From Hong Kong’s Capitalist Fundamentals to Singapore’s Authoritarian Governance: The Policy Mobility of Neo-liberalising

Shenzhen Special Economic Zone (SEZ) has been the flagship labouratory of Deng Xiaoping’s reform and open-door policy and the forerunner of China’s capitalist transformation. The initiation of the Shenzhen SEZ was driven by the imperative of political and economic survival along the state hierarchy and was informed by the international practices of export processing zones (EPZs). Shenzhen’s capitalist funda-mentals, such as the commodification of land and labour, were largely established through imitating its ‘big master ’ Hong Kong across the border. However, Shenzhen’s policy learning style has gradually shifted from laissez-faire Hong Kong to authoritar-ian Singapore, propelled by the aspiration, shared among policy-making party élites across China’s administrative hierarchy, of perpetuating the single-party rule. Theoretically, this paper demonstrates how policy mobility is shaped path-dependently by the pre-structured institutional/ideological regime, in what ways the idiosyncratic geographical/historical conjuncture matters, and why political representation and par-ticipation are crucial to policy selection and mutation. A trip on National Highway 321 east from Chengdu in Sichuan province to Shenzhen in Guangdong is a journey through economic development. Propelled by the forces of agglomeration, migration, and specialization, and helped by its nearness to Hong Kong, China, Shenzhen has grown the fastest of all cities in China since 1979, when it was desig-nated a special economic zone (World Bank, 2009, p. 13). What has happened to Shenzhen since 1979 has been nothing short of amazing in the world’s urban history. In three decades