- July 1, 2022
- Posted by: Stratford Team
- Category: Economy
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A few years after the 1997 British handover of Hong Kong to China, officials in the former colony unveiled an ambitious new branding strategy. Post-colonial Hong Kong would be “Asia’s world city” — a preeminent entrepôt for global trade, a key staging ground for foreign investment into the emerging Chinese superpower, a cosmopolis of people from virtually every continent, and a de facto city-state with its own currency, immigration protocols, legal system and far greater civil freedoms than the mainland.
For the first decade of the new century, that branding seemed more or less accurate. Hong Kong boomed alongside China’s surging economy. Major U.S. and Western banks expanded their footprints in…
