Anxieties about the effects of international property investment in world cities like London have mainly focused on super-rich investors and corporate vehicles that have generated price inflation of assets and accelerated exclusion from an already expensive market. In fact, many international investors in the city's housing market are middle-class individuals, and focusing on Hong Kong as an emblematic example of such processes, we examine their motives and the products offered to them by important investment intermediaries. We find that an important rationale for these investments lies in local class-based uncertainties and existential anxieties concerning the future of Hong Kong itself. We focus on the cultural roots of these investor rationalities but also consider the role of investment intermediaries who have helped bolster confidence while shielding investors from the consequences of their aggregated market power -concerns in London over household displacement from foreign investment. We suggest that what may seem to be the predatory search to 'fry' property ( ), a Hongkonger colloquialism referring to the search for high performing investments, should also be understood as actions anchored in and generated by the habitus of the Hong Kong middle class whose lives have been moulded by historical geopolitical uncertainty and worries about its longer-term social positioning and security.
Although Hong Kong has become one of the most valuable wine trading hubs in the world since the withdrawal of the wine duty in February 2008, relatively little is known about how and why local consumers drink wine. Drawing on Bourdieu's notions of "connoisseur," "pedant," and "proletarian," this article introduces a paradigm of three drinking practices in Hong Kong: established, aspiring and creative. It further introduces the concept of "third indigenization"the combining of products from two or more places of origin, and subsequently creating a new product in a third place. Methodologically, the analysis of marketing materials, ethnographies, interviews and focus groups conducted in Hong Kong provides a basis for exploring the sociocultural and geographical meanings of wine. This article discusses how wine consumption is popular because it conveys the idea of being globalized, allows the display of wealth, and expresses the idea of having cultural capital. Significantly, this article challenges popular Anglo-Eurocentric understandings of consumption practices and provides a broader and more flexible approach to cultural analysis: it makes conceptual and methodological and contributions to consumer research and to the sociology and geography of wine.
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