Citizenship,economy and social exclusion of mainland Chinese immigrants in Hong Kong

Hong Kong is often viewed as a Chinese immigrants' city. This article discusses three interrelated dimensions of the social exclusion of migrants designated as “new” Chinese immigrants in Hong Kong. First, it is argued that globalisation has triggered intense economic rivalry among world cities as they undertake economic restructuring. Second, the political attempts of territorial states to establish their own legitimacy and strengthen their governing capacity are major catalysts that induce the social exclusion of immigrants. Third, the nature and strength of local place-based social identity is vital to determine the difficulties new immigrants face in being included in the host society. After recounting the history of Chinese immigrants and their recent profile in Hong Kong, the article examines the relationships between Hong Kong's economic development and the state's immigration policies, and how Hong Kong's state policies have constructed a form of Hong Kong identity vis-à-vis Mainland Chinese, drawing out the mechanisms that determine the social exclusion of Mainland immigrants since the 1990s.

“We asked for workers but human beings came.” Max Frisch(quoted in Hollifield,2000:149)     

State,bureaucracy and polity in modern Thai politics

We test the comparative foreign labor policies of Korea and Japan within a vein of international relations literature addressing the effects of international norms on changes in state policies. Building on the efforts to emphasize a state's domestic structure as a source of variations in the impact of international norms, this study enriches this debate further by demonstrating the role of the Korean state in developing international human rights norms domestically. In contrast to the previous studies that tend to dichotomize between states and human rights activists, which result in focusing their empirical studies on the question of whether states are constrained in developing immigration policies under the influence of international human rights norms, we demonstrate that state actors in coalition with human rights activists were actively involved in the process of enacting the Employment of Foreign Workers Act (EFWA) in Korea. More precisely, by offering a detailed account of how Korea finally suc ceeded in adopting the EFWA in 2003 after two failed attempts in 1997 and 2000, we attribute the success to the more extensive, organized pro-foreign workers coalition of state actors and human rights activists over the course of actions. When this observation is applied to Japan, the absence of an active role of the state accounts for Japan's relative silence on the EFWA.     

Globalization's impact on the Malaysian workforce

This article provides a partial analysis of the socio-political impact of the so-called IMF reforms that were implemented by the South Korean government in response to the financial crisis of 1997–98. We find that at least in one key area — namely policies related to foreign investment — the IMF reforms fundamentally altered and reshaped Korea's development path. In fact, the policy changes affecting foreign investment produced what amounts to a paradigm shift in Korea's well-known model of developmental state. Alternatively put, these reforms led to the demise of the “Korea, Inc.,” the symbiotic relationship between government and businesses that was at the core of Korea's developmental state. As such, our analysis suggesting a paradigm shift in Korea's developmental state stands in contrast with previous (pre-crisis) arguments that proclaimed the demise of the developmental state.     

Public health in Burma: Anatomy of a crisis

Burma has been ruled by a military government since 1962. A steady deterioration in public health standards has accompanied such rule, with a particularly marked decline following the crushing of the pro-democracy movement in that country in 1988. This article draws attention to a number of aspects of this decline and the growing precariousness of the overall public health system. As it will be suggested, primary responsibility for this state of decay should be borne by the military regime. Through several policies and practices, the military has severely compromised the functioning of the public health system and perverted it in ways that fulfill its narrow political interests, rather than those of the nation as a whole. The article concludes by emphasizing the urgent need for a reinstatement of democratic norms and institutions in Burma, so that the nation's public health needs may be meaningfully addressed and a looming humanitarian disaster averted.     

UNESCO’s Tangled Web of Preservation: Community,Heritage and Development in China

In the past two decades the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) has broadened its focus on heritage from tangible sites to intangible cultural practices. It has also, according to supporters, advocated for the inclusion of local residents at heritage sites in management plans, emphasised the need to promote and protect human rights, and sought to balance preservation and conservation with what it terms “social and economic” needs. This article examines these claims via a case study on world heritage in China. It is suggested that UNESCO’s embrace of community involvement in heritage management is underpinned by a reliance on two fictive categories: an “international community” that agrees on heritage policies and a fictive homogeneous “local community” assumed to share the institutional values of UNESCO. This in turn reflects assumptions found at the centre of UNESCO’s cosmopolitan project going back to its establishment in 1948.     

The meaning of war: A heterodox perspective

This article raises serious methodological, conceptual, historical and empirical questions concerning the notion of China as the next world superpower. The most dynamic sector of growth is the private sector, but within that sector foreign capital is growing the fastest, especially in strategic export sectors and increasingly in finance and the domestic market. Historically China has passed from a semi-colony to a collectivist state to a state capitalist economy toward a neo-liberal economy which contains the seeds for the re-emergence of a foreign capitalist-dominated economy. Contradictions in the current neo-liberal economy are leading to increased class struggle especially in the countryside and increasing tension between the super-rich Chinese bourgeois allied to foreign capital and ‘national statist’ sectors of the governing class. The efforts by the new leadership to ameliorate the contradiction through increased social spending are too little and too late.     

