Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
enterprising entrepreneurs, a superb network of transport and communications
infrastructure, a high degree of internationalisation and open financial mar-
kets. Adding to these are a low taxation system, free and fair market competi-
tion, a fully convertible and stable currency, tight fiscal discipline, a well-
supervised banking sector, sound monetary policy and a comprehensive legal
framework. The World Economic Forum ranks Hong Kong as the world's
second most competitive economy, while the US Heritage Foundation and
Fraser Institute of Canada rank it the freest economy in the world (Govern-
ment of Hong Kong 1998).
Even allowing for a measure of hyperbole, this boosterist narrative that
Hong Kong told itself about itself was a fair approximation of economic life
in the colony over the previous 20 years. But these assets were rooted in
place. So why would any entrepreneur worth his salt want to leave them
behind? Confronting the comparative evidence on the ranking of the Canadian
and Hong Kong economies set out by the right wing, Vancouver-based Fraser
Institute, why would any aspiring
homo economicus
move to a land of inferior
opportunities? There was a palpable fear that a move could make one a 'sec-
ond-class citizen' (Li et al. 1995), economically and culturally.
Theoretical categories owe their careers to simplification of the real social
processes they seek to model, and the characterisation of the Chinese entre-
preneur as
homo economicus
is no different. The identities of economic
migrants from Hong Kong, Taiwan or South Korea cannot be reduced to
economics alone. The package of amenities offered by Canada was attrac-
tive: political stability, a versatile passport, a higher quality of life, a better
family environment including a perceived higher standard of education. Of
course an economic reductionist might respond that if market transactions
ultimately decompose to alternating motives of greed and fear, the move by
a bourgeois class to Canada, Australia, New Zealand or the United States
represented an attempt to reduce the fear-inducing proximity of communist
Mainland China by securing a base camp in safe territory, a strategic with-
drawal to facilitate a renewed capitalist advance. There is something to this
argument, but it is less than a full account, as we are learning from family
biographies. A more accurate interpretation would see instead a profoundly
split personality among many members of the middle-class as they faced a
geographical conundrum of conflicting economic and social wellbeing.
Transnationalism brought resolution to this fragmented geographical
impasse. To bring coherence to a dispersed social and spatial field across
the Pacific, to incorporate the capital-generating station of East Asia with
the family-nurturing station of Canada into a single life-world, would
require continuing transnational connections, constant travel, well-
lubricated channels for the transfer of information, people and money.
With surprising candour, the Taiwanese-oriented
World Journal
told its
Vancouver readers at an early date its own assessment of their settlement
