The Economic Success of Hong Kong

1986 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alvin Y. So

This article studies the origins and development of the economic success of Hong Kong. After pointing out the problems of the free-market explanation and the authoritarian state explanation, this article turns to the world-system perspective for new insights. It is argued that the historical development of Hong Kong is shaped both by the capitalist world-system and by the interactions between socialist China and the capitalist power bloc between the 1950s and the 1970s. This article contributes by showing how these world-system dynamics have affected the Hong Kong political economy over the past three decades.

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 439-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cora Chan

Abstract The 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre marked China out as an exception in the chapter of world history that saw the fall of international communism. The massacre crystalized the mistrust between China and Hong Kong into an open ideological conflict—Leninist authoritarianism versus liberal democracy—that has colored relations between the two since then. This article tracks the hold that authoritarianism has gained over liberal values in Hong Kong in the past thirty years and reflects on what needs to be done in the next thirty years for the balance to be re-tilted and sustained beyond 2047, when China’s fifty-year commitment to preserving Hong Kong’s autonomy expires. Still surviving (just) as a largely liberal (though by no means fully democratic) jurisdiction after two decades of Chinese rule, Hong Kong is a testing ground for whether China can respect liberal values, how resilient such values are to the alternative authoritarian vision offered by an economic superpower, and the potential for establishing a liberal-democratic pocket within an authoritarian state. The territory’s everyday wrestle with Chinese pressures speaks to the liberal struggles against authoritarian challenges (in their various guises) that continue to plague the world thirty years after the end of the Cold War.​


1986 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Rojek

It is often maintained that capitalist and socialist systems of organization are diametrically opposed. This paper uses convergence theory and the problem of divergence to attack this position. It is argued that socialist systems are economically integrated into the capitalist world economy, and further, that the ideology of divergence acts as a central dynamic in relations of production in the world economy. The world system perspective associated with neo-Marxist writers such as Wallerstein and Frank, is used to suggest an alternative framework for examining the organizational dynamics of 'capitalism' and 'socialism'.


2000 ◽  
pp. 19-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Wilkin

There are good grounds for taking seriously Wallerstein's dictum that the world system has entered what he describes as an interregnum. By this he means two important things: First, that the world is moving between two forms of world system, from a capitalist world system to something new; Second, that in such an interregnum questions of structure become less signi? cant than those of agency. The world system is one that has been produced, reproduced and will ultimately be transformed by human actors. The direction that it takes will be the result of the political struggles that ensue in the interregnum. In this paper I examine some of these claims in the context of a series of events that have taken place over the past decade and in the run up to the protests that occurred in December 1999 at the World Trade Organization (WTO) summit in Seattle. In so doing I hope to put some empirical ?esh on the bones of the idea that Wallerstein has suggestively offered us.


Land ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 501
Author(s):  
Xuege Wang ◽  
Fengqin Yan ◽  
Yinwei Zeng ◽  
Ming Chen ◽  
Bin He ◽  
...  

Extensive urbanization around the world has caused a great loss of farmland, which significantly impacts the ecosystem services provided by farmland. This study investigated the farmland loss due to urbanization in the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) of China from 1980 to 2018 based on multiperiod datasets from the Land Use and Land Cover of China databases. Then, we calculated ecosystem service values (ESVs) of farmland using valuation methods to estimate the ecosystem service variations caused by urbanization in the study area. The results showed that 3711.3 km2 of farmland disappeared because of urbanization, and paddy fields suffered much higher losses than dry farmland. Most of the farmland was converted to urban residential land from 1980 to 2018. In the past 38 years, the ESV of farmland decreased by 5036.7 million yuan due to urbanization, with the highest loss of 2177.5 million yuan from 2000–2010. The hydrological regulation, food production and gas regulation of farmland decreased the most due to urbanization. The top five cities that had the largest total ESV loss of farmland caused by urbanization were Guangzhou, Dongguan, Foshan, Shenzhen and Huizhou. This study revealed that urbanization has increasingly become the dominant reason for farmland loss in the GBA. Our study suggests that governments should increase the construction of ecological cities and attractive countryside to protect farmland and improve the regional ESV.


2021 ◽  
pp. 72-77
Author(s):  
A.V. Verkhoturov ◽  
◽  
A.A. Obukhov

Analyzed is one of the most comprehensive modern approaches to the problem of the existence of evolution of human society as such and of specific human communities, i.e. “General Theory of Historical Development” by American historian and sociologist Stephen Sanderson. While agreeing, in general, with its main ideas, we believe that it is important to note that the issue of existence of individual communities demonstrating devolution (regression to an earlier historical state), stagnation or degeneration at certain historical stages is practically ignored in the framework of the theory under consideration. This creates its vulnerability in the face of specific empirical data, indicating a deviation from the evolutionary trend. We believe that overcoming this theoretical difficulty is possible in the process of comprehending the theory of S. Sanderson in the context of ideas of the world-system approach of Immanuel Wallerstein. We want to show that examples of devolution, stagnation and degeneration of societies do not deny general progressive evolutionary tendencies, characteristic for the world-system as a whole, but only indicate the transition of a particular society to a lower level within the world-system (from the core to the semi-periphery, or from the semi-periphery to the periphery).


