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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.
Chapter 2 |
