Re-branding without re-developing: constraints of Hong Kong's ‘Asia's World City’ brand (1997–2007)

Abstract

Interest among academics towards Hong Kong's global status has gradually waned since 1997. However, identifying Hong Kong's position on the international platform is essential if the Special Administrative Region's competitiveness is to be distinguished from that of regional rivals. The positioning challenge not only results from the sovereignty retrocession, but also from the rapid pace of globalization and the intensified competition from major cities in the Greater China Region. Instead of focusing on the much-researched topic of the direct competition between Hong Kong and Shanghai or Singapore, an exploration of Hong Kong's hitherto little-researched re-branding experience not only throws light on Hong Kong Special Administrative Region's policy orientation, but is also valuable in understanding how other cities in the region conducted similar exercises. This article reviews the overall evolution of the ‘Asia's World City’ (AWC) discourse as promoted by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region from 1997 to 2007. It starts by reviewing the international identity of post-colonial Hong Kong as background to the discourse, in order to reconstruct various theoretical assumptions that led to the re-branding exercise. The second section examines the purpose and evolution of the AWC campaign, and identifies the problems within the discourse. The concluding section focuses on the unrealized theoretical assumptions and other administrative and ideological constraints that the HKSARG faced in the exercise as a means to explaining the overall limited achievements of the campaign and proposes possible ways to remedy the shortcomings.     

Disunited in ethnicity: the racialization of Chinese Mainlanders in Hong Kong

In the current climate of increasing antagonisms and populist discontents surrounding the visible presence of mainland mobilities in postcolonial Hong Kong, there is an acute need to understand how those from Mainland China are racialized. Lowe and Tsang's article provides an examination of the campaign against Mainlanders prevalent in Hong Kong society. The emergent conflicts between Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese migrants overlap with the duality of time or differing time-inflected cultural habits of Mainlanders and Hong Kongers. As Hong Kong's citizenry and Mainlanders contest the status of the former colony and claim rights over it in ways aberrant to both factions' national consciousness, discrimination increases as Mainlanders are castigated by Hong Kongers for grazing their territory with mannerisms deemed unsettling to Hong Kong's everyday notions of time and space. Hong Kongers' sense of collective identity is shored-up as they reject the People's Republic of China’s favoured concept of pan-Chinese ethnicity by constructing Mainlanders as the inverse of themselves.     

Political context,policy networks and policy change: the complexity of transition in Hong Kong

Abstract

Central to the debates on the transition of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty is how this process has affected change in the policy process and policy outputs. Many see policy change as a result of the evolving political environment in Hong Kong following the political transition. This article, however, adopts the notion of policy networks and argues that the analysis of policy change cannot be reduced to a simple contextual stimulus – the policy alteration model. A case study – ‘the development of civic education’ – demonstrates the importance of policy networks, as a particular structure of government and group relations in decision making, in explaining the course of policy change. It is apparent that the relationship between regime change and political liberalization, on the one hand, and established networks, on the other, tends to be complex and dialectical in Hong Kong. Despite the importance of sovereignty transition and political restructuring, the effect of contextual factors on public policy greatly depends on the nature of the network involved.     

Ideas,spaces and ‘sovereigntyscapes’: Dramatising Scotland's production of a new institutional fix

Abstract

As part of a general endeavour to ‘modernise’ Britain for the epoch of globalisation, Britain's New Labour government has sought to integrate wide‐ranging constitutional reform with new structures for regional governance. Perhaps the most radical proposal concerns the attempt to align continued UK sovereignty with an elected parliament for Scotland in what has been called a ‘new covenant with the people’. This paper draws on Jane Jenson's neo‐Gramscian discourse‐regulation theory and its stress on social agency and the politics of representation, to explore the political, economic and socio‐spatial tensions and the related ideas, discursive forms and political processes that have given rise to this emergent institutional and representational ‘fix’. The author argues that rather than being perceived of solely as some ‘modernisation move’ on the part of a New Labour project, this reconfiguration of power and representation also needs to be traced to the political and representational style of Thatcherism, in particular, the latter's continuous ‘testing’ of the 1707 Treaty between Scotland and England as a negotiated settlement of economic and political union. The paper concludes with some reflections on the future prospects facing any future Scotland‐UK institutional settlement, including the question of sovereignty.     

