yes, we must learn to write like this ft - balance, fair,
intelligent and humourous.
We should note that the original
article by chua referred to the western ‘democracy’, not western
countries, or westerners in general. Is it not a known fact that
those who champion western democracy do not like Singapore’s way of
government, and call it an authoritarian state?
The western
countries do not have the same political systems, there are
parliamentary democracy headed by a constitutional monarch, federal
parliamentarian republic, constitutional monarchy with a
parliamentary system, just to name a few. Such systems developed
through long history, and it is obvious that such systems may not
be duplicated for other countries, from the fact that many of their
old colonies have not shown much success after
independence.
All systems in the
world are worthy of studies, to emulate is another thing. It is the
students who decide what is relevant to their countries and what is
worthy of emulating, it is not how highly some westerners think of
their systems. To think that the western countries such as
Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria, Norway and Finland are successful
and therefore there must be something worth emulating is absurd.
Not all systems or model can be 're-packed' into potentially highly
successful export products, because each country is
different.
China and Singapore are very
different, even between the majority race which are of the same
ethnic origin. It is typical of angmoh to think that Chinese is
Chinese. No, Singaporean Chinese is very different from the
mainland Chinese.
But there is much similarity
between the two government, one party rule (Singapore with a small
opposition), authoritative decision making…this is despite of the
big difference in the size of the countries.
Much of the damages seen in China
were already there, accumulated over the last 100 years, from a
weak dynasty, occupation by the western colonial power during the
time of opium war, war of independence, WW2, civil war, communists
rule and more wars, with South Korea, and Vietnam. These are not
the collateral damages due to rapid development. In fact, it is the
“highly regulated, market-driven economy at lightning speed” that
is giving the government the much needed resources to tackle the
damages, with the recent Sichuan earthquake added to the
list.
A fair view would be one who look
at both sides of argument, a balance view is one that have both
argument written down, an intelligent view is what Veneta asked, “I
am just curious which middle east countries are really
worth emulating if you dont have the oil? “ and humorous view
is when an angmoh who live in the developed cities in Asia, such as
HK, Singapore, Tokyo, live an expat life, send their children to
international school, and think he knows what is
Asia.
