If you look at almost any kind of cross-national data, you notice that East Asians are fundamentally different from other peoples. So much so that we

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2023-03-22 01:00:02

If you look at almost any kind of cross-national data, you notice that East Asians are fundamentally different from other peoples. So much so that we might talk about an “East Asian package,” a series of traits shared by South Korea, Japan, China, and the Chinese-descended nations and territories of Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, and Taiwan. There are indications that even North Korea shares many of its important components, despite it being the most isolated country in the world. This package includes:

Low levels of crime. Every East Asian country, with the possible exception of North Korea, where we lack data, has a murder rate of less than 1 per 100,000. This is true whether you look at China and its 1.4 billion people, other sizable nations like South Korea and Japan, or the crowded city-states of Singapore and Hong Kong. The latter category is particularly notable because American liberals often respond to complaints about crime by saying that it is a natural part of living in a big city. But the largest and most crowded East Asian cities have less crime than rural and suburban areas in the West!

Extremely low rates of illegitimacy. Below you can see countries ranked by percentage of children born out-of-wedlock. Japan and South Korea are at the bottom, somehow below Turkey and Israel, thus making them closer to the Middle East than Europe in this area. Taiwan isn’t usually included in these cross-national comparisons, but it’s similarly low. I can’t find numbers for China, but I would be shocked if things were any different there.