So now, either China democratizes or fails? If those are the 2 options, then we got nothing to worry about.
Taiwan is actually now stagnating and experiencing a brain drain to China.
I think the model for China is Singapore — ultra capitalist in some ways, and a nanny state in many other ways. And the amazing thing is that Singapore does it with government spending at 18% of GDP. I believe if there’s a real estate crash in China, they will roll over the non performing assets into a Singapore style public housing.
Singapore hosted ASEAN last week. Hank Paulson was there. I watched some speeches and interview with PM Lee Hsien Long.[/quote]
Actually Taiwanese businesses know China really well, most are fleeing China in droves. They see the bubble bursting and they are abandoning ship.
Singapore as a City State used as a model for the world’s biggest country by population? That’s a tough one.
China did not have to democratize now. They could have continued slow and gradual liberalization. Again, Taiwan generated a very viable playbook: repressive regime gave way to benign authoritarian government with sham local elections, grip on speech loosen up gradually over time, sham elections get a little more fair and more national and consequential elections are then added. Soon President is elected indirectly via representatives, after that direct election of the highest office of the land.
This playbook could have been implemented in HK and Shanghai locally. After all, they invented the very pragmatic one country two systems policy. They could have set a standard where if a province or metropolitan region reaches a certain gdp per capital or educational level, they earn some level of local election and so on. Had that been implemented, Taiwan would likely get sucked into the orbit very quickly.
The opposite is true, things are getting much more authoritarian. American and other foreign expatriates are reporting that the crack down on personal liberty is very real, the restrictions are getting worse, and the government interference on daily speech is casting a shadow on everything. The grip is getting tighter and Taiwan sees that and is running the other way. The US is looking at this and realizing China is not following the post war playbook followed by Japan, Taiwan, S.Korea… this is turning out to be a repay of Hitlers’ Germany or Imperial Japan. Trump maybe the one starting the trade war, but both parties are on the same side on this one.
