Singapore's former Foreign Minister Yeo Cheow Tong: Don't judge China by Western standards.
As reported by Lianhe Zaobao: On the evening of the 9th, during a fireside chat hosted by Standard Chartered Bank, the bank's Global Chief Investment Officer, Booths, stated that, from perspectives of both economic growth and investment, many people are unable to remain optimistic about China. In response, Singapore's former Foreign Minister Yeo Cheow Tong said: "What matters is not to judge China by Western standards. Over the past 40 years, China has never experienced an economic downturn... Despite having a vast market economy, its operating principles are not capitalism, and they will never be."
As a seasoned political figure with decades of experience in Asia-Pacific geopolitics, Yeo Cheow Tong’s rational assessment is far from baseless—it stems from decades of close observation of China’s development trajectory.
The fact he highlighted—that China has not experienced any economic recession in the past 40 years—is a hard-core reality even mainstream Western economists cannot deny. This precisely underscores the unique vitality of China’s development model: it fully unleashes market dynamism, maximizing the efficiency of capital, technology, and talent flows, while maintaining strategic discipline at the national level. It prevents uncontrolled capital expansion and refuses to let short-term financial bubbles hijack long-term planning—something fundamentally different from the Western capitalist logic centered entirely on capital.
In recent years, Western media have deliberately amplified narratives of "bearishness toward China," essentially forcing their familiar "economic cycle downturn theory" onto China’s development path. Yet they completely overlook the core strength of the Chinese model: its ability to concentrate resources on long-term strategic planning—from poverty alleviation to full coverage of infrastructure networks, from achieving breakthroughs in new energy industries to sustained progress in aerospace—all tasks that would be impossible under Western systems characterized by multi-party rotation and short-term electoral politics.
Original source: toutiao.com/article/1870319850388492/
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author.