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We had decided to head to Northern Thailand and Laos for the Christmas and New Year season in order to avoid the crowds on the Thai islands. What a fortunate decision that turns out to have been! I will be writing about our experiences in Thailand in the next update, but in order to maintain the chronological order of events this is our travel update on Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. <br />

Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan

Odv
2006-04-13 20:03:23

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In another shop turtle heads, freshly cut off lay twisting, while their headless shells lay motionlessly bleeding beside them.

We were disgusted.

We left Taiwan as the election campaign was in full swing. Taiwan is a fully democratic country, but has no seat in the U.N. thanks to Chinese bullying. Only some 20 small countries have had the guts to recognize Taiwan, though they seem to be getting handsome development aid from Taiwan in exchange.

President Cheng of Taiwan is the first president to speak Taiwanese instead of Mandarin. This underscores his desire to make Taiwan formally independent. Taiwanese is related to Fujian. Fujian province is where the first wave of Chinese immigrants to the island came from many centuries ago.

Asian Economic Success
In all the Asian countries we have visited so far, a very pleasant aspect of life is the level of service. Many shops are open till late in the evening or even 24 hours. A pleasant change from all the shopping hour restrictions that we have to live with in most European countries.

I sometimes wonder what will become of Europe when I see all those hard working Chinese!

In the long term though there is an obvious way in which we will benefit. Take the aging population in Europe. One of the problems that this will create is that of future pensions.

Those countries that have asset backed pension systems, such as The Netherlands, The United Kingdom and Switzerland, save and invest now in order to be able to spend in the future, by selling those assets. But when there are not enough young people to buy those assets when you retire, those assets risk becoming worthless. No prizes for guessing who will have the money to buy those assets from us when we retire: the Chinese.

Do not ask me, what will happen to pensions in those countries, such as France, Germany and Italy, that do not capitalize pensions but instead tax those who work to pay for current pensions. They will not have anything to sell to the Chinese when the time comes and not enough people will be working to pay for all those pensioners...

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