The crisis of governance in New Subsistence States

In the sixty years since the establishment of the United Nations on 24^th October 1945, societies across the world have endeavoured to reshape themselves in accordance with the model of the modern state. Whereas the institutions of the modern state have proved appropriate for societies with historical experience of the production and administration of large surpluses, the adoption of state institutions presents an ongoing challenge for many other societies. Only a minority of states operate free from foreign aid, and weak states composed of stateless societies with minimal surplus generation capacity continue to face particular difficulties as they seek to adapt to the modern state system. Like other New Subsistence States, East Timor possesses grass-roots administrative capacities grounded in its village social structures. Short of the skills and resources necessary to support its formal justice system, East Timor has the option to formally integrate elements of its traditional mediation and conflict resolution capacities into the structure of the state.     

Ethnicity and capital: Changing relations between China and Southeast Asia

This article seeks to debunk the persistent myth of an ethnically-based Chinese capitalism and the culturalist view of an “economic miracle” created by Asians of Chinese descent. This myth claims that Chinese entrepreneurs constitute a closed category with homogenous ethnic attributes and cultural values that have enabled them to achieve economic success. This article disputes such primordialist views and proposes an alternative analysis of the cultural economy of regionalisation and constructions of Chineseness. It deconstructs the politics of culture and identity, and argues for the need to analyse Southeast Asian Chinese entrepreneurship within specific historical, geographical, economic, political and socio-cultural contexts.     

The politics of Japan's free trade agreement

For a long time, the Japanese government showed awkward and indecisive attitudes towards trade policy. There was strong opposition from the two political actors — bureaucrats at the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) and politicians in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) — to market opening in the agricultural sector. This article highlights private interests and the public interest of MAFF bureaucrats and LDP politicians and examines how the evolving perception of the interests has influenced debates and the progress of free trade agreement (FTA) policy over agriculture. The central argument is that economic linkages and institutional cooperation in East Asia have changed basic interests of MAFF bureaucrats and LDP politicians, and such changes, then, have induced new moves in Japan's FTA policy towards countries of the region.     

Neo-liberalism in post-crisis South Korea: Social conditions and outcomes

South Korea's post-war development pattern has been considered to be a developmental state model, where the basic institutional framework was the “state-banks-chaebol nexus.” Since the financial crisis of 1997, however, the country has been swiftly transformed from the developmental state model and has acquired more neo-liberal characteristics. This has been made possible through intense reforms implemented by the post-crisis South Korean government under the IMF's guidance and encouraged by domestic political, ideational, and social conditions. Among those, significant conditions for this swift transformation include chaebols' legitimacy problems, neo-liberal consensus among the domestic elite, democracy hijacked by neo-liberalism, and the role of some NGOs. As social outcomes of the transformation, we find the enlarged presence of transnational capital, increased labour flexibility, inequality and poverty, and an increasing cultural gap in the country. Huge social costs of such neo-liberal transformation necessitate an alternative path of political economy.     

Asset stripping in Chinese state-owned enterprises

This study addresses the consequences of commercialization and modernization of agriculture on ethnic minority farming communities in Vietnam's upland areas. These communities have been deeply affected by the pro-market reforms introduced nation-wide as the result of economic renovation (doi moi). The study examines the changes in standards of living and quality of life as well as the constraints acting on the development of family farms. Importantly, it investigates the role of government in influencing the process of rural development. Some of the most important findings can be summarized as follows. First, pro-market reforms have led to the diversification of the farm economy. Cash crops, especially tree crops, are now the main component of the household economy. Second, income disparities have increased and poverty remains entrenched in pockets of the upland population. Third, in its effort to restructure the national economy, the central government has decreased its contribution to upland development. The weakening of the social and physical infrastructure hampers farmers' efforts to participate in the market economy. Fourth, because of a general lack of rural industries, few employment opportunities exist outside the farm sector. As a result, many households engage in informal off-farm activities as a survival strategy.     

A critique of ADB policies towards the Greater Mekong Sub-region

This article takes issue with the rhetorical construction of what constitutes a “regional market economy” that informs much official thinking around the Greater Mekong Sub-region (GMS) Program. It is argued that this is a limited construction that privileges the unimpeded movement of goods and resources within the area. Missing from this construct are more fundamental dimensions of what constitutes a proper “economy,” such as production and the institutional foundation to support such activity. Without these, the GMS may be constrained in its future development, rising little beyond an entrepôt basis. If the Program is to realise its full promise, further initiatives will be required, particularly to firmly embed a productive capacity within the region and establish a coherent institutional framework in its support.     

