Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
and neo-liberal policy adjustments of the past 25 years. The British Columbia
government has opened a high school in China with a Canadian curriculum,
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and plans to license others, with graduation certificates permitting post-
secondary movement to Canadian universities. Education fees for study in
Canada are of course much lower for Canadian tax-payers and these sav-
ings have provided a substantial bonus for business immigrants from East
Asia. The heavy emphasis upon educational attainment among overseas
Chinese and Koreans has led to a substantial new business sector in after-
school, weekend and holiday 'cram', enrichment, and remedial programmes.
In addition scores of full- and part-time colleges of variable repute cater to
language and full-programme foreign students. Many colleges are in or near
downtown and the thousands of international students they serve make a
significant contribution to the downtown boutique, restaurant and leisure
market, not least on trendy Robson Street.
The heavy investment in education in ethnic Chinese families has borne
immediate, indeed spectacular, results. Children in the 1.5 or second
generation whose families speak a Chinese language at home are the top
achievers in British Columbia schools. Nationally, analyses of the 2006
Census show that the Chinese-origin population, whether immigrant or
non-immigrant, widely outperforms the native white population (typically
by around 30 percent) in terms of university education (Abada et al. 2008;
Jedwab 2008a).
3
But it appears that it is not until the third generation that
the full benefits of this abundant human capital are transformed into the
financial capital of very high incomes in Canada, and discerning better
returns on their educational investment elsewhere, this superior talent has
been part of the substantial brain drain from Canada to Hong Kong and
Taiwan. Nonetheless education remains as a key institution structuring the
trans-Pacific social field with interviews among young adult 'returnees' in
Hong Kong indicating that many of them are likely to repeat their parents'
journey by sending their own children to Canada for education.
Landscape change is a more obvious process in any exploration of the
restructuring of Vancouver into a putative 'Hongcouver'. In the transfor-
mation of the built environment the pace and scale of change has been
extraordinary. Among the 150,000 ethnic Chinese immigrants who landed
in Vancouver between 1986 and 1996 was an over-determined attention to
the sale of property and the appreciation of land value through redevelop-
ment. Vancouver has had a long history of land deals, beginning with the
'incentive' of a massive land grant that persuaded the Canadian Pacific
Railway to re-locate its planned west coast terminus to the village of
Granville, which it re-named Vancouver, substituting the name of an English
ocean explorer for an English aristocrat. But the millionaire migrants arriv-
ing from East Asia in the 1980s and 1990s embodied the idea and practice
of property like never before. In Hong Kong's 'property development regime',
