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.
“Better live in abject poverty than to give up our very narrow definition of freedom,” say people who have never experienced poverty and live under an illusion of political agency.
Fortunately(?) they’re about to slide so far down the poverty scale that their illusions will vanish like the ice caps. I will shed a tear for them after their tune changes.