Westerners crying that China helped subsidized their shitty liberal democracies since the 2000s and subsequently probably saved them from an even worse crisis than they are facing now. From Pew Research Center.
Quoted from South China Morning Post (paywalled):
Chong Ja Ian, an associate professor of political science at the National University of Singapore, said populations in Singapore and Malaysia were more “primed towards pliancy to authority” and tended to place more emphasis on economic performance.
I really do hate this rhetoric that somehow Malaysia/Singapore values authoritarianism (whatever that means). Liberal politics will never understand how even if the 2 countries are functionally 1 party states and may not be the most socially liberal places in the world, the parties carried and boosted economic performance, making both nations the top 3 in GDP per capita in southeast asia.
Personally, they would never get how economic performance has allowed my family to literally escape from poverty and peasant level subsistance farming to clean, modern houses and high-school/university education. Of course they wouldn’t understand. Muh liberal values and hooman rights.
The West would rather see us fighting for scraps and being unstable and war torn like the Middle East. Fuck them.
It only seems to be 19 countries within or close to the imperial core, too.
I doubt the investigators would get the same results if they included the rest of the world.
But that would skew the 19-country median, so even if they conducted that research they might find a way not to publish it. E.g. by saying that the results from, say, Angola (random example) are too few to be statistically relevant. Or they would group all the African countries so they only count as one vs all the individual European countries.