Absolutely agree. There's a lot of "yes, but.." in this for me, but the simple economics are pretty clear: post colonial asian states like this do fantastically well.

Cost of housing in HK is going to be an embuggerance if they don't fix that, it may bifurcate into a more strong over/underclass imbalance. Taiwan is amazing but has thinner underpinnings now the US has demanded chip manufacturing moves to continental USA and the water supply issue is huge.

But your central point I agree with strongly: fix education, health, housing and provide at least some representation and you can do so much better than being a colonial outpost of somewhere else sucking value out.

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itsthecourier 7 hours ago | parent [-]

[flagged]

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ggm 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I think this is a bitter pill to swallow for many because a more liberal sense of multiculturalism in AU and UK allowed enclaves to emerge which have now become intensely divisive where a less open "multiculturalism but conform to our norms" might have avoided.

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mytailorisrich 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Singapore is an enclave that emerged because of multiculturalism in Malaya caused by mass immigration from China, actually.

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mc32 2 hours ago | parent [-]

In the 60s the Chinese diaspora in SEAsia experienced violence by locals who didn’t like the success of the Chinese. This happened mostly in Indonesia Burma and Malaysia and not so much in the Philippine islands.

Malaysia in particular instituted pretty harsh laws to make Chinese suppress their Chinese identity and also curtailed their economic potential by implementing in practice expropriation and barring the Chinese from certain sectors of the economy.

So it emerged not because of multiculturalism but because they were being virtually locked out of the Malaysian economy.

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quickthrowman 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> In the 60s the Chinese diaspora in SEAsia experienced violence by locals who didn’t like the success of the Chinese.

I’m not super familiar with Chinese history, but this jumped out at me. How were other countries jealous of Chinese people during the decade of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution? Famine, death, destruction, etc. Am I misunderstanding something?

	▲	mc32 24 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I was referring to the Chinese diaspora who had left China over decades and even centuries -they had become successful in SEAsia and were often responsible for commercial progress in those places. The sixties were times of conflict all over the world and in SEAsia the Chinese diaspora in those countries found themselves the targets of the frustration of “natives”. I say natives though the Chinese diaspora was born and raised in those countries but were easily identified as being “foreign” in those places.
	▲	mytailorisrich 27 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It means success of ethnic Chinese in South East Asia. In Malaysia, Thailand, etc or even Indonesia, ethnic Chinese tend to be more successful in business circles compared to 'locals'.