ABSTRACT
The paper is about the emergent global Asian city and its reliance on a rescaled ethnic formation as a mechanism for producing a new biopolitical architecture of intellectual accumulation. I am not talking about new moves to be more friendly to strangers, such as the introduction of legal prohibitions against ethnic discrimination and racism in Hong Kong. Rather, my concern is with the new kind of entrepreneurial political thinking behind the rise of high-tech centers in Asia-Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Bangalore, and so forth-and the quest for knowledge workers. Specifi cally, I want to identify how urban authorities reconfi gure relations among expatriate and local populations through techniques that re-ode de-territorialized ethnic populations as essential to the growth possibilities that cannot be solely met by territorialized ethnic communities.
