Hong Kong – a model on the rocks?

Abstract

ABSTRACT The paper presents a critical reading of the construction and circulation of the Hong Kong ‘model’ as an archetype of free-market governance, calling attention to two sides of the attendant modelling process: first, folkloric tales of the acclaimed ‘architect’ of the colony’s laissez-faire policy, Sir John Cowperthwaite, Financial Secretary during the 1960s, who has risen to cult status in free-market circles; and second, the production and propagation of indices of ‘economic freedom’, which institutionalized Hong Kong as the paragon of free-market governance and the benchmark against which the world’s economies are annually rated. Together, these long-range projects have worked to sustain depoliticized images of an economically dynamic and institutionally stable Hong Kong, ostensibly ‘ground-truthed’ to the city-state but at the same time abstracted, decontextualized and ideologically performative. They each mobilize variants of the tabula rasa myth, in this case a fusion of colonial and (neo)liberal narratives of Hong Kong as an economic miracle founded on a ‘barren rock’.