Made in Hong Kong:Transpacific Networks and a New History of Globalization by Peter E. Hamilton

Abstract

Reviewed by: Made in Hong Kong:Transpacific Networks and a New History of Globalization by Peter E. Hamilton Kent Wan Peter E. Hamilton. Made in Hong Kong:Transpacific Networks and a New History of Globalization. Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. 419 pp. Hardcover, ($140), softcover ($35.00), or e-book. At a time when mainland cities such as Shanghai appear poised to replace Hong Kong as China's preeminent metropolises, it certainly seems quaint to study a former British colony that has been plagued by political instability in recent years. Peter E. Hamilton, however, points out that Hong Kong was not only the engine that made possible Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms but also a vital linchpin of Sino-American trade relations, which have been fraying since Donald Trump's ascension to the presidency (2). The monograph under review is a historical work focusing on Sino-American economic ties that were nurtured by men of privilege who used British Hong Kong as a base of operations to enrich themselves through blossoming commercial interactions between China and the United States. Hamilton's work uses Hong Kong history as a case study to argue that it was not "Confucian values" such as "heightened levels of paternalism, discipline, and respect for education" that ensured the economic rise of the East Asian "tigers"; in the case of this city, the determined efforts of powerful and self-serving merchants put it on a path to prosperity that overwhelmingly benefited the economic elites (24, 221). Hamilton's work is the first to delineate the roles played by Chinese merchants in Hong Kong who cultivated relations with American businessmen, academics, and officials to create mutually beneficial commercial ties, so much so that by the 1970s the United States, not Britain, was the dominant economic power in Hong Kong (158–159). The analytical focus of Hamilton's monograph extends far beyond the history of Hong Kong, as—besides arguing that Hong Kong underwent a US-led "informal decolonization" in the 1970s due to the dominance of American companies and their local allies—he seeks to find in the city the origin story of Sino-American economic interdependence (14–15). In addition to an introduction and a conclusion, this monograph has eight chapters that are organized in chronological order to advance Hamilton's thesis concerning Hong Kong's emergence as the nexus of Sino-American trade relations from 1949 to 1997. Hamilton concentrates on the kuashang (跨商), or "straddling merchants," men originally from China who found themselves in Hong Kong and then utilized their personal networks, educational backgrounds, and financial resources not only to save their own companies during a period of regime change in China but also to establish dynasties that are still pillars of the city's ruling class (3, 283–84). Recognizing the imminent arrival of a pax Americana (as many of these kuashang had either served with Americans during the Second World War or attended elite American universities), they were determined to perpetuate the access their families had to American social and financial capital by sending their offspring to the United States to accumulate further professional or educational experiences (67–68, 216–17, 287). Hong Kong's kuashang brought American expertise and social and financial capital to Hong Kong through partnerships and business agreements with American firms, a process that was instrumental to the city's economic rise in the 1970s (193–95, 208). The economic importance of Hong Kong motivated Chinese leaders to promise the implementation of the "one country, two systems" formula after [End Page E-7] 1997 to ensure the maintenance of the city's capitalist economic system, which had become vital to China's liberalization, especially since the kuashang were important early investors in Guangdong even before Beijing's formal announcement of economic reforms (223, 227, 277). By the 1980s and 1990s, American companies often partnered with Hong Kong firms to make full use of low-wage workers in Guangdong to manufacture goods destined for the American market (220, 264–65). It is therefore not surprising that after the Tiananmen tragedy of 1989, Hong Kong's economic elites, in cooperation...