Surviving Financial Crises: The Chinese Overseas in Malaysia and Singapore

This article analyses key elements of the Thaksin government's public sector reform program since 2001 in the context both of a longer history of public sector reform in Thailand, and of Thaksin's style of political rule. Carefully chosen instruments of new public management reform such as budgeting for results and performance management have been accompanied by an agenda of wholesale restructuring of the bureaucracy. However, these instruments do not include many familiar items of the public management reform agenda. The reforms are best viewed as part of a politicisation strategy aimed at asserting political control at the centre. Managerial reforms are being deployed to reshape the bureaucracy into an instrument of the Thaksin government's political program. In the process, the traditional power of the bureaucracy is being challenged and undermined. The long-term impact of the bureaucratic modernisation program on administrative performance is less certain.     

China,globalisation and the World Trade Organisation

This article claims that membership of the WTO will help industrialisation, rather than make China more dependent. Hedley Bull's realist paradigm helps to understand why China joined this organisation, any counter arguments are wishful thinking. Friedrich List's ideas for self-reliant industrialisation were used successfully by Mao Zedong, but globalisation has changed development strategy. Globalisation, if handled wrongly can make China jobless, voiceless, rootless, ruthless and futureless. If handled right, it can strengthen independence, sovereignty and self-reliance. The Chinese government needs stable external, as well as internal economic conditions. There are benefits for the vast majority of Chinese, but there are also possible disadvantages. David Ricardo's “comparative advantage” has not really helped Less Developed Countries, on the other hand, China should not become a crumbled “Somalia,” this means that China has to engage with globalisation, and this means also the WTO. After all, agency does exist and globalisation is a “two-edged sword.”     

China's impact on forests in Southeast Asia

Many developed countries have gained control of their forest-exploiting industries through advanced regulatory regimes. But stricter regulation usually displaces forest exploitation into developing countries with weaker regulatory regimes. The most important current example is the shift of forest exploitation for the Chinese market from China into Southeast Asia following the logging ban in China in 1998. In this article we describe and document the impact in Southeast Asia: rapidly increasing, unsustainable, and often illegal production and export for the Chinese market. We also note the growth in exports of furniture and plywood from China to the EU, UK, and elsewhere using imported and often illegally harvested timber from Southeast Asia. It is argued that it will be very difficult to interrupt the continuing deforestation in Southeast Asia because: (i) the profits from exporting forest products from Southeast Asia to the China market and the profits for Chinese firms which use these forest products to produce plywood and furniture for export to developed countries are substantial; and (ii) there is a lack of political will at all levels to interrupt these chains of trade and flows of profit.     

War or peace/war and peace

This article critically discusses several perspectives on the question of war and peace and finds them all inadequate. It argues that empire building induces war, international law is impotent against imperial powers, and national liberation struggles degenerate into local wars. The article argues for a new class perspective which challenges the civilian militarists and Zionists who control U.S. policy.     

Heritage Tourism in the Caribbean: The Politics of Culture after Neoliberalism

As neoliberalism has taken root in the Caribbean, heritage tourism has grown enormously. Using examples drawn from the Trinidad Carnival, this article shows how culture becomes a marketing force in the wake of increasingly difficult economic times in the Caribbean. As selling culture increases in importance for the overall economic health of Caribbean economies, it becomes, more and more, the focus of Caribbean states and state agencies and a basis for state sovereignty. Drawing on Foucault's notion of biopower, the article draws a connection between the increasing importance of cultural performances for state revenue and government intervention into those performances.     

A critical note on UNDP's gender inequality indices

This article explains the diverse responses among the Chinese bourgeoisie in Hong Kong and Singapore to Chinese nationalist movements in the 1930s. In Singapore, the slogan of “Chinese buy Chinese goods” boosted the Chinese bourgeoisie in their business competition with Japan. The same slogan was used by the Chinese bourgeoisie in Hong Kong to emphasize increased sales of Chinese goods while Japanese imports were used by Chinese manufacturers in Hong Kong. I also interpret Chinese bourgeois nationalism in Hong Kong and Singapore as a move toward transnational economic citizenship. Emphasising their Chinese ethnicity, the bourgeoisie in Hong Kong and Singapore asked the Chinese government for favourable import tariffs. At the same time, the bourgeoisie requested the British for favourable tariffs, when they wished to export goods to markets in Britain and its colonies.     

Assets in the age of tourism: the development of heritage planning in Ghanaian policy

Heritage planning in Ghana is mainly governed by the idea of sustainable pro-poor tourism, but is only marginally integrated with general planning programmes and fragmentally addressed by policy-makers. Motivated by the general lack of research on heritage policy in Ghana, this paper examines the role of heritage planning in national socio-economic, cultural and tourism policy and highlights various ambiguities in terms of concepts, objectives and approaches. The major findings show gaps between rational and communicative planning ideals, between informal management systems and wider democratic concerns, and between delimited and comprehensive planning perspectives. The central argument is that the lack of coherence among different development planning perspectives is an issue that future heritage policy-making needs to consider in order to balance tourism development with concerns such as social stability, community development and local pride of place.