Finance and Society in 21st Century China

Chinese Culture versus Western Markets

Junie T. Tong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317135210
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Finanzas

In this revealing book Junie Tong reflects on the role of banking and finance in China. The author adopts a critical perspective that views the societal as well as economic functioning of banking and finance. Finance and Society in 21st Century China considers how far the modern economy is disconnected from Chinese culture and history and the problems this separation may cause. She questions the common assumption that China has outgrown its reliance on its Western counterparts. The author believes that the country is still very much dependent on exports and foreign investments and any radical or rapid reduction in either would have serious adverse consequences for China's sustainable economic growth. To provide a model for 'finance and society' that integrates culture and economy, Tong draws on the seminal work of Belgian economist, banker and social commentator, Bernard Lietaer, who has focused on cultural forces and the future of money in the world, generally. Using representative case studies for illustration, Tong applies Lietaer's work in a specifically Chinese context, highlighting the need to root finance and enterprise in the rhythms and forces within Chinese culture to avoid future chaos and achieve socio-economic stability in a country now so critical to global well-being.

Chapter 1 From Investment Banking to Finance-in-Society

DOI: 10.4324/9781315582375-1

There is more than symbolism in this difference: one cannot come to learn about, and love, a nation unless one gets out to the countryside. One should not see unemployment as just a statistic, an economic ‘body count’, the unintended casualties in the fight against inflation or to ensure that Western banks get repaid. The unemployed are people, with families, whose lives are affected – sometimes devastated – by the economic policies that outsiders recommend, and, in the case of IMF, effectively impose.

Stiglitz, 2002

1.1 Introduction

My goal in writing this book is to hopefully effect social and economic transformation. Given that social and economic transformation and critical theory are rooted in history, they both emphasize the acquisition of deep understanding as the foundation of cognitive knowledge. Cognitive knowledge is, in fact, acquired from the thoughts, experiences and senses of each individual who is embedded in his or her particular history, society, economy, psychology and philosophy. For Habermas, cognitive knowledge also involves the moment of self-reflection and self-understanding. Therefore, a consistently and constantly self-reflective life story is an essential part of the process of attaining cognitive knowledge. Through self-emancipation and self-reflection, deep understanding can be fostered. I am going to start by narrating the story of my life which furnishes the underlying causes of my departure from a career in investment banking and international finance for one in socio-economic finance.

First of all, I must express my sincere gratitude to Professor Ronnie Lessem at the University of Buckingham. He has played a major role in guiding me through the present journey in my life. I remember when I first met Ronnie in the summer of 2002 when I returned to London. Our discussion was about my doctoral research plan when he emphasized the importance of rooting the research in my own life story and experience. In Ordinary Wisdom_ Biographical Aging and the Journey of Life, Randall and Kenyon state, ‘Central to the transformation of life into lifestory, and of raw events into experiencable episodes, we would propose, is narrative intelligence, a capacity on which psychology has been remarkably mute.’¹ It is, therefore, critical for me to tell my life story in order to reflect on and rediscover my past as a key part of understanding myself as well as banking and finance. As Randall and Kenyon put it, ‘We access our own wisdom only by telling “the story of my life” – that is, by getting it out and then stepping back from it to investigate and interpret it; in short, to read it.’² The roots of my family set the scene of my life story.

1.2 Life as Story

1.2.1 From Hong Kong to England

Hong Kong, the city where I spent my early childhood, celebrated the twelfth anniversary of the city's handover to its motherland in July 2009. On 1 July 1997, Hong Kong was returned to the ownership of the People's Republic of China (PRC) by the British Government. The Treaty of Nanking, following the defeat of China in the Opium War, ceded Hong Kong to British governance until the Joint Declaration signed by both the British and Chinese Governments in 1984. The Treaty reaffirmed the PRC's right to regain its sovereignty over Hong Kong under ‘one country, two systems’ with effect from 1 July 1997. In ‘One-horse race: A special report on Hong Kong’, Long states the following:

The whole point of Hong Kong, both for the people living there and the foreigners doing business with it, was that it was not quite China. It was a place of refugees, ‘a Chinese colony that happen[ed\ to be run by Britain’, according to its historian, Frank Welsh. By 1997 it had become a prosperous, service-oriented economy and a sophisticated cosmopolitan society. China was a poor agricultural nation in the throes of the world's fastest industrial revolution.³