Hong Kong as the ‘Neoliberal Exception’ of China: Transformation of Hong Kong Citizenship Before and After the Transfer of Sovereignty

The formation of Hong Kong citizenship was under tensions and struggles after the change of sovereignty in 1997. In spite of the limited political and social rights, many incidents showed that the promised civil rights were declining. More importantly, subject to the intensified transborder population mobility of Chinese citizens, there were public discourses addressing that the social rights of Hong Kong citizens were threatened. Protests in response to the intensified transborder population mobility were found, with the rightist public discourses advocating to conserve the essences of Hong Kong citizenship. Being the neoliberal exception of China, Hong Kong is positioned to contribute for China by its market economy, as well as the relatively well-established socio-economic institution. However, as this article argues, in spite of the logic of exception, i.e. the zoning technology that the state deploys, the intensified transborder population mobility and economic activities between the neoliberal exception and the sovereign state can lead to the struggles and contentions concerning the citizenship of the former.     

Hong Kong between East and West

The Hong Kong Basic Law: Blueprint for ‘Stability and Prosperity’ under Chinese Sovereignty, edited by Ming K. Chan and David J. Clark. (Hong Kong Becoming China Series) M. E. Sharpe, New York, 1991. xv + 311 pp. $45. ISBN 0–87332–835–3.

The China‐Hong Kong Connection: The Key to China's Open‐Door Policy, by Yun‐Wing Sung. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991. xiv + 183 pp. £27.50. ISBN 0–521–38245–9.

The Making of Hong Kong Society: Three Studies of Class Formation in Early Hong Kong, by W. K. Chan. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991. viii + 251 pp. £32.50. ISBN 0–19–827320–7.     

More than a ‘war of words’: identity,politics and the struggle for dominance during the recent ‘political reform’ period in Hong Kong

Patten's arrival as Governor in 1992 Marked a new stage inthe Sino-British struggle over ‘decolonization’ in Hong Kong. This struggle ishighly rhetorical and the local mass media call it a ‘war of words’.However, by adopting a strategic-relational approach, this article reveals a dual struggle over the politics of identity and the social basis for a new economic and political regime in the approach to 1997. The key protagonists (Patten and Chinese officials) have deploye various discursive strategies as economic and political circumstances in Hong Knog have changed. Global, regional and local factors and forces are shaping the emergence of two new, but still unstable, power blocs with different social bases. Whether these actions have an effect upon transforming the structural forms depends on the balanceof forces which is increasingly mediated by changes in discourses and discursive practices over time.     

Managing for Legitimacy: Agency Governance in Its “Deep” Constitutional Context

Recent literature on bureaucratic structure has gone further than studying discretions given to bureaucrats in policy making, and much attention is now paid to understanding how bureaucratic agencies are managed. This article proposes that the way in which executive governments manage their agencies varies according to their constitutional setting and that this relationship is driven by considerations of the executive's governing legitimacy. Inspired by Charles Tilly (1984), the authors compare patterns of agency governance in Hong Kong and Ireland, in particular, configurations of assigned decision‐making autonomies and control mechanisms. This comparison shows that in governing their agencies, the elected government of Ireland's parliamentary democracy pays more attention to input (i.e., democratic) legitimacy, while the executive government of Hong Kong's administrative state favors output (i.e., performance) legitimacy. These different forms of autonomy and control mechanism reflect different constitutional models of how political executives acquire and sustain their governing legitimacy.     

Determining ‘truth’ at the border: immigration interviews,Chinese marital migrants,and Taiwan's sovereignty dilemmas

As Taiwan transitions from an immigrant-sending to an immigrant-receiving country, it struggles to build an immigration bureaucracy while its status as a sovereign nation-state is not recognized by much of the international community. Taiwan's largest immigrant group, marital migrants from China, are perceived as posing the greatest challenges to border control due to longstanding political tensions between the two countries and governmental and societal suspicions about Chinese spouses' marital motives. Based on research conducted with immigration officials and during immigration interviews at the border, this article interrogates the status of ‘truth’ in official efforts to determine definitively immigrants' marital intentions. It analyzes such truth demands in relation to Taiwan's anxieties about its national standing and the ability of an immigration bureaucracy to generate ‘sovereignty effects’.     

Metis,migrants, and the autonomy of migration

This paper interweaves an ancient conceptualization of movement and mobility with the paradigmatic case of early twentieth-century Chinese migration to the USA in order to explore migrants’ ability to both re-interpret institutional control of movement and generate identities that garner institutional and community acceptance. By not ‘settling’ migrants into the discourse of (undocumented) immigrants, the paper (i) develops a framework for the study of migrants–state interactions that goes beyond claims to citizenship and demands for rights and (ii) explores practices and means through which migrants gain access to restricted territories and maintain presence in otherwise unwelcoming communities. The paper argues that such practices explicate the autonomy of migration: a phenomenon that is constitutive to processes of political transformation and is critical to the study of state sovereignty, citizenship rights, and political agency.     

