Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
intricate two-step between the state and the immigrants as the state sought
to control and contain the immigrants as national citizens, while newcomers
sought to maintain their circular motion between their money-generating
station in East Asia and their consumption station in Canada.
Business immigrants were required to place passive investments in ven-
ture-capital funds for a fixed period, or else to engage in active entrepre-
neurial activity. Chapter 4 traces the economic success of this group who
qualified for landing in Canada on the basis of their homeland business
achievements. Relations with the state again move to centre stage, for the
federal department, Citizenship and Immigration Canada, monitored the
economic activity of business migrants as a condition of their entry. Field
research indicates surprising lapses among these business households, out
of character with their public persona and past performance as
homo
economicus
. One conclusion is that the economic otherness of Canada
presented serious barriers to immigrant business success. There is no
explanatory alternative here but to retain aspects of methodological nation-
alism, for despite the flattening out claims of globalization theorists, local
geographies continue to matter profoundly. The economic culture of
Canada was unfamiliar, even without the additional barrier of the English
language. Many saw the investment required as the necessary cost of citi-
zenship; like the Canadian state they regarded the business programme as
above all a business transaction. Common to all insurance, passport insur-
ance was also measured in the hard currency of the market.
Hong Kong residents in particular have been embedded in an economic
culture where property has loomed large in wealth acquisition. Early arriv-
als in Canada like David Lam had made their fortunes in real estate, and if
any reinforcement was needed of the potential of the Vancouver property
market there was the lesson of Li Ka-shing's twenty-year commitment to
build out the Expo site. Chapter 5 reviews the embodied meaning of prop-
erty transported from Hong Kong to the Vancouver land market. The his-
toric enclave of old Chinatown was unattractive to the cosmopolitan and
quintessentially modern sensibilities of the new immigrants, and has been
avoided. New large houses, luxury downtown condominium units and sub-
urban malls more adequately integrate the relationship between place and
identity today for affluent Chinese-Canadian families. The buying and sell-
ing of Vancouver property was also a transnational enterprise with sales
occurring at weekend marts held at top-end hotels in Hong Kong, Singapore
and Taipei. Real estate agents and companies with bi-national connections
lubricated sales with international buyers. The net effect of capital seeking
property from the super-charged land markets of East Asia was the marked
inflation of house and condominium prices in Vancouver and its inner sub-
urbs, a causal connection that was vigorously contested in the real estate
conflicts to follow.
