Peter Hamilton is an assistant professor in Modern Chinese History at Trinity College Dublin. Published by Columbia University Press, Made in Hong Kong: Transpacific Networks and a New History of Globalization examines the elites that fled from China’s communist revolution to Hong Kong around 1949 when Hong Kong was still a peripheral British colony. From there, it maps the remarkable trajectory of key players in Hong Kong’s elite who established strategic relationships in the US, furthering global transnational ties and accelerating Hong Kong’s transformation into a financial powerhouse.
Indeed, as Dr Hamilton argues, Hong Kong has often been overlooked in examining the expansion of US-led post-war global capitalism. All the paradigms which have shaped the narrative have focused on Hong Kong as an example of “East meets West”, “a small British colony”, or an East Asian “tiger,” he suggests. In moving the narrative away from the Global North to an Asian colonial setting, Dr Hamilton contends, the script about who held key agency in the process of globalisation changes significantly. In moving the narrative away from the Global North to an Asian colonial setting...the script about who held key agency in the process of globalisation changes significantly.
“These are private sector individuals who are well known in their fields but there isn’t much historical scholarship about them. They played this key role from a base of Hong Kong, first in integrating Hong Kong with the United States in the 1950s and 1960s but then in integrating China and the United States, and particularly Chinese labour, with Hong Kong as the key mediator.”
“A Small British Colony”
The protest movement of 2019 in Hong Kong highlighted the very fraught relationship between China and this former British colony, and the unique space it holds in bucking “the global trend toward the nation-state, whether that be forming its own nation-state or simply joining into other nation-states which happened with lots of colonial port cities around Asia.”
As Dr Hamilton notes, Hong Kong’s very unusual political status has been further masked by the handover ceremony in 1997, which was “masterful theatre that allowed the British empire to say ‘this is what our empire stood for – amazing economic development and rule of law’--as distinct from many other former colonies with a bloody legacy.”
This nuance is also illuminated by many of the Chinese elites that fled to Hong Kong, whom Dr Hamilton examines in his book. “They were fine in many ways with British colonialism, as a placeholder; if it had not been there, they would not have had a place to flee to”, but, he argues, “their activities were also not designed to help or support the British system.”
...framing it as ‘a small British colony’ misses some of the story and the ways in which these bankers, industrialists and academics really had a much bigger global vision...
Professor Hamilton goes further in suggesting that “very few tears were shed for the end of British colonialism”, as these elites in Hong Kong had long been “savvy” about how the world was moving. They first used this British colony as a base to re-position themselves towards American business in the 1950s and 1960s, and later to connect China and the US from the 1970s.
“That’s part of the reason that framing it as ‘a small British colony’ misses some of the story and the ways in which these bankers, industrialists and academics really had a much bigger global vision -- the stability and rule of law provided by the British government were welcome and they were not trying to undermine that--but it’s not the full extent of their vision or their activities.”
Invisible Assets
Between 1945 and the early 1950s, roughly one million people fled to Hong Kong from mainland China’s civil war and communist revolution. While most were ordinary people fearful of war and revolution, these refugees included also many of China’s business and academic elites. While often cast as “losing everything,” according to Dr Hamilton, these elites brought with them substantial assets—not just money and machinery, but also what he describes as “invisible assets,” such as bilingualism, connections, and educations that helped them to rebuild and succeed. One such crucial asset was a prestigious US higher education. Much later, by the 1970s, Hong Kong was sending many more students to US colleges and universities, reinforcing the important global ties between business and education.
“They were able to…reclaim an elite status and restart business operations, get hired into a prestigious job with an American firm and so on.”
This mix of elite “human capital” —a professional class of bankers, industrialists, accountants, lawyers—who were able to exploit the low-cost labour of their fellow refugees to pursue integration with US-led trade and investment systems made for, as Dr Hamilton explains, “very productive economic results”.
Success Story
This low-cost labour and Hong Kong’s positioning towards the US is key, argues Professor Hamilton, to understanding why Hong Kong had such a huge role to play in the growth of capitalist globalisation in the post-war period. Made in Hong Kong chronicles the move towards outsourcing production to other labour markets and subcontracting different components of a single product. While American multi-national corporations may be central to this narrative and the gradual move away from Fordism, Dr Hamilton argues that it is Hong Kong which is “at the forefront of pioneering those strategies”. Hong Kong was “constantly adapting throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and very carefully reading the signs from the US consumer market about how to stay ahead.”
The all-American jeans are a case in point. “US-educated Hong Kong textile industrialists were attuned to the fact that jeans were going to be big and [they] pioneered a lot of those trends, of making jeans affordable, available and fashionable.”
Hong Kong was “constantly adapting throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and very carefully reading the signs from the US consumer market about how to stay ahead.
In the 1970s and 1980s, numerous Hong Kong companies also remodelled themselves as US-style corporations “that directed, supervised, and coordinated the production of all these commodity changes throughout Asia”. As Dr Hamilton notes, despite its small size, “by the 1970s, Hong Kong was the world’s largest supplier of textiles and apparel to the US market”, the same industries that later become a huge part of China’s export development.
Trump’s presidency may have marked a tumultuous period in Sino-US relations, but Hong Kong was in many ways the linchpin in forging strong commercial ties between China and the US and continues to be “the goose that laid the golden eggs”.
On 9 February 2021, Dr Hamilton discussed his new book with Dr Isabella Jackson (Trinity Centre for Asian Studies) as part of the Trinity Long Room Hub’s Faculty in Focus series. Watch now:
https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=128701432388560
Dr. Peter E. Hamilton is Assistant Professor in Modern Chinese History at Trinity College Dublin. He is the author of Made in Hong Kong: Transpacific Networks and a New History of Globalization (Columbia University Press, Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, 2021). His research has been published in Twentieth-Century China, The Journal of Historical Sociology, and The International History Review, and has received financial support from the Fudan Development Institute, the Schwarzman Scholars, the Weatherhead East Asian Institute of Columbia University, the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Hong Kong-America Centre.