2004 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 585-608 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Cox

It is an empire without a consciousness of itself as such, constantly shocked that its good intentions arouse resentment abroad. But that does not make it any the less of an empire, with a conviction that it alone, in Herman Melville's words, bears ‘the ark of liberties of the world.If all history according to Marx has been the history of class struggle, then all international history, it could just as well be argued, has been the struggle between different kinds of Empire vying for hegemony in a world where the only measure was success and the only means of achieving this was through war. Indeed, so obvious is this fact to historians – but so fixated has the profession of International Relations been with the Westphalian settlement – that it too readily forgets that imperial conquest, rather than mere state survival, has been the principle dynamic shaping the contours of the world system from the sixteenth century onwards. Empires, however, were not just mere agents existing in static structures. They were living entities that thought, planned, and then tried to draw the appropriate lessons from the study of what had happened to others in the past.


2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 318-341 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J Lynch ◽  
Paul B Stretesky ◽  
Michael A Long

During the development of green criminology, little attention has been paid to how Indigenous/Native Peoples (INP) are victimized by green crime and how they employ environmental activism to resist externally imposed ecological destruction. In the past decade, news services and environmental interest groups have reported on the killing of INP environmental activists who have resisted ecological destruction across the world. Here, we begin to develop a green criminological view of INP victimization and resistance to ecological destruction within the context of the global capitalist treadmill of production, while drawing upon concepts of colonization, imperialism, genocide and ecocide. Our analysis suggests that in the contemporary capitalist world system, expansion of the treadmill of production’s ecological withdrawal process (i.e. the withdrawal of raw materials used in production) not only accelerates ecological disorganization in developing/underdeveloped nations, but may be harmful in nations where INP are dependent on access to nature for survival.


Author(s):  
Christopher Chase-Dunn ◽  
Marilyn Grell-Brisk

The world-system perspective emerged during the world revolution of 1968 when social scientists contemplated the meaning of Latin American dependency theory for Africa. Immanuel Wallerstein, Terence Hopkins, Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank, and Giovanni Arrighi developed slightly different versions of the world-system perspective in interaction with each other. The big idea was that the global system had a stratified structure on inequality based on institutionalized exploitation. This implied that the whole system was the proper unit of analysis, not national societies, and that development and underdevelopment had been structured by global power relations for centuries. The modern world-system is a self-contained entity based on a geographically differentiated division of labor and bound together by a world market. In Wallerstein’s version capitalism had become predominant in Europe and its peripheries in the long 16th century and had expanded and deepened in waves. The core states were able to concentrate the most profitable economic activities and they exploited the semi-peripheral and peripheral regions by means of colonialism and the emergent international division of labor, which relies on unequal exchange. The world-system analysts all focused on global inequalities, but their terminologies were somewhat different. Amin and Frank talked about center and periphery. Wallerstein proposed a three-tiered structure with an intermediate semiperiphery between the core and the periphery, and he used the term core to suggest a multicentric region containing a group of states rather than the term center, which implies a hierarchy with a single peak. When the world-system perspective emerged, the focus on the non-core (periphery and semiperiphery) was called Third Worldism. Current terminology refers to the Global North (the core) and the Global South (periphery and semiperiphery).


Author(s):  
Vadim Nedorezov ◽  
Leonid Pisarchik

The authors of the article analyze the view of the World-system of I. Wallerstein, the F. Fukuyama concept of the “end of history” and the W. Beck concept of globalization. The authors focus not only on the concept and essence of globalization, but also on the problem of opposition of modern nation states to globalization processes that negatively affect the statehood and culture of sovereign states. The process of globalization is objective, but the loss of the country's sovereignty threatens to destroy its original culture. The authors show that globalization also carries threats that must be neutralized if we want to survive as a country and as a people. These are threats associated with the widespread dissemination of Western values (Westernization), models of upbringing and education, with Western sanctions against Russia. The neoliberal reforms of the 90s brought our country to its knees. Over the past twenty years, something has been corrected. The authors show that in the current situation it is necessary to make efforts to ensure the sovereignty and defense of the country, its economic growth and protection of the original values of our civilization.


1992 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 512-531 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAMES COTTON

South Korea cannot be seen as an example of the bureaucratic-authoritarian state type. Neither its position in the world system nor its industrialization strategy can be used to give a sufficient explanation of its political and social character. Although these factors have played a part, particular historical, political, and cultural circumstances have permitted the state to enjoy a degree of autonomy during the period of rapid social and economic transformation from the 1960s to the 1980s. The determinants and character of the transition to democratization generally support this analysis, but also indicate that limits exist to the degree of liberalization to be expected in the political system.


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