Hong Kong’s security law

China has imposed a security law on Hong Kong that specifies severe penalties for what Beijing deems to be secession, subversion of state power, terrorist activities and ‘collusion with foreign external forces to endanger national security’. Beijing is determined to bring Hong Kong to heel, whatever the international repercussions. In the long term it is likely that Beijing will progressively eliminate all vestiges of Hong Kong’s separate identity along with all remnants of the territory’s colonial past.     

Coordinating the Government Bureaucracy in Hong Kong: An Institutional Analysis

The change in sovereignty of Hong Kong in 1997 has brought about an interesting puzzle: despite a high degree of institutional continuity, the Hong Kong bureaucracy that was considered highly efficient during the colonial era has appeared to turn into an inept administrative structure generating blunder after blunder. The bureaucracy seems to face greater difficulties in horizontal coordination under the new governance, and has lost the ability to produce coherent policy actions.
Drawing upon a literature of institutional analysis, this article examines the institutional design for coordination in the Hong Kong government. The article argues that the bureaucracy in Hong Kong is designed upon a logic of colonial rule. Like any institutional arrangements, the colonial administrative system has inherent coordination limitations. During the colonial era, some smoothing mechanisms were developed as the lubricant for the bureaucracy's operation, but the new governance has inevitably impinged upon some of these—making the bureaucracy more prone to coordination problems.     

Social Policy Under One Country, Two Systems: Institutional Dynamics in China and Hong Kong since 1997

Hong Kong's 1997 reversion to Chinese sovereignty brought two hitherto distinctive social policy systems into one country. As Hong Kong is gradually assimilated into China in the coming decades, the two social policy systems will need to identify elements of convergence. In this article, we argue those elements can be found in parallel efforts to curtail the reach of the state, extend the role of the market, enhance individual responsibility, and in the development of a productivist social policy orientation in both societies. The social policy systems of the two societies remain strikingly different in many ways, reflecting their diametrically opposed starting points. But their reform trajectories appear to be pointing in similar directions.     

Haranguing Hong Kong

The Economic Future of Hong Kong, by Mir on Mushkat. Lynne Rienner, Publishers, Boulder and London/Hong Kong University Press, 1990. xii+171 pp. £16.50. ISBN 1–555–87197–6.

City on the Rocks: Hong Kong's Uncertain Future, by Kevin Rqfferty. Viking, London, 1989. x + 518 pp., 16 pp. plates. £15.95. ISBN0–670–80205–0.

Political Change and the Crisis of Legitimacy in Hong Kong, by Ian Scott. C. Hurst, London, 1990. xv + 480 pp. £27.50. ISBN 1–850650–527.

Kowtow! After Tiananmen Square: A Plea on Behalf of Hong Kong, by William Shawcross. Chatto CounterBlasts No. 6. Chatto and Windus, London, 1989. 57 pp. £2.99. ISBN 0–7011–3628–6.

Democracy Shelved: Great Britain, China, and Attempts at Constitutional Reform in Hong Kong, 1945–1952, by Steve Yui‐Sang Tsang. Oxford University Press, Hong Kong, 1988. xxxiv + 254 pp. £18.50. ISBN 0–19–584175–1.

Hong Kong! Hong Kong!, by Dick Wilson. Unwin Hyman, London, 1990. 284 pp. £15.99. ISBN 0–04–440622.     

Gendering women and politics in contemporary China

This article suggests moving beyond "state-society" models of Chinese politics in order to more effectively integrate "gender" as a category of analysis. The article examines a number of empirical examples of women’s activism in Hong Kong prior to the 1997 handover to China as a way of gaining insights into which variables might more effectively nuance "state-society" models so as to highlight the gendered aspects of women and politics. In the Hong Kong case, such variables include ethnicity, class, race, nationalism, and feminism. The article finds 1)that a number of these variables also apply equally well to research on women and politics in Hong Kong and to gender studies focusing on the contemporary People’s Republic of China; and 2)that disaggregating concepts like "state" and “society” using variables like gender, race, and class provides a more complex understanding of the process of politics in Chinese societies. She received her Ph.D. degree in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has taught in both Hong Kong and the United States. Her work on the women’ movement in pre-1997 Hong Kong will soon be published in an edited volume from University of British Columbia Press.     

