Whose offshore? Rescaling Hong Kong from Asia's World City to China's Greater Bay Area

Abstract

ABSTRACT Divining the future of development, not least of all of China, from Hong Kong has long been fraught. Taking up Jamie Peck’s call for ‘conjunctural theorizing’ that destabilizes idealizations of the state and market, through examples drawn from the Pearl River Delta, this paper explores how the colonial and contemporary accumulation of political power and financial capital by wealthy individuals, families and their corporations renders divisions between the two institutions superficial. It then considers the local and global geopolitical effects of Hong Kong’s transformation into an entrepôt for international trade and, more recently, offshore wealth – increasingly from Mainland China, a dynamic which will again reshape state–market relations. These reflections support Peck’s demonstration of the productive possibilities of starting rather than ending theory from cases such as Hong Kong.