ASIAN AFFAIRS ANALYSIS 1.1 HONG KONG, A WORLD CITY, IS IT? (extract of Asian Affairs nș19) To quote a bad slogan adopted by the current government, what sort of a city is Hong Kong and what does it mean to be a world-city? Hong Kong is a city of 6.8 million people, created in the middle of the XIXth century by a foreign power. There had been many such places in the world with the same history. Close to Hong Kong, there is still Macao. The city is in appearance a rich one. Yet, as we shall see later, it is a relatively poor community by many standards. Nevertheless, it still retains a substantial economic power. The city is currently going through an economic downturn creating hardship, unemployment and deflation, but we have been reminded a couple of years ago that economic cycles do exist. Therefore, why would Hong Kong be worse off than its neighbors? Why does it have to lose when the others won't? Why all these talks about an “unprecedented” crisis? Leaving aside financial considerations that we will study further, Hong Kong panics because its elite wants to keep it on its pedestal as the “world-city of Asia”. It is this divergence between aspiration and reality that has given Hong Kong’s crisis a spin. Hong Kong is not satisfied being only Hong Kong. It needs to be more than that. C.H. Tung wants Hong Kong to be the London of Asia, the New York of the region. ‘This identity embodies the spirit and characteristics of Hong Kong and reflects our competitive edge’ he declared in his Policy Address. This insistence to claim to be more than Hong Kong, as if the rest of Asia, not to mention the world, were unable to recognize what it is, does no good to the city. Isn’t it just a naive admission of weakness and the sure sign that the ex-colony has lost its edge forever? There are many reasons to think that it is the case. Aside from the economic downturn, which keeps being presented as one of the many ups and downs of Hong Kong but not as a turning point, an historical reason for that is that Hong Kong has indeed been a world-city. Therefore, it will have the same fate as its predecessors. World-cities have always existed. Notably Fernand Braudel in his book “Civilization and Capitalism” studied their characteristics and their fate in details. What are they then exactly and why do they become world-cities and cease to be so? According to the French historian Fernand Braudel ‘world-economies are autonomous sections of the planet to which their internal links and exchanges give a certain organic unity. The Mediterranean in the sixteenth century was one of them, a world economy, not merely the sea itself but a whole area stimulated by its trading activities, whether near its shores or far away. Its center was Venice, and then it moved to Genoa before going outside the Mediterranean sea (to Antwerp). The economic activities of the whole area ignored the frontiers of empires, in the case of the Mediterranean, whether it was the Spanish one or the Turkish one, or other kingdoms. That is why such sections are labelled as a world-economy. Its characteristic is to bestride the political and cultural frontiers.' (1) Thus, world-cities are the center of gravity of a specific world-economy. When such a world-economy evolves, its center of gravity changes. We can recognize in Fernand Braudel's description many of the attributes of the economic region that had Hong Kong as its center for probably a century. The colony was then truly the only world-city of the South China Sea, with no real concurrent in Asia. History books recorded enough data to construct a typology of the world-economies at different times of their life. The first observation is that world-economies have clearly defined boundaries that give them their identities and they invariably have a center with an already-dominant type of capitalism. Fernand Braudel also observed that ‘a profusion of such centers, in a single world economy, represents either immaturity or on the contrary some kind of decline or mutation’. That the Pearl River Delta bordering Hong Kong today has a profusion of emerging centers, the biggest one being Guangzhou itself, is self-evidence that the world-economy surrounding Hong Kong is changing rapidly. ‘In face of pressures both internal and external, he wrote, there may be shifts of the center of gravity: cities with international destinies, world-cities, are in perpetual rivalry with one another and may take each other’s place.' The above observation fits Hong Kong’s current predicament very well. While during the second part of the XXth century, it was the unparalleled and unchallenged center of an economy encompassing the South of China whose reach could be felt in most parts of China, it is today challenged in many fields, not only by Shanghai, but other Chinese cities as well. A further remark is that a world-economy is always a sum of individual economies, some poor, some modest, with a comparatively rich one in the center. As a result, there are inequalities ‘which make possible the functioning of the whole. Hence, the international division of labor, not a new division but an ancient and no doubt incurable divide’. But what happens when such inequalities are eroded? This is precisely this unprecedented question that Hong Kong has to solve to retain its former glory. Although Fernand Braudel had not included Hong Kong in his list of world-cities when he wrote his masterpiece, the former British colony in the 1980's and 1990's fitted very well along its peers in the above description. Indeed, Hong Kong, being the center of its own world-economy was truly a world-city. But a city cannot be a world-city forever. (the notes are at the end of Chapter One - see Notes Chapter One) | |||
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