Singapore's Lee says China won't take Taiwan

As always, Lee has interesting things to say in this interview with UPI:

Q: In the next 12 months, China, in this New Year of the Rat (Feb. 7) that you are now celebrating, will mark its transformation in the past three decades from one of the poorest countries in the 20th century into the world's third-largest economy, soon to displace Germany, as the globe's new engine room of economic growth. Will China be to the 21st century what America was to the 20th?

A: The Chinese leadership has come to the conclusion if they stay on their present course, the peaceful rise of China's power will prevail. They are determined not to challenge any existing power, meaning America, EU, Russia, but just make friends with everybody. Given the rules of the game now that China is in WTO, they can only grow stronger year by year, and within three or four decades, China's GDP will be equal to America's, their technology will be equal to what was long regarded as the world's only superpower, and their GDP will be larger than America's. And all that stems from what they have long studied in detail in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. When Deng Xiaoping came to Singapore he was amazed at what he saw, as his briefing papers did not tally with his own eyes. That's when he must have concluded the Communist system didn't work. He could see how we were exploiting Western capitalism and had plants all over the place with cheaper labor and exporting goods all over the world. Hell's bells, he said, we can do that, too. That's when China began setting up special economic zones around coastal cities. They saw Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore with the advantages of close ties with the West, access to Western technology, export markets, knowledge, capital and an educated workforce. Now with WTO, they are on the same course, sending 250,000 students abroad every year, and even though they may lose 60 percent to 70 percent of them to other countries, they don't care because they know many of them will come back eventually. Year by year, they're closing the gap.

There's a lot, lot more there, all at the end of the interview.

[Taiwan]