>>69685710I understand that perfectly, with three of them being cities and one of them being half of a country but that's not the main point being made.
The original term, "first world", was in the cold war context of "Warsaw Pact", "Marshall Plan" and "the rest of the world" and it definitely didn't include any of those countries.
The meaning them drifted to "developed countries" and "underdeveloped / developing countries" but up until the early to nineties all of those four countries were in the later column.
They were usually referred together as the "Asia Tigers" exactly because of a boom in prosperity and wealth coming to them lifting them away from "underdeveloped" and calling them "first world" even today would be an anachronistic misnomer or even a retcon
