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本帖最后由 choi 于 3-31-2015 17:36 编辑
Orville Schell. The Man Who Remade Asia. Lee Kuan Yew built tiny, impoverished Singapore into an astonishing economic success, and the 'Asian values' he preached had a profound influence across the region, especially among the Communist elite in Beijing. Is the 'Singapore model' the future of Asia? Wall Street Journal, Mar 28, 2015.
www.wsj.com/articles/lee-kuan-ye ... ade-asia-1427475547
Excerpts in the windows of print:
“He was a larger-than-life figure with a grandness of vision.
“An Asian alternative to the messiness of liberal democracy.
My comment:
(a) The print has just two (big) photos and a graphic. Before the title is a photo of Lee being “hoisted.” Underneath the title is the graphic. At the end of the essay is Lee shaking hands with Deng.
(b)
(i) I read the essay, which talks about Asian values, but not a word about economics. In fact I was impressed, having cast a glance at the graphic, by Singapore economy’s meteoric rise, which upstages China’s (I did not know that). (Hence you need not read the text of the WSJ essay.)
(ii) The graphic indicates “Source: World Bank.” It is easy to find the data source, because not many primary sources uses exchange rates to calculate GDP per capita (or GDP itself). The source of the graphic is
GDP Per Capita (Current US$). World Bank, undated
data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD
(gross domestic product divided by midyear population; 1980-2013 [inclusive])
(A) The same source pegged Singapore's mid-2013 population as 5.4m. "The "2013" is exactly the last points of data in the WSJ graphic.
(B) The “current US$” means that a nation’s dollar figures in the past are converted to the present value of a dollar--eliminating the effects of inflation over time and making old data sets HIGHER/larger than reported back ten.
(c) So last night I dug around to try to understand what makes Singapore ticks, economy-wide. Then I discover there is more than meets the eye.
(d) First all, China is very late in the game of economic development--after 1979 (or perhaps even later). And Japan is barely growing for a quarter of a century. So Singapore’s economic peers are actually the other members of Asian Tigers. Data for Hong Kong and Taiwan are hard to come by, because they are both kind of in limbo politically (unless I reach official websites of these two). That leaves S Korea.
(e) The WSJ essay states in the opening paragraphs:
"When I arrived in Singapore one sultry summer evening in 1962 as a 22-year-old student, the Union Jack still fluttered over the British colony. Coolies unloaded wooden boats on the docks, per capita income was languishing under $500 and the young independence leader Lee Kuan Yew was still in his 30s * * *
"What distinguished Singapore back then was its colonial torpor, a total absence of natural resources (not even its own supply of drinking water) and little industry. It was a small, backward Third World outpost. Besides a few iconic British buildings, the city consisted mostly of low arcaded “shop houses,” flimsy street stalls that made up its outdoor markets and a chaotic infinity of dilapidated shacks that formed the slums where most of Singapore’s poor Chinese, Malay and Tamil immigrants made their homes.
"In the early 1960s, his real problem was not his name [he changed his name from Harry Lee to Lee Kuan Yew] but that Singapore was ethnically fractured * * * and then in 1965 expelled unceremoniously from an ill-fated union with Malaysia. In announcing this devastating rupture on television, Lee became so distraught by the apparent hopelessness of his country’s situation that he ended up weeping.
“As Lee ruefully observed in trying to imagine his small country’s future, ‘City-states do not have good survival records.’
(f) we are familiar with Singapore’s backwardness and desperation in 1965. But economic data from that era indicated Singaporeans were better off than most Asians except Japanese.
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发表于 3-31-2015 12:38:53
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