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May. 28th, 2015 05:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
timeletsThe impact of Singapore on reforms in Malaysia may go beyond just the economics, such as trade, migrant labor, finance, etc. Despite all the tensions between ethnic Chinese and Malay, Lee Kuan Yew provided Malaysians with a real-life example of an Asian leader who didn't get corrupted by his own unlimited power. Willy-nilly, Malaysians compared their king and public leaders to Lee Kuan Yew. Maybe cross-border family ties and travel played a role too. An ethnic Malay non-citizen living in Singapore had a better and more honest life than his close relatives living in their own country of Malaysia. That was happening at all income and education levels, from an illiterate poor laborer to a rich business person educated in the west.
I wonder whether we can model cross-border diffusion of good practices in neighboring authoritarian regimes. Maybe we can even factor in cultural proximity as well, e.g. China vs Taiwan vs Hong Kong, East vs West Germany, Germany vs Poland, etc. (North vs South Korea is an obvious counter-example, but we could account for it by a repression coeff). By contrast, no post-Soviet country has been successful in producing an example of a successful non-corrupt authoritarian leader.
I wonder whether we can model cross-border diffusion of good practices in neighboring authoritarian regimes. Maybe we can even factor in cultural proximity as well, e.g. China vs Taiwan vs Hong Kong, East vs West Germany, Germany vs Poland, etc. (North vs South Korea is an obvious counter-example, but we could account for it by a repression coeff). By contrast, no post-Soviet country has been successful in producing an example of a successful non-corrupt authoritarian leader.
