Neoliberalism ‘with Chinese Characteristics’

through competitive uneven geographical developments, remains

to be seen.

The initial success of Deng’s strategy depended upon the Hong

Kong connection. As one of the 

first of Asia’s ‘tiger’ economies,

Hong Kong was already a signi

ficant centre of capitalist dyna-

mism. Unlike the other states in the region (Singapore, Taiwan,

and South Korea), which resorted to high levels of state planning,

Hong Kong had developed in a more chaotic entrepreneurial way

without signi

ficant state guidance. It conveniently stood at the

centre of a Chinese business diaspora that already had signi

ficant

global connections. Hong Kong’s manufacturing had developed

along labour-intensive and low-value-added lines (textiles being in

the lead). But by the late 1970s it was su

ffering from severe foreign

competition and acute labour shortages. Guangdong, just across

the border in China, had all the cheap labour in the world. Deng’s

opening therefore came as a godsend. Hong Kong capital seized

the opportunity. It took advantage of its many hidden connections

across the border into China, its function as an intermediary for

whatever foreign trade China already had, and its marketing net-

work into the global economy through which Chinese-made goods

could easily 

flow.

As late as the mid-1990s, some two-thirds of foreign direct

investment (FDI) in China came through Hong Kong. And

although some of this was Hong Kong business expertise inter-

mediating for more diverse sources of foreign capital, there is no

question that the fortuitous fact of Hong Kong’s proximity was

critical to the developmental path that unfolded in China as a

whole. The provincial government’s economic development zone

in urban Shenzhen, for example, was unsuccessful in the early

1980s. What attracted the Hong Kong capitalists were the newly

created TVEs in rural areas. Hong Kong capital provided the

machinery, the inputs, and the marketing while the TVEs did the

work. Once established, this style of operation could be emulated

by other foreign capitalists (particularly Taiwanese, mainly around

Shanghai after it was opened up). The sources of FDI diversi

fied

greatly during the 1990s as Japanese and South Korean as well as

US corporations began to use China as an o

ffshore production

centre in a big way.

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