My Take | How Anglo-American ideologues have exploited HK’s ‘free market’ success
If Hong Kong people can remove their colonial blinds, they would be able to see the economic detritus left around the world by Western ideology.
Every time the British consulate sends me the latest six-monthly report on Hong Kong’s development, I either sigh or roll my eyes, and then delete.
While the UK government continues to claim such monitoring is an obligation under the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, there is simply no specific treaty provision on how long this futile and offensive exercise needs to continue under its current format.
So why do the Brits persist? One, they want to stay on the moral high ground, though that looks increasingly ridiculous over the years. Second, and closely related is that they still can’t get over the long-ago ending of their imperial glory. Of course, from the Indian subcontinent to the Middle East and Africa, they cannot deny that British decolonisation in the second half of the last century had been a blood-soaked affair and laid the seeds of so many intractable conflicts today. Whether it’s Palestine, Kashmir or the lasting enmity between India and Pakistan since the break-up of the British Raj, the United Kingdom bears direct “historical responsibility” for all of them.
But, understandably, they tend to forget that kind of responsibility and prefer the other kind for Hong Kong. After all, the city achieved GDP per capita parity with the British colonial mothership by the early 1990s and in some, though not all years since then, has exceeded it.
Colonial Hong Kong has been an undoubted economic success story, so naturally, the Brits claimed credit for it, and the Americans, by portraying it as an ideal free market, used to glorify it. Also, many Hong Kong people buy into the myth; I know I did.
But as the late political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset famously said, “a person who knows only one country knows no countries”. Comparatively with the development of other East Asian or even post-war European economies, it’s simply unclear what the city’s economic-colonial history was actually representative of – that is, which economic school, which political ideology, or none at all?
Since the city was, according to the far-right Heritage Foundation and Milton Friedman, the freest free market there ever was, it would clearly have been an outlier, as most other post-war economies achieved comparable or even greater success with a (Keynesian) mixed economy and state planning – that is, what we call industrial policy nowadays.