In the latest World Happiness Report Taiwan scored the 26th spot. However, the authors of the report also decided to label Taiwan as a province of China, which it has also done in previous years. To anyone with even a cursory knowledge of history and politics this is simply not true. Taiwan has never been party of the People’s Republic of China. The comparison gets even more laughable when actually comparing Taiwan and China.
Taiwan sits 46 places above China, outpacing it in nearly every metric, besides ‘Freedom to make life choices’. This is also strange because its pretty easy to have all of your life choices taken away in China if you do something like promote democracy, which might get you 5 years in a Chinese gulag, just ask Lee Ming-che.
Hong Kong is also listed as part of China on the list, though not as a province. They are instead listed as a Special Administrative Region. Hong Kong actually scored worse than both Taiwan and China, ranking down at 81. Hong Kong, as sad as it makes me to say it, makes more sense listed as part of China because, even though a massive portion of the country doesn’t want it, their government is an undemocratic puppet regime for the CCP.
It’s nice to see Taiwan is relatively happy, though there is still a lot of work to be done here like raising wages and lowering housing prices to help increase the level of happiness among regular people. It is, as always, endlessly annoying to see people daftly put Taiwan as a province of China. Hopefully one day organizations that claim to be in support of peace and democracy will stop catering to the ravings of despotic regimes around the world, but I don’t know how much hope I have for those like the UN. 