Building colonial Hong Kong: speculative development and segregation in the city: by Cecilia Chu, Abingdon, Routledge, 2022, 240 pp., £75.00 (hardcover).

Chapter 2 examines the nineteenth-century Victoria of Hong Kong and discusses the effects of the city's high land price system, which not just benefitted the colonial government and property speculators but also perpetuated a chronic housing shortage and overcrowding in the city. It interrogates the dynamic linkages between the housing crisis and economic as well as social changes of not just Hong Kong but also its neighboring regions, especially Guangdong Province of mainland China, in the interwar years. Hong Kong, known for its I laissez-faire i capitalism, has long been taken as a kind of free-market utopia, especially by neoliberal economists such as Milton Friedman.[1] In the 1970s, Sir Philip Haddon-Cave, the city's financial secretary, defined its governance as "positive non-interventionism", so to articulate the local government's rigorous defense of free-market rule (See note 1 above). [Extracted from the article]

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