Hong Kong as Global City

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Hong Kong as Global City
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Themes and Questions

• Themes
• The concept of global cities
• Hong Kong as an early world city
• 3. From industrialization to positive non-
  interventionism (???????)
• 4. Manhattan Dream

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Three Major Aspects of Global Cities

• Command Centers
• transnational corporate headquarters - house the
  crucial institutions of economic globalization,
  such as, stock markets, advertising agencies and
  teleports.
• Center of cultural hegemony- concentration of
  cultural festivals like music, film or dance
  festivals in New York.

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Three Major Aspects of Global Cities

• Socio-cultural infrastructure
• Amin and Thrift (1994) identify three important
  elements
• Centers provide the face-to-face contact needed
  to generate collective beliefs.

New York Central Park
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Three Major Aspects of Global Cities

• Socio-cultural infrastructure
• Centers are needed to enable social and cultural
  interaction, that is, to act as places of
  sociability, of gathering information,
  establishing coalitions, maintaining trust, and
  developing rules of behaviors.

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Three Major Aspects of Global Cities

• Socio-cultural infrastructure
• Centers are needed to develop, test and track
  innovations, to provide a critical mass of
  knowledgeable people and socio-institutional
  networks.
• "centers of representation, interaction and
  innovation"

Silicon Valley
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(No Transcript)
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Three Major Aspects of Global Cities

• Social polarization winners and losers
• the richest and the poorest members of society
• increasing capital intensity of production and
  large-scale immigration of foreign workers

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Three Major Aspects of Global Cities

• Social polarization winners and losers
• the paradoxical relationship- between the growth
  of finance and producer services and the increase
  of an informal economy in these cities

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Social polarization winners and losers

• process of professionalization vs process of
  polarization

VS
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Social polarization winners and losers

• The depiction of New York by Castells (1993) can
  be best summed up
• "Wall Street may make New York one of the nerve
  centers of the global capitalist system, but this
  dominant position has a dark side in the ghettos
  and barrios where a growing population of poor
  people lives.

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Hong Kong as City-State

• Singapore makes itself an Intelligent Island in
  Southeast Asia, while Hong Kong describes itself
  as the gateway to the Mainland.

VS
Gateway Hong Kong
High-tech Singapore
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Hong Kong as City-State

• city-states take a significant role in creating
  their local niches to win out the competition of
  the global economy.
• City-states develop competitive niches through
  re-shaping their own unique governance structure
  (????).

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Hong Kong as City-State

• To survive in the age of globalization, the
  city-states have to re- position(????) and
  re-imagine(????) itself in the regional city
  network (??????).
• In the process of repositioning, the Hong Kong
  SAR government argues that the role of city-state
  Hong Kong is that of a middleman (???).

Hong Kong is middleman???
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Hong Kong as a Colonial City

• "transnationality" of Hong Kong's economy is not
  a recent phenomenon.
• Hong Kong as an entrepôt trade center was among
  the earliest world cities

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Hong Kong as a Colonial City and the early
World City

• Hong Kong as a trading centre bridging China and
  the Western world
• "middleman capitalism" (Hui 1999) -- capture the
  geo-political location of Hong Kong as the
  stepping stone to the China market and resources
  in its early colonial history.

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Hong Kong as a Colonial City

• Colonialism, as a particular form of political
  economy, shapes the territorial governance
  structure.
• the territorial governance structure was
  basically a divided one
• the colonial government was a weak state

Key concept to remember!
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Hong Kong as a Colonial City

• organized through the collaboration of the
  colonial state, British merchants and local
  Chinese compradors.
• the Chinese society linking the overseas Chinese
  communities via big Chinese merchant houses.
• The Chinese businessmen who acted as trading
  middlemen

Key concept to remember!
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Flexible Manufacturing in HK andPositive
Non-interventionism

• A new international division of labor (????)
  emerged in 60s.
• the capability of HK to link a local, flexible
  manufacturing system (??????) to a fluctuating
  global market.

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Flexible Manufacturing in HK andPositive
Non-interventionism

• the competitive advantage of Hong Kong
  manufacturing was conditional upon low wages and
  minimal diversification
• when wages rose, its competitiveness gradually
  eroded.

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Flexible Manufacturing in HK andPositive
Non-interventionism

• A role of "positive non-intervention" during the
  industrial period.
• colonial state was traditionally biased against
  manufacturing and favored finance-and-trade
  related sectors.

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Flexible Manufacturing in HK andPositive
Non-interventionism

• Positive nonintervention was merely rhetoric
  (????) employed to justify whatever economic
  action the government took.

Sir John Cowperthwaite (?????) The so-called
Father of Hong Kong positive
non-interventionism.
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Flexible Manufacturing in HK andPositive
Non-interventionism

• No long-term industrial development planning or
  strategic policies . Chen (1987) comments that
• "Technological intensity and capital intensity
  are slowly increasing in Hong Kong manufacturing,
  but the speed does not seem to be adequate for
  the maintenance of Hong Kongs economic
  position."

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Flexible Manufacturing in HK andPositive
Non-interventionism

• The government finally set up an advisory
  committee in 1977.
• The Open Door Policy started and the
  deindustrialization of Hong Kong began.
• a massive relocation of manufacturing industries
  in South China.

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Flexible Manufacturing in HK andPositive
Non-interventionism

• The late colonial government adopted a let-go
  approach.
• In early 90s, over 30 of Hong Kongs
  manufacturing has moved to the Mainland, among
  which some industries like the electronics and
  plastics industries even amounted to 70-80.

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Flexible Manufacturing in HK andPositive
Non-interventionism

• a deepening of labor-intensive industry by
  incorporating Southern China as the production
  base.
• Sit (1998) a "front shop, back factory" model

Integrating with Pearl River Delta Region (no
alternative solutions)!!!!
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Flexible Manufacturing in HK andPositive
Non-interventionism

• The capability of Hong Kong to maintain its
  "front shop" status is now doubtful.
• Hong Kong fails to reinvent its advantages
• no technological upgrading and spatial
  governance to meet the challenges of economic
  globalization.

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Flexible Manufacturing in HK andPositive
Non-interventionism

• A process of "Manhattanization" in Hong Kong-
  producer services, especially financial services,
  would be the major sources of Hong Kong
  competitive advantages.

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Flexible Manufacturing in HK andPositive
Non-interventionism

• Manhattan Dream was blown out by the outbreak of
  the Asian financial crisis immediately after the
  handover.
• The SAR therefore was confronted with serious
  governability problems.

George Soros
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Hong Kong as Global City
Key concept to remember!

• From "positive non-intervention" to active
  imagineering in response to the global economy.
  
• The term "imagineering" -- a process of active
  imagination and projection of urban governance,
  even without the actual ability of social
  engineering and political regulation

Hong Kong South China Paris!!!??? (As shopping
center only)
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Hong Kong as Global City
Key concept to remember!

• City-states drastically transform their roles as
  grand imagineer, consensus builder, regulator or
  monitor.
• A contractual relation with various societal
  actors has to be formed in order to generate a
  dominant vision of city development.

Civil servants (All employees in HK) should
accept salary reduction!!!???
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Hong Kong as Global City

• SAR government attempted to restructure the city
  by actively imagineering a grand vision of a
  global technopolis in Hong Kong.
• This grand project required a reinvention of the
  active role in the new urban governance.

It was the best of time, it was the worst of
time.
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Conclusion

• Hong Kong government thus tried hard to find new
  development strategies.
• After 1997 handover, the global cities strategies
  were hence launched.
• New relations among state, society and market
  were generated.