ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to survey the East Asian employment relations context of Hong Kong in the last decade of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the decade there were signs that Japan might not be able to sustain its economic dynamic. However, observers were still confident that the Asian economic ‘miracle’ would be extended through the ‘generations’ of industrialisers; that it would only be a matter of time before Vietnam and other late industrialisers caught up with the ‘tigers’, and the ‘tigers’ with the ‘newly industrialised economies’ (NIEs). Towards the end of the decade, East Asian countries were in a major recession precipitated by a rapid transfer of capital out of the region in 1997, the transfer facilitated by the forces of globalisation that most East Asian countries were eager to embrace. In the same year, Hong Kong, which had been singled out from among the Asian NIEs because of its apparent laissez-faire economy and employment relations, was joined as a Special Administrative Region (SAR) to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) ruled by a communist government that was once dedicated to highly regulated employment relations. It is from this central perspective of Hong Kong, then, that employment relations in the countries of East Asia are surveyed.
