Look East young man! Who's off to live in China?

[brianthedog]

It won't be mutual.

 

So you're left wing pseudo socialist crap?

[callippo]

it was fab -the people were exceptionally friendly. we saw some 3 bed apartmenst being built which equated to £20k.

i'm definitley looking at it as a retirement destination, if not before. looking @ Kota Kinabalu to be close for plane access.

 

you're never very far from an airport anywhere in especially Sabah, but also the much larger Sarawak. Kota Kinabulu isn't anywhere near as nice as Kuching anyway. All the desperate Filipino migrants from Tawi Tawi and southern Mindanao have turned KK into a toilet compared to what it was even 15 years ago. To say there's no inter-ethnic tension in Sabah is nonsense. There's actually quite a lot. Everyone moans about what effect the massive influx illegal immigration from Mindanao and Kalimantan has had on Sabah - they complain about all the beggars and drug dealers being immigrants.

 

sound familiar?

 

there's quite an xenophobic atmostphere in KK, in fact though you won't have noticed it if you'd just taken a three week holiday on the Rasa Ria Shangri La resort there. Local press is full of articles castigating illegal immigrants - it can be like reading the Mail sometimes. Even the older, established Filipino migrants to Sabah, that came over to work on the logging and palm oil plantations in the 1970s, moan about the newer Filipino migrants, and the more 'indigineous' Sabahans themselves draw a distinction between these two Filipino groups, the first of whom are regarded as hardworking and contributive, the latter as a bunch of parasites trying to take advantage of Sabah's higher living standards - even though Sabah is of course, the poorest state in Malaysia, the Mississipi of the Federation. Sarawak is the better place. It's further away from the Philippines, and the desperadoes can't teach it in their rickety boats and border controls are more enforced. Hence they don't beg on the streets and establish no go shabu-infested shanty towns in Kuching like they have around KK so often.

[Uptowngirl]

I do wonder how people will reconcile the obvious human rights issues as the worlds economic and power focus drifts east. Maybe they will improve, maybe we will become more blind.

 

I think the Chinese are pragmatic enough not to keep harping on about Guantanamo, Iraq and the other human rights violations. After all they probably aren't perfect themselves.

[TheGuy]

The economic rise of the Eastern powers seems inevitable.

 

Would you consider moving to the hub of the new world economies? Perhaps communist China, the junta dictatorship of Burma or perhaps the cosy western feeling of India?

 

I think the rise of the East and the demise of the west is very overstated.