Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter Three
Calculating Agents: Millionaire Migrants
Meet the Canadian State
For several months in 1998-99, Titans , Peter Newman's topic on Canada's
corporate elite, was securely fixed at or near the top of the country's best-
selling non-fiction list. As the author turned his attention to his home city of
Vancouver, he identified members of the Chinese diaspora as the most
dynamic sector of the business community (Newman 1998a). This section of
the topic, highlighting the success of a new immigrant elite, was abridged for
an extensive double-page feature in the Vancouver Sun , the city's principal
daily newspaper (Newman 1998b). The Sun , smarting from criticism of
unflattering representations of the new immigration regime earlier in the
decade (Sun 1998; Dunn and Mahtani 2001), had learned to pay more atten-
tion to heralding immigrant successes. Its story led off with a profile of Terry
Hui, the business friend of Victor Li, and in his early thirties CEO of the vast
Concord Pacific Place redevelopment on False Creek, the project initiated by
the dramatic land purchase of the entire Expo site by the Li family a decade
earlier. Shortly before Newman's précis on the new elite appeared, a front-
page feature in the Sun 's business section had featured Kevin Wong, a 1992
immigrant from Hong Kong, who ran a children's garment factory and retail
business. Announcing another provincial trade tour to China, Glen Clark,
the NDP Premier of British Columbia, held up Mr. Wong's company as 'a
very good success story', a prototype of trans-Pacific entrepreneurial endeav-
our (Aarsteinsen 1998). 1 In the same vein a federal cabinet minister was on
hand beside the Sun 's reporter and photographer a month earlier for another
prominent story, a planned high technology business park in the Vancouver
suburbs, to be funded largely by private Asian investors assembled by Steven
Wu, a 1989 business class immigrant from Taiwan (Chow 1998a).
Here is the weighty intervention in the provincial economy by members
of a transnational capitalist class (Sklair 2001) with a foot on each side of
the Pacific Ocean and financial, business and family resources that bind the
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