ABSTRACT
Business and politics have a long and close relationship in Hong Kong. This chapter sketches a genealogy of business and politics from the colonial period to the post-handover era. It traces the rise and decline of British, Cantonese, Shanghainese, and mainland businesses in connection with commercial, industrial, financial, and land capital. In doing so, the chapter underlines the reasons why the old government-business alliance of the colonial era has ceased to work and why a new alliance is hard to forge in post-1997 Hong Kong. While the colonial administration succeeded in fostering competing business interests into a corporatist order through a pact of alliance, the dynamic transformation of business since the opening of China rendered this technology of power obsolete. The conglomeration and fragmentation of big business groups, as well as the emergence of hybrid businesses, have altered the agency of business as an actor and hence given rise to new logics of rationality. This new era of uncertainty is compounded by the crisscrossing boundaries between mainland politics and local Hong Kong politics and a radical redefinition of the political as well as the realm of public contention.
