Browsing by Subject "Transnational elite"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1

Capitalizing on the Cold War : Hong Kong elites and America’s Pacific empire
(2015-08-11) Hamilton, Peter E.; Hsu, Madeline Yuan-yin; Abzug, Robert H.; Lawrence, Mark A.; Suri, Jeremi; Metzler, Mark; Carroll, John
This study argues that it is impossible to understand either the Cold War Pacific or post-1945 globalization without Hong Kong. Rather than just a small British colony, Hong Kong was at the center of both the Cold War’s transfer of international power from Britain to the United States and the post-1978 reintegration of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with global capitalism. In particular, this study argues that Hong Kong demonstrates a previously unstudied mode of expanding US imperial power that later structured contemporary US-PRC relations and the rapid growth of US-PRC trade. Scholars have documented the United States’ Cold War pursuit of global “hearts and minds” through overt anticommunist cultural diplomacy. This study reframes this research by arguing that the United States steered Hong Kong’s future through the subtlest manner of extending influence: the provision of curated opportunities. Due to British restraints on overt propaganda, the United States oriented this refugee-inundated territory toward US leadership by constraining local business opportunities, sponsoring the expansion of local higher education, and by facilitating enormous numbers of the colony’s youth to attend American colleges and universities. By the early 1970s Hong Kong was routinely the largest sender of foreign students to the United States and by 1990 likely the world’s most US-educated international society. In turn, the 1950 US embargo on the PRC fostered Hong Kong’s dependence on the US market and opened the colony to waves of US capital. The United States transformed into Hong Kong’s largest export market and largest outside investor. This reorientation of educational and business cultures was expansion by the sophisticated imperial technology of coopting capitalist elites, not by the US military. These US opportunities empowered the colony’s capitalists into powerful global agents. It was US-educated returnees who led in brokering outside trade and investment into the PRC through Hong Kong during the 1980s. This same class was critical in stabilizing the colony before its 1997 return to the PRC. Particularly after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, they repurposed America’s Cold War neo-imperialist systems and paved the way for the United States to rebuild economic relations with the PRC during the 1990s