Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Geopolitical events in East Asia aided Canada's Pacific Rim strategy. The
Chinese in Southeast Asia were wealthy, but often threatened, minorities
(Ang 2001; Rigg 2003). Successful entrepreneurs in Hong Kong included
bourgeois families that had fled Shanghai ahead of the Communist army
and were worried in light of the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984 that
planned for the repatriation of the British colony to the Mainland in 1997.
Their anxieties were much aggravated by the harsh suppression of student
reformers in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Periodic sabre-rattling by the
Mainland government in the Taiwan Strait, including provocative exercises
in 1995 and 1996, unsettled wealthy Taiwanese households who could see
the benefits of portfolio diversification and passport insurance. And in
South Korea the instability of living with the wild card of North Korea as
nearest neighbour encouraged the same global scanning for safer havens.
In this uncertainty the attentions of Canadian trade missions were of
considerable interest, and not only for investment purposes. Canadian
immigration had expanded away from its European-preference origins, as
reforms in 1962 and 1967 welcomed global arrivals and the announcement
of multiculturalism in 1971 emphasized that all were welcome. Moreover,
further immigration revisions in 1978 and 1986 appeared tailored to
the needs of anxious ethnic Chinese capitalists in East and Southeast Asia.
The Government of Canada assembled a Business Immigration Programme
(BIP) whose express intent was to recruit wealthy immigrants to advance
economic development in Canada either through active entrepreneurialism
or more passive investment (Ley 2003). In the neo-liberal commodification
of everything during the globalizing 1980s, financial capital with entrepre-
neurial experience offered a passage to Canadian citizenship.
Between 1980 and 2001, almost 330,000 immigrants landed in Canada
through the BIP, making the Canadian programme the most successful in
the global immigration marketplace, far ahead of competing programmes in
Australia, New Zealand and the United States (Wong 2003). Hong Kong,
Taiwan and South Korea accounted for over half the business immigrants
landing in Canada, and three-quarters in British Columbia. This cohort of
economically privileged newcomers, some of them fabulously wealthy, con-
tributed a new genre of millionaire migrants.
Travelling Agents
If Wayson Choy's
Jade Peony
provides the novelist's reconstruction of a
Chinatown-bound past, then Clara Law's film
Floating Life
(1996) is a much
fuller representation of a diasporic and cosmopolitan present. Australian-
made, the film is synchronous with Law's own departure from Hong Kong
to Australia the year before. As the title suggests,
Floating Life
presents the
