Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
and transportation that enables contact to occur with such facility across
weakening borders. The conventional barrier of distance has seemingly been
eroded, even eliminated in instantaneous electronic communication. The
thesis of the level playing-field and the substitutability of locations may be
translated in geographical jargon to the older idea of the isotropic plain, the
undifferentiated regional surface populated by rational economic actors,
where conditions are held constant in all directions. So has the isotropic
plain up-scaled and gone global?
In such a scenario boundaries are transcended, borders are transgressed.
Nations as such are fading away, their border functions overridden by a
larger logic. Occupying this space is a particular kind of cosmopolitan
migrant, an emerging transnational capitalist class who seem to be the natu-
ral players in a flat world (Appadurai 1996; Sklair 2001). They include
expatriates and sojourners, what I have called the capitalists
sans frontières
,
networked across space and engaged in global scanning to optimize eco-
nomic prospects. Residential decisions and national commitments are stra-
tegic and often short-term. Such actors might include British expatriates in
Singapore, Japanese businessmen in NewYork or the 'cosmopolitan capital-
ists' among the Chinese diaspora (Hamilton 1999; Yeung and Olds 2000;
Ma 2003). Neo-liberal economic theory has raised the spatial range of the
rational entrepreneur from local hero to global champion. Economic ration-
ality has jumped spatial scale from the more modest geographies of von
Thünen's isolated state (Chisholm 1962) or Christaller's regional system of
central places (Haggett 1965) to the transnational and even the global. Such
a cosmopolitan capitalist is 'at home' in any setting. As an overseas Chinese
businessman told Aihwa Ong in San Francisco: 'I can live anywhere in the
world, but it must be near an airport' (1999: 135).
Canada's BIP, and its equivalents elsewhere, are based on the thesis of the
substitutability of locations, that both capital and entrepreneurial acumen
can be unproblematically transplanted from East Asia overseas. But in prac-
tice geography does matter, for entrepreneurial achievements in Hong Kong
and Taiwan have not led to many rewards in Canada or Australasia. Language
provides an unwelcome barrier sending formerly successful business people
hurrying to the overcrowded Chinese enclave economy where fierce com-
petition and business failure were a common outcome. A flat income tax in
Hong Kong of 15 percent was no preparation for a graduated tax whose
marginal rate approached 50 percent in Canada; as bad, the detailed busi-
ness, environmental and labour codes and regulations, the various licensing
requirements, were part and parcel of a different economic culture requir-
ing mastery for survival.
Business immigrants rarely possessed such mastery. Far from a thesis of
cosmopolitan agility, they were often confused and disabled by geographical
difference. Frequently respondents spoke of their surprise at how different
