Can Economic Integration Appease Autonomy Demands? A Comparative Study of Hong Kong and Macau

In dealing with regions demanding more autonomy, states can intuitively utilize economic integration programs to forge a stronger sense of nationality. As regions share a “mutual economic advantage”, in the words of political theorist David Miller, regions have weaker justification for more autonomy or even outright secession. Although economic integration has the merit of simplicity, it seems increasingly ineffective as regions from Scotland to Hong Kong have risen up to demand independence despite an increasingly globally and regionally integrated economy. These (re-)newed calls for independence have effectively questioned whether economic integration could really fend off these aspirations for more self-governing powers, or even outright secession. This paper aims to evaluate whether economic integration between a seceding region and the rest of the country they belong to could reduce demands for more autonomy by comparing the cases of Hong Kong and Macau. Hong Kong and Macau are strange neighbors as the former have seen very large-scale democratic movements (and recently a smaller-scale independence movement) while the latter has seen virtually none. Macau has passed an anti-secession law, while the proposal of such a law took some 500,000 Hong Kong protesters to the streets in 2003. While both regions are undergoing large projects of economic integration, from the building of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge (HZMB) to the signing of the Closer Economic & Partnership Agreement (CEPA), the Hong Kong public is way more confrontational to China than Macau as demonstrated by their 2014 Umbrella Movement. Looking into government archives, party elite behavior and economic data, this paper also aims to explain the difference in democratic or autonomy movement mobilization despite their close economic integration with China. This paper found that the degree of economic integration alone does not determine the aspiration for autonomy. A more complex causal calculus is at work: It appears the former colonial history, China’s own objective of United Front and last but not least, the economic structure between the two territories led to diverging results of economic integration, and the subsequent attitudinal divergence towards elite demands for more autonomy. For instance, handover to China was seen as a damage to the prosperity Hong Kong enjoyed under British colonial rule, while Macau saw Chinese rule as an alternative to bad governance under Portugal; Macau’s later specialization in the gaming industry is also set to benefit more from integration to China, while integration made Hong Kong more dependent on imports from China and Chinese tourists instead of bringing the promised economic growth. Through a most-similar paired comparison, this paper aims to enrich the literature on autonomy and in general, regionalism by unraveling the complex causal map linking economic integration and the local aspiration for autonomy. This paper also aims to see if new experiences emerge by studying a dyad outside of the Europe or North America, where different cultural norms or social practices might be at work.