Sitting in the pool at the iconic Marina Bay Sands Hotel in Singapore, with the full moon of the Mid-Autumn Festival shining down over the city state that hosted the Trump-Kim summit, I couldn’t help reflect on the pool scenes in the movie Crazy Rich Asians. The hotel symbolized and played a major supporting role highlighting Chinese opulence. That got me thinking about how crazy capitalist communist democracy is in Singapore and China and what America can learn and take away from these crazy Asians.
Singapore is supposed to be a democracy and China a communist dictatorship. Yet both are capitalist economies, with Singapore being more of a benevolent socialist dictatorship than China; and China, in many ways, a more limited-chaotic democracy, yet more of a democracy than Singapore.
It’s crazy capitalist-communist-democracy with socialist-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 limited 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.
Staying in the hotel that was Kim Jung-un’s main tourist attraction during his summit with Trump, while South Korea’s Moon was delivering to Trump in New York the denuclearization plan he and Kim came up with last week during their Korea Summit in Pyongyang, it became pretty obvious to me that political systems have nothing to do with how people make money. From North Korea’s repressive dictatorship, South Korea’s vibrant democracy and Greater China’s mixed political bag, it should be obvious to everyone that hard working corrupt Asians get crazy rich, no different than their crazy rich corrupt counterparts in the Americas, Africa, Europe and the Middle East — regardless of their ethnic, cultural, political or religious bags.
Chatting with veterinarians and pet care executives from Africa, black and white, who were attending the same veterinary conference I was, the conversation inevitably turned to the movie Crazy Rich Asians and how it compared to Black Panther, politically, economically, racially and personally. Fueled by several rounds of Singapore Slings at the Spago rooftop hotel bar, the free flowing discussion was periodically punctuated by heated exchanges between Africans and Chinese. In the end, the unanimous consensus was, there are alternative, more diverse better 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 in London this year to overseas parents who want to secure for their children places at top schools and universities.
The capitalist trade war between democratic America and communist 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 Order — a blend of crazy capitalist-socialist-democracy.
It is beginning to take shape with the midterm elections in America. Capitalists, socialists, libertarians, democrats and republicans, representing all colors, ethnic groups, crazy rich and poor, trying to democratically re-define and blend the New World Disorder.
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 and Black Panthers, immigrants and foreign students — not only economically, but politically. As a white European American immigrant, who was a foreign student, now living in Hong Kong, China, and Arizona, U.S.A., I know first-hand.