ABSTRACT
Deindustrialization increases the importance of finance in urban economies, as do aging populations. Both of these factors produced dramatic shifts in Hong Kong’s political economy, and China is now following the same path. At the same time, new financial technologies, such as securitization and subprime mortgages, have transformed the nature of real estate markets globally, increasing volatility and creating a greater detachment between property investment and local commitments. Despite their centrality to urban political economies, anthropologists have paid relatively little attention to these processes until recently. In my own research, I began thinking about financialization through an attempt to understand the importance of real estate and land revenues to the Hong Kong government, in both colonial and postcolonial eras. In China, the reform era brought a flurry of economic and financial innovation, often in the grey zone of what is not-yet-(il)legal, such as shadow banking. With the slowing of export-oriented manufacturing as the growth engine of coastal China, local governments have increasingly followed Hong Kong in becoming reliant on revenues from land development. Such shifts are changing the nature of local governance and the meaning of housing to urban residents, and frequently causing problems of housing affordability that may threaten the stability of governance regimes in the future.
