Razeen Sally, a visiting associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, wrote this year in Singapore’s Straits Times that: “A global city is where truly global services cluster. Business — in finance, the professions, transport and communications — is done in several languages and currencies, and across several time zones and jurisdictions. Such creations face a unique set of challenges in the early 21st century. Today, there appear to be only five global cities. London and New York are at the top, followed by Hong Kong and Singapore, Asia’s two service hubs. Dubai, the Middle East hub, is the newest and smallest kid on the block. Shanghai has global-city aspirations, but it is held back by China’s economic restrictions — the vestiges of an ex-command economy — and its Leninist political system. Tokyo remains too Japan-centric, a far cry from a global city.”

It’s a striking indication of the extent to which the world order remains structured by the Anglo-Colonial legacy. However one would like to see the world run, this hub-net is an essential clue to the way it is run now.

Sucking up to the specter of Sino-Capitalism:

Ironically, my connectivity here is so bad it’s driving me out of my mind, so this is arriving in pieces …

Our hotel is in Huaqiang Bei, the center of the Shenzhen electronic market zone. The area is packed with emporia, which are in turn packed with products — and more specifically commodities. Rather than masking the traits of commercial mass-production under a veneer of ’boutique’ rarity, the Shenzhen spirit is most gloriously manifested in the naked exhibition of hyper-alienated, techno-proliferated, trade-format volumes. Chips (of all kinds) come in sheets, which are then stacked into piles, and tessalated into display places designed to minutely explore minimal differences (product micro-specifications and volume-linked price slices). This is capitalism. It’s easy — in a decline-phase Westernized world — to forget what it looks like.

Cables:

Skynet embryo chips in the Huitong Professional Security Market:

The drone market is only just getting started (at least, we didn’t see any stacks):

(via Derek Hopper)

Rather than cathedrals, the East Asian cities that enthrall this blog tend to nurture temples to self-cultivation and ultimate cosmic nullity among their LED-skinned hypermodern edifices of capitalist darkness. Yet, despite the difference in religious heritage, the split-time signature is precisely the same. Neoreaction diverges from Paleoreaction insofar as it coincides with the understanding: Tradition is not something one can ever simply hold on to, or to which one can truly return. The Neoreactionary city is a standing time-spiral in process.

Naively, I had expected that Mandarin would have made some obvious inroads since the last time I was here (roughly six years ago). No sign of that, though. It’s quite stunning how much English there is here, and the extent to which English remains the default alternative to Cantonese. That has to have important implications in respect to the cultural foundations of Hong Kong autonomy.

Expeditionary inertialization due to exhausted children prevented exploration getting off the ground today. Nothing too adventurous is likely to happen, but I’ll try to record a few sporadic notes here. Hong Kong is an iconic city, with an exceptional intensity of sociopolitical meaning,  so it should be possible to discuss — and even argue about — it.

I’m only here (with family) for a few days, then returning to Shanghai for six weeks of solitary, extremely high-intensity production. After Thursday, if anybody has extravagant demands to make, it’s the time to make them. Whatever is ever going to be possible should be possible soon. Most likely, I’ll learn some crushing lessons about project feasibility, because all my excuses will be gone.

ADDED: Hong Kong has to be a critically important example for the development of the sovereignty discussion. It’s almost certainly the freest society in the world, whilst quite clearly under the sovereignty of a nation that, even to its its most ardent defenders, equally certainly isn’t. Perhaps this doesn’t rise to the level of a paradox. After all, up until 1997, when it served (retrospectively) as a crucial case of the neoreactionary thesis — distinguishing liberty and democracy with extreme clarity — the structure was not altogether different. Even then, the colonial metropolis was evidently pitched at a far lower level of liberty than its comparatively small, powerless, and insultingly disposable possession. Given the international image of the PRC, however, it would surely be hard to argue that the peculiarity had not been exacerbated.

In Hong Kong, the PRC ‘oversees’  an outpost that operates as a zone of uninhibited reflection upon its ideologically hyper-sensitive motherland. There are many ways to explore this. It connects with the larger issue of Cantonese ethnic self-consciousness —  a topic of truly immense significance for China’s medium-term future. It has important academic and media dimensions. It also shapes the concrete reality of China’s engagement with the world, especially in its most ‘deterritorialized’  or cosmo-capitalist dimension.

On this trip, the area which brought it most into focus was the visual arts. Most particularly, a fascinating exhibition at the Asia Society Hong Kong Center called Light before Dawn: Unofficial Chinese Art 1974-1985. This show covered material that might have been found in Shanghai today, except what would have been explored approximately, cautiously, and with nervous cunning in Shanghai, was brought together brazenly and (for anyone habituated to mainland cultural norms) provocatively in Kong Kong. The message of the exhibition was stark: Socialist Realism was benighted, and the cultural escape from the command economy era was a liberation from totalitarian night. The three decades from 1949-79 were a horror story, from which China has been released. It scarcely needs to be said that this is not a narrative in conformity with the ‘official’ PRC storyline of Reform and Opening, and its historical meaning.

Setting aside the details of the show, for the moment, the questions it raises concern Hong Kong, China, sovereignty, and cultural autonomy. Does China surreptitiously appreciate this offshore zone of critical leverage? Does it merely tolerate Hong Kong’s role as gadfly, due to the preeminence of other factors, and interests? (Chinese mainland capitalism clearly makes massive use of the ‘One Country Two Systems’ arrangement, in many different ways.) How functional is a peripheral zone of exorbitant freedom, considered abstractly, as an appendage to large-scale authoritarian social structures in general? Could this be the way that a rational apparatus of power realistically discriminates, eagerly seizing upon an invaluable exemption from impractical universalism? That is what Outside in suspects.