From The New Inquiry, August 11, 2022:
In the Mood for Loss
Did Hong Kong ever have a belle époque? It’s difficult to say. Hong Kongers never had full control over their city’s political fate, no matter how hard they fought for it. Even now, it seems insulting to claim that the meager electoral reforms and quasi-autonomy afforded to the city at various points in its history ever set the stage for a sort of golden age. Yet it remains undeniable that there was a time spanning some set of years between 1980 and 2020––although I suspect that few will agree on which ones--in which there was a sense of political possibility in Hong Kong.
During those years, many Hong Kongers put their faith in what the writer Wilfred Chan has described as a “coercive bargain,” a belief that Hong Kong’s “culture, language, and ways of life might be kept precariously intact as long as the city continued being a ‘window to the world’”––which is to say, a free-market haven for international businesses. Over time, free markets became considered a sign of the city’s political health. For decades, Hong Kong topped global measures of economic freedom. When the Heritage Foundation finally removed Hong Kong from the Economic Freedom Index in 2021, it signaled the end of an era. A set of roundly mocked tweets proclaimed the death of the city. “RIP Hong Kong,” they read. “1842-2020.”
The suggestion that Hong Kong found its origins in the end of the First Opium War in 1842 was, of course, ahistorical, risible, and quite offensive. But we should think of 1842 as an important date nonetheless, one that marks the shotgun marriage of global capital markets to a conveniently placed port city that kicked off Hong Kong’s tragic and lengthy entanglement with international finance. From the colonial seizure onwards, Hong Kong became a zone of contact between western financial interests and the Chinese market. In the beginning, these interactions were a largely one-sided, exploitative affair; as the 20th century dragged on, they became much more mutualistic.
Certain things nevertheless remained the same. For many decades, Hong Kong was afforded an unusual degree of access to international capital. But the city was never home to any political arrangement resembling a real democracy. This was long considered a contradiction of Hong Kong politics, a source of friction that would eventually be resolved by either the broad opening of Hong Kong’s political life or the end of the city’s vaunted free-market system.
Unfortunately, the idea that Hong Kong’s free markets were one part of some free society to be realized in the future was never anything more than a comforting fiction. From the outset, Hong Kong’s liberal markets and illiberal politics were not in tension. Their coexistence was a built-in feature of the city’s political economy, one designed by British colonialists and adopted eagerly by Chinese capitalists after the handover.
Though it is rarely phrased this way, “market freedom” has always connoted the market’s right to be free from oversight, boundaries, democratic control, or anything else that might impede the forces of accumulation. In this sense, free markets are perfectly, or even optimally, compatible with the type of authoritarianism we find in Hong Kong. More pithily, the historian Quinn Slobodian once characterized neoliberal free-market statecraft as an “ongoing effort to protect capitalism from democracy.”
The history of Hong Kong’s relationship to free-market ideology tells us that we should consider it, like Chile or Argentina or Thailand, as one of many countries unwillingly converted into a laboratory for neoliberal policies. As outlined in Globalists, Slobodian’s intellectual history of free markets, Hong Kong became part of an effort by Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and others working in tandem with British authorities to create “the most libertarian major civilized community in the world.” The city was chosen in no small part because of its illiberal politics; in Slobodian’s description, Hong Kong became a “remarkable example of the neoliberal fix in a basic form: a model of a non-majoritarian market economy that limited popular sovereignty while maximizing capital sovereignty.”....
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Also at The New Inquiry:Make the Golf Course a Public Sex Forest!
