Search results

The purpose of this paper is threefold: first, to recount the scale, composition and agents of red capital in Hong Kong; second, to conceptualise the peculiarity of red capital; and third, to explore the impact of red capital on the political and economic institutional setup in Hong Kong.

The paper consults the comparative capitalism literature to conceptualise the phenomenon of red capital. The paper gathers data from Hong Kong Stock Exchange and indices to provide an overview of red capital. Furthermore, the case study of 2016 Legislative Election is deployed to investigate the mechanisms of red capital’s influence. The paper concludes with a summary of how red capital may challenge the validity of the “One Country, Two Systems” framework.

This paper argues that red capital replicates China’s state–capital nexus in Hong Kong and morphs the game of competition in favour of Chinese nationally controlled companies. In tandem with the emerging visibility of the party–state in Hong Kong’s economic sphere, the authors observe attempts of Chinese economic actors to compromise democratic institutions, deemed obstacles to state control.

This paper is the first attempt to systematically embed the discussion of red capital into comparative capitalism literature. This study provides conceptual tools to examine why red capital could pose a threat to liberal societies such as Hong Kong. Through this paper, we introduce a novel research agenda to scrutinise capital from authoritarian states and investigate how the capital is changing the political infrastructure shaped by liberal principles and values.

To fill the gap in the existing literature on the 20th anniversary of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), the purpose of this paper is to critically reflect upon the continuities and changes of the city’s relations with the world.

The paper has adopted a generic approach to shed light on the factors behind the evolution of the international status of Hong Kong from a by-product of geopolitics to a global city in its own right, to understand how the city has been perceived by traditional western partners after 1997 and to investigate how China has made use Hong Kong’s international status.

It has shown that Beijing’s strategy toward Hong Kong has been marred by the inherent tensions between “becoming Chinese” and “remaining global.” The official discourse of functionalism, according to which economic and professional ties are both the most acceptable and therefore the least resisted pathways available for the development of Hong Kong’s external relations, has the opposite effect of expanding Beijing’s control over the city.

In contrast to the HKSAR Government’s belief that Hong Kong will certainly benefit from the emergence of China, the city has found itself on a shorter leash than ever. It has therefore pinpointed the pitfalls of the logic of functionalism which has dominated the existing literature as much as the policy-making process.