Time-Space Punctuation: Hong Kong's Border Regime and Limits on Mobility

Abstract

Chinese people seem to be increasingly on the move, as this special issue emphasizes, among the diaspora, and especially among residents of the People’s Republic of China after it re-opened to the capitalist world after 1979. We argue, however, that an emphasis on mobility can be misleading unless we also pay close attention to factors that inhibit movement. Foremost among the inhibiting factors are international borders. The notion of a “world without borders” is only realized by the world’s elites. For ordinary people, borders are substantial or even insuperable barriers. One of the most powerful metaphors for globalization has been David Harvey’s idea of “time-space compression,” in which the speeding up of economic and social processes by transportation and communication technologies has in effect shrunk the globe. As with all metaphors, it both offers important insights and is potentially misleading. The world is not shrinking in any uniform manner. Compression is uneven for different kinds of actors, objects and ideas. In this article, we set out the concept of time-space punctuation. We offer this approach as a complement to time-space compression, not as a substitute. Even a combination of both metaphors distracts attention from other representational approaches to globalization, such as accounting, visibility or fi ltering.1 Punctuation conventionally identifi es arbitrary symbols that break up the fl ow of speech. Here we extend this idea to other arenas. The world is punctuated by barriers, the most important of which are national borders. For some people and things, borders act as periods, full stops denying legal entry. For others, they are like semi-colons, requiring visas and work permits. For the global elite, by reason of their citizenship status or their assets, borders are like commas, slightly slowing movement at various checkpoints, particularly if they have access to VIP lanes or private jet facilities at ports of entry. The metaphor can be extended. In these post-9/11 days, certain people move around the world with the equivalent of asterisks attached to them, having been placed on “no-fl y” or other watch lists. Others,

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 50 citations exist upstream.