The outcasts who built China
The Hakka people -- the 'Jews of Asia', or perhaps its 'dandelions' -- have had an influence out of all proportion to their numbers
Jonathan Manthorpe
Vancouver Sun, July 10, 2004
There is a handful of men who can be justly called the architects of modern Greater China. With very different political purposes and philosophical viewpoints they have fashioned today's principal independent Chinese societies: Mainland China, Singapore and Taiwan.
Deng Xiaoping, China's paramount leader until his death in 1997, decided in the mid-1970s that the country's isolation and Marxist-Leninist centrally controlled command economy were dead ends. He launched China into the global marketplace, a revolutionary move that will see the country develop the world's second- largest economy within the next half dozen years and has set it on the route to super-power status.
Lee Kuan Yew created the extraordinarily successful trading city-state of Singapore on a small collection of islands and with few more resources than the skills and hard work of its two million people. In semi-retirement Lee remains the guiding hand behind Singapore and has become the guru of "Asian values." the doctrine that North Atlantic political and social mores are not always applicable east of Suez.
Lee Teng-hui has overseen the transition of the independent island of Taiwan from military dictatorship to full democracy, demonstrating that some civic values are universal. In 1996 he became Taiwan's first freely elected president and the island's first Taiwanese leader.
Since his retirement from frontline politics in 2000 Lee Teng-hui has cast aside the diplomacy of power and revealed himself as a passionate advocate of international recognition o ...