From being a part of China, to becoming a British colony and eventually being handed back to China, Hong Kong has a history of straddling two empires and two worlds. Although it acts as the link between the East and the West, Hong Kong has itself been at the centre of conflict and compromise. Hong Kong was only a village in the early 1800s, inhabited mostly by farmers, fishermen and pirates. It began to prosper in the 1850s and 1860s. As a result of the Treaty of Nanking, signed in August 1842, Hong Kong became a British colony for 167 years. In view of the historical background of Hong Kong, it is obvious that its people's very distant and detached feelings for both the PRC's government in Beijing and the British administration in London prevented the development of strong patriotic emotions. Economic prosperity has, therefore, become the priority of the Hong Kong people for generations. In other words, it is appropriate to say that the political ideology of the Hong Kong people is primarily grounded in its pragmatic roots of economic prosperity, though it can be reactionary when its freedom is challenged. The protest on 1 July 2003, involving hundreds of thousands of its citizens set against the anti-subversion legislation Beijing tried to impose on Hong Kong, demonstrates this point. Otherwise, the Hong Kong people are, in the main, contented as long as the economy of the city continues to develop and prosper.

Nonetheless, Hong Kong has a long history of having to cope with illegal immigrants from China and in particular with the massive influx from the mainland when China was caught in years of severe social and economic devastation from the late 1950s to the 1970s. The Cultural Revolution of China, which began in 1966, had actually provoked a workers’ uprising of anti-capitalism in Hong Kong, since a large number of the grassroots population of the city came from the mainland. Nevertheless, Hong Kong has been a cosmopolitan city and has successfully served as an important international financial and business centre in Asia after Tokyo. Christopher Patten, now Lord Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, writes the following in his book titled East and West: China, Power, and the Future of Asia:

Hong Kong is vital to the fastest-growing parts of the Chinese economy that underpin the rise in prosperity and in living standards that sustain the legitimacy of the Chinese leadership. For the overseas Chinese as well as for so many foreign businesses, Hong Kong is the reassuring and safe commercial base for doing business in China. A contract signed in Hong Kong enjoys the security of a common-law system and independent courts. The city also provides the bridge to Taiwan, economic relations between Taiwan and China being largely conducted through Hong Kong. Taiwan will watch closely what happens farther down the coast: Can ‘one country, two systems’ work in the former colony, and if it cannot do so there, the Taiwanese will ask, how could it possibly work for them?⁴

Although Hong Kong has not been in the socio-political limelight since its handover, its thriving economic recovery from the Asian Crisis, the bursting of the Internet bubble and the bird flu epidemic is of great credit to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In spite of its economic prosperity, the city, like most of the western world, has suffered higher unemployment and rapidly widening wealth disparity. In ‘One-horse race: A special report on Hong Kong’, Long further states:

Unemployment before the handover, at about 2 per cent of workforce, was almost negligible. It climbed to 6.2 per cent in 1999 and 7.9 per cent in 2003. Since then it has fallen very year, but at 4.8 per cent in 2006 was still much higher than pre-handover levels. Over the same period median earnings – about HK$10,000 a month – have not changed at all.⁵

While unemployment has become a challenge, the rapidly widening wealth disparity of the city is also critical. The Gini coefficient of Hong Kong, as explicitly reported by CNN.com in ‘Hong Kong boom belies wealth disparity’, has ‘increased from 0.476 in 1991 to 0.525 in 2001 – the most recent figure – on a scale where 0 represents perfect equality and 1, complete inequality’.⁶ It is further reported in ‘Hong Kong boom belies wealth disparity’ that ‘China's economic emergence is fostering a growing population of ultra-rich in Hong Kong, with property and stock prices well above 1997 highs, and the city is now home to an estimated 270,000 local-dollar millionaires – some feeding off a seemingly endless train of billion-dollar public-share floats.’ Hong Kong, a city deeply embedded in pragmatism as well as utilitarianism, seems to have endless opportunities for making high returns from business, trading and speculating properties and stocks, and is growing more disconnected from its Chinese holistic origins despite the handover to its motherland.

