>"Neighbors"? Singapore is 2000km from the closest part of China! I'm not "playing" dumb; in this entire thread you have given us no reason to expect Singapore and China to have similar modernization performance.

Sorry, what does relevance geographic proximity have to economic growth? The point is that those countries all have similar cultural and racial backgrounds to China, yet developed much faster.

Obviously, relative proximity has very little to do with economic growth. No one ITT ever mentioned any other unifying factor, so I was being charitable by suggesting it. You seem less sophisticated than 'woah, in that you've openly stated the racial assumption that 'woah left unsaid.

Are you seriously calling people racist for comparing China with the islands and peninsulas surrounding it? Is it racist to compare Germany with England?

If you invoked race as an explanation for e.g. why South Korea and Taiwan had similar modernization experiences, that would be weird but maybe not obviously wrong. Among the dozens of other similarities between these two nations, race as perceived by white Americans is one similarity. It's not the most salient similarity to reasonable people, but there's no inherent contradiction involved.

That's not what's going on ITT. China has had a different modernization experience from the other nations discussed above, which is entirely understandable given their very different histories, assets, infrastructures, populations, demographics, educations, etc. Your racism is that you ignore all those obvious differences in favor of one trivial, contingent aspect in which to an ineducable white American they might seem similar.

In an effort to silence legitimate criticism of a totalitarian regime, you are making the assertion that comparing a country to its neighbors is racist. Amazing.

Dude this thread is buried under several flagged posts. No one is reading this. No one will care about racism here. The things we're saying won't silence anyone.

However, you could still learn something. When you compare two different groups of people, be sure to have something besides "they have the same skin color" to say when someone asks the obvious follow-up question.