One morning when I was last in Hong Kong I asked my friend Miss Lim, who always cleans my room at the University's guest house, what she did with the money she earned as a Hong Kong chambermaid. "Have you ever been to Petra?" she replied. Having arrived in the colony penniless twenty-three years ago, she had just returned from a tour of the Nabatean, Roman, and Greek ruins of the eastern Mediterranean.
In 1960 Hong Kong was just above Malta in per capita GNP; today it has overtaken Israel, and is soon expected to surpass the United Kingdom. At the close of the Korean War, 75 percent of Korea's adults were illiterate; now a teenager there has a greater chance of going to university than his counterpart in Japan.
A 1960 World Bank study proclaimed Singapore "unviable" as a country, should it separate from Malaysia. Thereupon the city-state began a period in which it sustained for over three decades the fastest growth rate the world has ever seen. This former "opium den" and "basket case" now has the world's busiest container port, the third largest oil refining facility, and the second highest per capita GNP in Asia, second only to Japan.
Thirty years ago Brazil's per capita GNP was double that of Taiwan; today Taiwan's is six times Brazil's. Indeed, the combined merchandise exports of East Asia's four Little Dragons--South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore--are twice the total of the entire Latin American continent, which has six times their population and sits on the doorstep of the world's richest and most open market. Astonishingly too, in transforming themselves at this astounding rate, all four dragons have avoided a severe income gap between rich citizens and poor.