Political space in Vietnam: a view from the ‘rice-roots'

Abstract

Single-party, authoritarian states such as Vietnam are frequently characterised as having ‘closed’ political opportunity structures and ‘un-free’ socio-political systems. The validity of this observation depends, however, on the viewer's frame of reference. Seen from the perspective of active citizens, Vietnamese political structures offer increasingly greater space for collective action than a state-centred institutional analysis would predict. Episodes of contentious politics surrounding land disputes and public parks during 2007 provide evidence of the changing dynamics of participation in politics. Actors involved in these and similar campaigns are broadly optimistic about the future prospects for an opening of political space within the existing system. These findings are contrasted with international reports of violations of political rights and with the Vietnamese government's own efforts at legal reform. Although signals remain mixed, to some extent Vietnam might be becoming a ‘rice-roots democracy’ in practice, while remaining a single-party state. The voices and experiences of civil society actors will continue to shape opportunities and risks in the expansion of political space.     

The fraying of the socio‐economic fabric of Hong Kong

Abstract

Since the 1980s, Hong Kong has undergone momentous socio‐economic changes, which in turn have greatly affected public attitudes toward society and the economy. Interpersonal trust and the sense of community have weakened. Hong Kong as a society is increasingly seen as unfair in the sense that it is not perceived as a land of opportunities for the hardworking. The capitalist rules of the game are increasingly considered by the people to be unacceptable. Public demands for more governmental intervention in the economy, particularly in the area of income redistribution, are increasingly raised. Nascent feelings of class antagonism are palpable as economic inequalities are getting worse. As social conflicts of various kinds proliferate, public anxieties about Hong Kong's fraying socio‐economic fabric have come to the fore. People expect the government and the legal institutions to strengthen social order. At the same time, however, public trust of all social, economic and social authorities is declining. Accordingly, as social discontent and anxieties accumulate, the socio‐economic system of Hong Kong will face serious challenge in the years ahead.     

Science studies,climate change and the prospects for constructivist critique

Abstract

Starting from the debates over the ‘reality’ of global warming and the politics of science studies, I seek to clarify what is at stake politically in constructivist understandings of science and nature. These two separate but related debates point to the centrality of modern science in political discussions of the environment and to the difficulties, simultaneously technical and political, in warranting political action in the face of inevitably partial and uncertain scientific knowledge. The case of climate change then provides an experimental test case with which to explore the various responses to these challenges offered by Ulrich Beck's reflexive modernization, the normative theory of expertise advanced by Harry Collins and Robert Evans, and Bruno Latour's utopian vision for decision-making by the ‘collective’ in which traditional epistemic and institutional distinctions between science and politics are entirely superseded.     

The domestic politics of international development in South Korea: stakeholders and competing policy discourses

Abstract

The paper examines the domestic politics surrounding South Korea's foreign aid policy. It delineates the institutional characteristics and strategic interests of key government and non-government stakeholders, and suggests an analytical framework to comprehend the country's aid policy regime. It suggests that two competing policy discourses exist – one emphasising ‘intellectual leadership’ and the other ‘ethical leadership’ as the key principle of aid policy. In practice, the country's political leadership promulgates a complex amalgam of these discourses in alignment with their own political imperatives and interests. The paper discusses ‘Global Saemaul Undong’ as such an example under the incumbent Park Geun-Hye administration.     

Identity and recognition: remembering and forgetting the post-war in Sino-Japanese relations

Abstract

In the 1990s, Japanese views of China were relatively positive. In the 2000s, however, views of China have deteriorated markedly and China has increasingly come to be seen as ‘anti-Japanese’. How can these developments, which took place despite increased economic interdependence, be understood? One seemingly obvious explanation is the occurrence of ‘anti-Japanese’ incidents in China since the mid-2000s. I suggest that these incidents per se do not fully explain the puzzle. Protests against other countries occasionally occur and may influence public opinion. Nonetheless, the interpretation of such events arguably determines their significance. Demonstrations may be seen as legitimate or spontaneous. If understood as denying recognition of an actor's self-identity, the causes of such incidents are likely to have considerably deeper and more severe consequences than what would otherwise be the case. Through an analysis of Japanese parliamentary debates and newspaper editorials, the paper demonstrates that the Chinese government has come to be seen as denying Japan's self-identity as a peaceful state that has provided China with substantial amounts of official development aid (ODA) during the post-war era. This is mainly because China teaches patriotic education, which is viewed as the root cause of ‘anti-Japanese’ incidents. China, then, is not regarded as ‘anti-Japanese’ merely because of protests against Japan and attacks on Japanese material interests but for denying a key component of Japan's self-image. Moreover, the analysis shows that explicit Chinese statements recognising Japan's self-identity have been highly praised in Japan. The article concludes that if China recognises Japan's self-understanding of its identity as peaceful, Japan is more likely to stick to this identity and act accordingly whereas Chinese denials of it might empower Japanese actors who seek to move away from this identity and ‘normalise’ Japan, for example, by revising the pacifist Article Nine of the Japanese constitution.