On my flight back to Hong Kong from the US on November 1st, I watched the movie Crazy Rich Asians again. That got me thinking about how crazy capitalist autocracy is in Singapore, Hong Kong, and China and what democratic America can learn and take away from these crazy Asians.
I arrived November 2nd in the middle of the Global Financial Leaders Summit, Hong Kong’s showcase to the world’s top bankers confirming that it is back in post-Covid business — and ready to reconnect international capitalists. The summit attracted more than 200 guests that included more than 30 chief executives of global banks and funds including Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Morgan Stanley, Standard Chartered and UBS.
Singapore is supposed to be a democracy and China a communist dictatorship. Yet both are autocratic capitalist economies, with Singapore being more of a benevolent socialist dictatorship; and China, now that Xi Jinping has secured his third five year-term, a capitalist autocracy with Chinese characteristics.
The movie is not about Asians. It is about Chinese. Rich Chinese. Chinese in Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Shanghai – Greater China – and New York, America!
Democracy is flourishing in Taiwan, struggling in Hong Kong and non-existent in Singapore and China. In Singapore, one family rules and in China, one party rules. Yet all are successful capitalist economies that have made the Chinese crazy rich. Both the hard working Chinese, corrupt bureaucrats and politicians, regardless of the political environment they live in.
Political systems have nothing to do with how people make money. It should be obvious to everyone that hard working Asians get crazy rich, no different than their crazy rich counterparts in the Americas, Africa, Europe and the Middle East – regardless of their ethnic, cultural, political or religious beliefs.
There are alternative, more diverse worlds outside white-dominated America.
Hong Kong has surpassed New York as the city with the highest population of people worth at least $30 million according to research firm Wealth-X. Asia saw the fastest growth of wealth globally, driven by the mainland and Hong Kong.
What made Asia crazy rich and smart, notwithstanding the ethnic, tribal, religious and political differences, is culturally, such differences are secondary to the main focus of building sustainable human capital and wealth. That starts with education, health, trade, housing, infrastructure, manufacturing and the rule of law.
Remember the opening scene of Crazy Rich Asians at the hotel in London bought by a Chinese family? Wealthy parents from China and Hong Kong lead the two billion pounds sterling of real estate sales annually in London to overseas parents who want to secure for their children places at top schools and universities.
The capitalist trade war between democratic America and autocratic China doesn’t really change much for the crazy rich anywhere. It only hurts the poor and middle classes short-term, as the world’s two top economies duke it out to figure out how to live together in a bipolar political and economic world they lead. In the long run, there will be an economic and political solution that will redefine the New World Disorder – a blend of crazy capitalist-autocratic-socialist-democracy.
Let’s not forget the lead characters in the movie met and lived in capitalist New York. They represent what makes capitalist-democratic America crazy great. Immigrant families and foreign students from different economic classes who have made America crazy rich economically, culturally, militarily and politically.
Americans, especially white European Americans, have much to learn and grow with Crazy Rich Asians, immigrants and foreign students – not only economically, but politically. As a white European American immigrant, who came to America as a foreign student, now living in Hong Kong, China, and Arizona, U.S.A., I know first-hand.
2 thoughts on “Crazy Capitalist Autocracies”
Back in the 1970s, the effort to understand why East Asia — and not Latin America — was economically successful led to ethnic explanations. It took about five minutes before the theory (which seems present in your op ed) was thoroughly trashed.
Good morning, South Korea, how is your non-Chinese economy over the past 50 years? Still leagues ahead of Macau?
peter an old friend and word-smith could not have said it any better even using more words espesically when he characterized it with the word “crazy” and which left unchecked will drive ALL of us over the cliff, like it or not. So let us take a minute then to learn from one another and delve a little more into Confusus and his eastern words of wisdom. And out of our Western science; fake or real and stop taking our selves so serious including the myth of scarcity, or racial superiority, or war beteen the sexes, all
deliberate distractions to keep us misinformed, confused and thereby easily lead by the puppet masters and whose days of recogning are coming. remember LOVE is the answer !
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