When I began to cover Taiwan in the 1980s for The New York Times, it was a dictatorship under martial law, banning opposition parties and imprisoning dissidents. Per capita income was just $4,000, and the government once tried to bribe me to provide more friendly coverage.
Now the world has turned upside down. Taiwan today is more democratic than the United States, according to the democracy index published by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Similarly, Freedom House lists Taiwan as freer than the United States.
What’s more, Taiwan is a wealthy technological marvel: Robots assist at restaurants, and its citizens enjoy a higher per capita income than the Japanese do. Because Taiwan produces more than 90% of the world’s most advanced computer chips, it may be the single most indispensable hub in the global economy.
Likewise, on my first visit to Vietnam in 1989, its per capita income was about $100, and in one hotel my wife and I stayed at (one of the best in the city of Hue), rats fell like rain from the ceiling of our room.
Last month at my Sheraton hotel in Vietnam, where per capita income is now about $5,000, there was no rat precipitation. Skyscrapers line city streets, reflecting an 8% economic growth rate, among the highest in the world, and a stock market that soared 37% last year in dollar terms. Life expectancy in Ho Chi Minh City is 77 years, longer than in some U.S. states.
So it goes across so much of Asia, transformed at a staggering pace. Some Asian countries have managed to double their economies in less than a decade. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development says that emerging Asian economies (including China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam and others) contributed more last year to global economic growth than the rest of the world combined, and will do so again in 2026.
I have been able to spend much of my career as an Asia watcher precisely because it was so unimportant in the 1980s that the Times didn’t mind sending a young reporter there as a correspondent. The region has been changing so quickly in recent years that, to borrow from Heraclitus, you can never step into the same Asia twice. (Actually, that’s not fully true: Sadly, you can repeatedly step into the same Myanmar and the same North Korea.)
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