Traveling throughout China, I can't help notice that the best cities are the ones where developed nations had the greatest colonial influence: Hong Kong and Shanghai had the British, Macau had the Portuguese, Qingdao had the Germans, Harbin had the Russians AND the Japanese, and Beijing had all of them and more. Outside these cities, for the most part you see poverty and backwards traditions. So I started to wonder: in some cases, is colonialism really such a bad thing?
So I looked up some data, and found
this report on colonialism of island nations:
Quote:
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The number of years spent as a European colony is strongly positively related to the island's GDP per capita and negatively related to infant mortality.
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It's just one case, and I'm sure more examples will come up. Obviously, the conditions in colonialism were always different.
Furthermore, I want to be clear when I say
I'm not advocating colonialism in any way. I'm merely arguing that in some cases, colonialism may have had a net positive effect on the colonized peoples.