Emerging as a newly industrialized city-state, Hong Kong, a former Asian tiger, has become a leading finance-capital center of the world and functions as a commercial center for Southeast Asia and Southern China. A postmodern city with an international airport, skyscrapers, traffic jams, and cellular phones, Hong Kong has been at the forefront of neo-liberal free trade policies. The former British colony, now Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China, has the world's freest market economy, the world's most service-oriented economy, and Asia's highest per capita income in terms of domestic buying power. Hong Kong has the world's second most competitive economy and the world's seventh largest trading economy. It is the world's second largest per capita holding of foreign currency, the world's fourth largest source of direct foreign investment, and the world's ninth leading exporter of services. Today successful business people dot what has become one of the world's capitalist showcases. And indeed, a mapping of Hong Kong reveals high-walled private homes, neon signs advertising designer goods from every continent, and blocks of luxury hotels and indoor malls. Another dimension of this landscape, however, is its sweatshops, storefronts, urban pollution, and shantytowns of unrelieved squalor, with too many people for too little land. Poor laborers, sole proprietors, and street people inhabit this terrain.

Politics, such as it existed in colonial Hong Kong, only rarely exhibited working class features. But the transition to a service economy eliminated four hundred thousand manufacturing jobs in the 1980s and 1990s. Other sectors of the working class risked being abandoned by footloose industries looking elsewhere for ever cheaper labor. As public housing construction slowed, numbers of low-income people found themselves in danger of being priced out of affordable housing by rent inflation following the elimination of rate controls for all old private buildings. One of the consequences of the 1992 'Patten Reform' (after the last British colonial governor Chris Patten) providing for elected members to the Legislative Council was that pro-democracy, grass-roots, and trade-union councillors held a majority of seats in the final session to convene under British colonial rule. Responding to widening income polarization and growing poverty among single-parent families and the working poor, the assembly increased welfare spending and passed legislation favoring labor; including the right to bargain collectively on wage and benefit issues and protection against job discrimination. So Hong Kong experienced a foretaste of working class politics in the years leading up to the 1997 handover. Whether such developments signaled a new territorial mapping would remain to be seen.