# Hong Kong **Hong Kong** is a city on China's southern coast that was a British colony until 1997, when it was returned to [[China]] under the formula "one country, two systems." For the market radicals in Quinn Slobodian's *[[Crack-Up Capitalism]]*, it is where the story starts: the original zone. ## The libertarian ideal Colonial Hong Kong had low taxes, open trade and almost no say for the people who lived there. [[Milton Friedman]] made it a showpiece of his 1978 television series *[[Free to Choose]]*, told an audience there that political democracy tends to destroy economic freedom, and in 1990 called Hong Kong, not the democratic West, the right model for Eastern Europe. The Fraser Institute still ranked it the freest economy in the world in 2022, two years after Beijing imposed a national security law and crushed the city's protest movement. ## The template Hong Kong was copied. [[Deng Xiaoping]]'s China built its first [[Special Economic Zone]] next door at Shenzhen in 1980. Thatcher's ministers wanted Hong Kong-style zones in British inner cities, and [[Canary Wharf]] was nicknamed "Hong Kong-on-Thames." The apartheid homeland of [[Ciskei]] was pitched as an "African Hong Kong." [[Paul Romer]]'s [[Charter City]] took British-run Hong Kong as its model, and [[Próspera]] in Honduras was designed with Hong Kong, [[Singapore]] and [[Dubai]] in mind. ## Why it's on the map Hong Kong is the reference point for nearly every project on the [[Network State Experiments Roster]]. It is also the cautionary tale its admirers leave out: it is now one of the most unequal places on earth, and the freedoms its residents did have ended when the sovereign power decided they should. ## See Also - [[Crack-Up Capitalism]] — chapter 1, "Two, Three, Many Hong Kongs" - [[Reform and Opening Up]] - [[Singapore]] · [[Dubai]] · [[Canary Wharf]]