Like many expatriates, I am spending Christmas far from Hong Kong - in my case, in a small town in the southern United States. The first settlers arrived in the 1820s, and the region known as the Black Belt became wealthy on King Cotton, and poor as the king moved elsewhere. Like derelict hulks on a forgotten stage set, mansions with names like Indian Camp, Reverie and Pitt's Folly glimmer through the pines.
My 80-year-old mother lives in Marion, Alabama (population 6,000), where there are no shopping centres and everyone is on first-name terms. Even the notorious racial divide seems a little gentler here. Blacks and whites mingle in the town's only restaurant, Kalico Kitchen, dining on such southern staples as collard greens, cornbread and fried chicken.
Few places could seem more remote from mainland China and Hong Kong. Yet appearances can be deceptive. Even in tiny Marion, the places where I am doing my last-minute Christmas shopping are solidly in China's orbit, along with virtually all of American retail. At the Southern Belle, on Washington Street, ceramic music boxes with figurines of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara, decorative sculptures of Brer Rabbit - an iconic figure of southern folklore - homespun quilts and silver-plated candelabra all come from China.
So do my mother's plastic Christmas tree, the ornaments, and strings of lights. Very little, in fact, can be found that does not have the 'Made in China' label. Last week, a cartoon in the Montgomery Advertiser, the daily newspaper of Alabama's state capital, featured a Chinese Santa Claus ho, ho, ho-ing from the 'East Pole'.
Just less than a year from now, Hong Kong will host the sixth ministerial summit of the World Trade Organisation, in what many hope will be the definitive meeting leading to a new global trade agreement. Negotiations began in 2001, just days before China formally joined the WTO, and many hope that the Hong Kong summit will serve as its coming-out party. Yet Hong Kong is one reason why China is making knick-knacks that appeal to the southern belles of an Alabama country town. Although China may be the star of the show, it should be a double billing.
In a little over a decade, China has climbed into the league of the top three trading nations, along with the United States and Germany. But it is in small towns such as Marion, at the far end of the international trading system, that the evidence of China's success is most striking. The lesson I take from my Christmas shopping is of a strategy in which Hong Kong's role has been paramount.
