Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press; New York: Columbia University Press [distributor], 2012. xxi, 437 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 978-988-8083-82-4.
The eleven essays in this volume were first published in different journals and collections. Gathered together with a new introduction and a concluding chapter, they are carefully researched articles that highlight three main stages in China’s development story over the past two decades.
The first two published in 1993 mark the great surge that followed Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour. One of them reminds us of the remarkable turnaround after the Western world’s reaction to the tragedy of Tiananmen Square in 1989. The other records the impact of China’s reforms on Hong Kong and reminds us how the colony, as it was then, adjusted to the thrust of China’s challenges.
On the eve of Hong Kong’s return to China, Professor Kueh examines key aspects of change that have wider repercussions both for China and the region and for Hong Kong. His 1996 study of Guangdong’s transformation supports the case to view the province as the “fifth dragon” in eastern Asia. Clearly, it has been the greatest beneficiary of China’s new reform policies. Another essay provides a close examination of the overall effect on Hong Kong’s links with its most important external market, the United States, and shows that Hong Kong has acted as a stabilizer in that relationship. And in the third essay, chapter 10 of this volume and also of 1997, there is a preliminary look at the outreach of the PRC into the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) framework, one that would accommodate both Hong Kong and Taiwan as thriving economies in the larger region.
Professor Kueh has made important contributions to our understanding of the consequences of the 1997 financial crisis in Asia. Three years after it began, he published his studies on how that sudden downturn that happened only days after the Hong Kong handover led to a near meltdown of several key economies in the region. The four essays republished here describe the various ways Hong Kong dealt with the series of financial shocks that followed. The first shows that the optimism at the handover was justified by the way the Special Administrative Region coped with the unexpected banking collapses and withdrawals in several partner countries. A helpful chronology of the events from July 1997 to January 1998 has been included here.
Another essay outlines what the PRC authorities did to assist Hong Kong’s financial restructuring despite moments when Beijing wondered whether Hong Kong might become a burden on the PRC. Together with some technical scrutiny of the data pertaining to the “US Dollar Peg,” the third of the essays also explains how “the China factor” served to help Hong Kong overcome some immediate challenges. The fourth of the essays, focusing on what has been called “the Greater China Triangle,” demonstrates the value of the connections that Hong Kong has established over time with both Taiwan and the PRC.
Chapter 11 deals with a decade of two special developments. It is a substantial report on China’s advances since the 1990s into new industries: the electronics and IT industry and the automobile industry. Much of the report details what began well before the 2008 financial crisis and before the report’s first publication in 2009. But, in many ways, this meticulous study of the rapid progress of the industries prepares us to understand both the precariousness of their links with the American market as well as the strong resilience of the Chinese economy when the global crisis struck. The stress in the report on how the industries enabled China to realign its policies towards the Asia-Pacific provides clues to what China may plan to do in order to deal with the recent US-Japan rebalancing. The report was published in Manila and is not easily accessible. Its inclusion here should be welcome to scholars concerned with post-2008 economic readjustments in the region.
The final essay follows the evolution of Chinese policies towards the “open regionalism” favoured by its regional partners. It updates an earlier study of how China’s WTO accession impacted on a number of larger regional arrangements and suggests why that may not hurt the close economic relations that China still wants with ASEAN.
The book’s title Pax Sinica is a little misleading. It implies that the geopolitics in the subtitle might have played a greater part in Chinese policies than we think. By comparing it first with Pax Britannica and then Pax Americana, one could be led to believe that geopolitical factors dominate the changes of the past three decades. Professor Kueh’s essays, however, follow Deng Xiaoping’s emphasis on economic development and how he focused on that almost to the exclusion of everything else. And the book as a whole shows how decisive that emphasis has been. The essays collected here, therefore, provide a great deal of data that point to the fact that it was not until after Deng’s death that geopolitical concerns surfaced as a matter of wider interest. This has more to do with the response of other countries to China’s economic success than any deliberate shift on China’s part. It is not surprising, whether rightly or not, that Professor Kueh is inclined to believe that economics is more likely to prevail over geopolitics.
Wang Gungwu
National University of Singapore, Singapore
pp. 569-571