Wei-Bin Zhang

Hong Kong has an urbanisation history of an interesting course -- from fishing village of the Qing dynasty under the Manchu rule, to British colony with 98 per cent of its population being Chinese, to global city with great wealth and business activities, to Communist China's Special Administrative Region (SAR) from 1 July 1997. China resumed sovereignty over Hong Kong and granted Hong Kong the right to self-government for at least 50 years, except over diplomatic and defense matters. Long before the return of Hong Kong to China, the colony had already firmly established itself as a regional business centre. It had been at the forefront of the East Asian economic 'miracle' between the 1970s and the mid 1990s. Lightened by multi-coloured neon signs of commercial advertisements, the semi-westernised Chinese city is more attractive in night than in daytime. Hong Kong is full of contrasts and paradoxes. The wide variety of the city's contrasting and yet fluid and interesting social and cultural images, aptly has been described as, 'east and west', local and colonial, modern and traditional, extravagant and frugal -- has earned it the epithet 'a cultural kaleidoscope'. The author explores these contrasts and paradoxes not only from economic, cultural, and social perspectives, but also from perspectives of non-linear theory and Adam Smith's and Confucian philosophies -- an endeavour which no other author has systematically made before.

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