Although Hong Kong has been hit very badly by different financial crashes in the last three decades, before this latest financial crash caused by the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage system, the city was always busily engaging in strengthening and expanding its stock market which included inviting many sizeable Chinese state-owned enterprises to list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. In ‘One-horse race: A special report on Hong Kong’, Long makes the point that:

As financial services have steadily grown in relative economic importance, so has exposure to any fickleness in Beijing's policies. This is particularly true of the stock market. Last year the amount of capital raised in initial public offerings (IPOS) in Hong Kong was second only to that in London. Some 73 per cent of the Hong Kong total, or HK$369 billion, was raised by mainland enterprises. By the end of 2006, 367 mainland companies had listed shares in HongKong. They account for 55 per cent of the capital raised in Hong Kong in that period and now make up nearly one-third of listed companies, half the stock market's capital and 60 per cent of its turnover.⁷

No matter whether under British or Chinese administration, the craze for speculating in the real estate and stocks of Hong Kong has shown no sign of diminishing. It is, nevertheless, appropriate to say that the Hong Kong people have grown to be very adaptable to the domination of their souls and minds by financial trading and speculation. Rudolf Steiner states in The Philosophy of Freedom that ‘Man can certainly do as he wills, but he cannot want as he wills, because his wanting is determined by motives.’⁸ He goes on:

Freedom of will would then mean being able to want without ground, without motive. But what does wanting mean if not to have grounds for doing, or trying to do, this rather than that? To want something without ground or motive would be to want something without wanting it. The concept of wanting cannot be divorced from the concept of motive. Without a determining motive the will is an empty faculty; only through the motive does it become active and real. It is, therefore, quite true that the human will is not ‘free’ inasmuch as its direction is always determined by the strongest motive.

It is obvious that while speculation is driven by greed, the motive of wanting and demanding more is the ground for such speculation. In other words, due to the motive of wanting and demanding more, speculation becomes active. Unless the motive which drives speculation is under control, free will is impossible to attain. Without the successful attainment of free will, domination will always prevent true liberty. Hong Kong, which is embedded in western pragmatism, has become more disconnected from the ancient Chinese holistic orientation even after the handover to its motherland, whereas the catastrophic Cultural Revolution and the economic reform have, at the same time, disengaged the mainland Chinese from holism. In recent years, an increasing number of Chinese citizens have, in fact, established accounts in Hong Kong for stocks trading and speculation.

1.2.2 The Roots of my Family

Although my father and mother come from very different family backgrounds, both of their families are very much rooted in the pragmatic and commercialized Hong Kong. My father's grandfather was the first generation of my family to settle in Hong Kong. Nobody in my family really knows exactly when my great-grandfather started to reside in Hong Kong but I suspect it is likely to be after the second Opium War during the 1860s and 1870s because my grandfather was born in Hong Kong in the late 1800s. As an old Hong Kong family, owing to our very early settlement in the city, we were privileged to have an upper-middle class standard of living. My grandfather as well as my father and his siblings were able to receive the best education in Hong Kong and were brought up in the comfortable environment of the then British colony. If the family system was the social system of pre-industrial China, my family would be more appropriately classified as one which belongs to the modern society. In Selected Philosophical Writings of Fung Yu-lan, Fung states:

Traditional Chinese society originated long before the Christian era, and continued to exist, without fundamental change, until the latter part of the last century. It began to break down with what is usually called the invasion of the East by the West but which was really an invasion of medieval by modern society. The basic factor in modern society is its industrialized economy.⁹

It may well be that, as a result of the long history of living under a British administration and receiving a British education, the members of my father's family have never had the urge to seek out their indigenous Chinese identity. My uncles and their families departed for Australia and Canada in the six months after the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984, my parents and my brothers emigrated to Canada in early 1985 but I remained in Hong Kong as a British citizen. Whereas I have spent the last seven years in China to try to rediscover my indigenous identity, my brothers and cousins have been settled in both Australia and Canada for over two decades. Their children are, in fact, very disconnected and distant from their Chinese identity.

My mother's family is far more intriguing from the Chinese historical perspective compared to that of my father. My mother was born in 1937 in Shanghai, the city of prosperity and turmoil, in the same year as the Sino-Japanese War broke out. Although related to the prestigious Song (also spelt Soong or Sung) family, my mother had quite an unfortunate childhood. Shanghai, the eastern entrepôt of China in 1930s was, on the one hand, prosperous but, on the other, a dangerous place to be. After the Opium Wars, Shanghai had become a city of opportunities, dreams, fortune – and violence as well. Shanghai was the centre where most trade between the East and the West took place and it was both a multicultural and an international city with endless nights. The city itself was divided into different concessions occupied by the different western powers and my mother was born in the then British Concession where the Wing On Department Store managed by her uncle was located. I was told that my mother's uncle had a very close relationship with T.V. Song, the Minister of Finance and Foreign Affairs of the then Kuomintang Government (國民黨政府).

Nevertheless, my mother's family has both Ch...