[infecto]

I don’t know if I would consider a month long vacation as evidence. Taiwan is pretty famous for have lower labor classes that they import from places like the Philippines and while people are friendly, they are still generally looked down upon. Not dissimilar to places like Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore. So I think racism is a pretty loaded and broad word and people typically think about it in purely an American context, it’s more common around the world than people think in all kinds of shades.

Ultimately I do agree with the original thesis around monocultures.

[arjie]

Well, certainly my experience on the ground is far more meaningful than someone’s statements without evidence. Just googling around it seems that American policing is generally considered fairly racially discriminatory so performing racism on its own is not getting us less crime. Taiwan doesn’t seem to have that problem as extensively.

And I’m an Indian who grew up in and spent the majority of my life in India as did my parents. I’ve lived in a few countries for years and stayed in many for months. My frame of reference is unlikely to be the American context for racism.

[infecto]

I don’t think anyone is arguing that Taiwan or Japan are uniquely or universally racist. The point is that many highly cohesive societies have clear social hierarchies and stronger in-group preferences than Americans (or other groups) often recognize.

Taiwan’s treatment of many Southeast Asian migrant workers is a commonly discussed example. People can be welcoming to tourists and expatriates while still having structural biases toward certain groups. Those aren’t contradictory observations.

Likewise, we wouldn’t dismiss concerns about women’s safety in India simply because a visitor spent a month there and had a wonderful experience. An individual’s experience matters, but it doesn’t settle broader questions about how different groups experience a society.

My opinion comes from having spent a lot of time around Asia and more than a month of “tourism”.

[arjie]

> I don’t think anyone is arguing that Taiwan or Japan are uniquely or universally racist.

The original comment used this as the explanation for why there's low crime. Here's a reminder of the context we are conversing within.

> > > > East Asia built a uni-culture by being extremely racist against outsiders. I don't think you can get away with that anywhere else.

I think "extreme racism to outsiders" is detectable within a month. I am as outsider as they come - being a brown-skinned South Asian Indian[0]. And the other statement I'm replying to there is

> > > > A friend of mine (white guy) married a Chinese woman and when they visited China they were subject to slurs and dirty looks in public.

My wife's cousin is married to a White Irish man who has lived there over a decade. This is not his experience anywhere in Taiwan, in particular, as opposed to the GP's China experience.

I think his decades of living there prior to and then after marrying my wife's cousin probably provide some experience. There's a lot of Planet of Hats thinking from Westerners visiting Asia. But different countries there are clearly different, just like France and Switzerland are different.

And in the end, if racism is not unique then it cannot explain difference in crime outcomes. To quote the great sage pj evans: "Cars have windows and can move. Houses have windows and can't move. So it's not the windows that make the car go. It's something else entirely."

And as a little epilogue, we may consider other countries with a foreign-born populace similar to Taiwan's: Poland, Argentina, Uruguay, and South Africa. None of them match Taiwan's broad lack of crime while having a similar degree of foreign-born people.

Which brings us again to whether the windows make the car go or not.

0: website in profile, feel free to take a look at my face