"Korea and Taiwan (China) began land reform under broadly similar circumstances. In both cases, authoritarian governments facing a communist threat were dependent on the assistance of the United States, whose advisers urged them to adopt more egalitarian land holding. In Taiwan (China) the government seized land from the landlords, compensating them with shares in state enterprises. It then sold the land to the tillers at favorable credit terms and favorable prices. The government then helped the tillers upgrade production for domestic and export markets. The program worked economically and politically. Land reform helped Taiwan (China) achieve one of the world's most equitable income distributions."
(Source: World Bank, http://www.worldbank.org/html/dec/Publications/Briefs/DB21.html )

Capitalist propagandists have to talk about a tiny minority of countries in the world to justify their claims to success for their blood-soaked and militarily unstable system. Specifically they focus on Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and southern Korea instead of the overall average of 150 capitalist or capitalist and semi-feudal countries. Instead of doing honest scientific comparisons, these propagandists pick and choose their data to support their conclusions. They don't take all the countries where private property rights are guaranteed and compare them with China and other socialist countries.

Singapore and Hong Kong are cities and should not be compared with countries that are mostly peasant as in the Third World. Calcutta, India should be compared with Shanghai, China, but cities that developed on their own are already an economic success in a sense and not a good comparison.

Taiwan and southern Korea are parts of countries. Here is what bourgeois economist and business school dean Lester Thurow has to say about them:

"Between 1981 and 1986, 42 percent of Korea's growth and 74 percent of Taiwan's growth could be traced to exports to the American market." Head to Head (NY: William Morrow, 1992), p. 36.

Not all countries can run up a trade surplus with the United $tates and gain the favorable trade policies Taiwan and Korea have had for a long time. The Taiwan and southern Korean examples cannot be and have not been widely duplicated within capitalism. It is therefore wrong-headed to speak of them all the time as some kind of model for success. Such beliefs detract from world peace, because the people everywhere want economic development and there will be violence as long as basic humyn needs are not met.

What do Taiwan and southern Korea have in common that the other 150 countries do not? The United $tates's ally Chiang Kai-shek was kicked out of China into Taiwan and in Korea into southern Korea--by Mao in the case of Taiwan and Mao's troops and the anti-imperialist Korean masses in the case of southern Korea. In other words, the U$A saw these two places as bases on the front-lines of war against communism and they were right. To prop them up was a leading goal of U.S. foreign policy. We can say the U.$. imperialists succeeded in their efforts not to let Taiwan and southern Korea face the same problems other Third World countries faced.

In fact, what these two places had in common was great pressure against the United $tates created by Mao's successful communist movement. The rich countries felt compelled to allow some Third World countries to develop. Without that pressure, Taiwan and southern Korea never would have had the chance to develop the way that they did. It was the pressure of class struggle by Mao and the Korean people that created 1) land reform 2) U.S. willingness to trade with southern Korea and Taiwan. Those are the only two factors needed to explain the success of southern Korea and Taiwan economically and they both stem from successful class struggle.