Chungking Mansions, the tumbledown backpacker haven on Nathan Road in Kowloon, represents, as Gordon Mathews puts it, an “alien island of the developing world” (p. 15) at the heart of Hong Kong, which has paradoxically come to stand for the city's culturally hybrid heritage as well as for the dream of economic success that has fuelled the city's growth since the postwar years. This dream now attracts a different sort of migrants, or rather two sorts: South Asians who intend to settle in Hong Kong to work and earn wages that they cannot expect back home and African traders who use Hong Kong as a stepping stone to source cheap Chinese goods they can resell in their home countries. These are the two main socio-ethnic groups that make up the population of Chungking Mansions, against a backdrop of Hong Kong Chinese landlords/shop owners (70 percent of the 920 holders of ownership shares, p. 38) and Western tourists.

Starting in 2006, Mathews, a professor of anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, spent several years in the building gathering information, interviewing inhabitants, mapping shops, sleeping in guesthouses on the higher floors, and striking up conversations in cheap South Asian food joints and the neighboring 7-Eleven where African traders gather for a drink. He also led a weekly discussion group for asylum seekers, one of the most elusive groups of Chungking inhabitants, for a local NGO. His book contains a wealth of both quantitative and qualitative data, including interview transcripts, and occasional forays into other “nodes” connected to Chungking Mansions in Africa or India. Mathews also gives credit to his research assistants for several aspects of his study and extensively discusses his own ethical position (pp. 50–55).

The book is organized thematically, with four main chapters dedicated to “place,” “people,” “goods,” and “laws,” ending with a section titled “Future.” Mathews's thesis is that the building represents a “central node” of the “low-end globalization” (p. 13) most commonly experienced in the developing world today, a network of individual traders (as opposed to multinational corporations) carrying goods by hand (mostly mobile phones and clothes) and migrants leaving their countries to seek opportunities as “temporary workers, asylum seekers or sex workers” (p. 13). The economic model of Chungking Mansions is based on cheap illegal labor (cheap because it is illegal), itself predicated on Hong Kong's relatively open visa policy, which is also the prerequisite for the African traders to freely enter and exit the city. The building is, however, threatened in its role as a trading outpost by the rise of the Tianxiu district in Guangzhou as well as by Dubai.

One of the most interesting parts of the book is the section devoted to asylum seekers (pp. 169–94, including three interview transcripts), whose numbers Mathews estimates at around 300 in the building at any given time (p. 170). The government grants them a small housing subsidy as well as monthly supplies of groceries, but bars them from working during the (often protracted) examination of their application. It also does not allow the happy few who are granted asylum (less than 3 percent in 2008, p. 173) to stay in Hong Kong; however, it does not forcibly deport rejected asylum seekers. Because Hong Kong is not a signatory to the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, asylum seekers may only turn to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, with no possible appeal. Hong Kong is, however, a signatory to the UN Convention Against Torture; hence since 2007 asylum seekers have been increasingly invoking this instrument to request protection through Hong Kong courts, an implicit recognition of the territory's record in the area of the rule of law. This legal opening, as well as a 2009 court decision that briefly granted asylum seekers the right to work before it was overturned (pp. 81, 193), has led to a significant increase in asylum applicants: from 1,600 in 2006 to 6,000 in 2010 (p. 173).

At times, Mathews's agenda to “celebrate Chungking Mansions as a place of cultural diversity” (p. 55) sits somewhat uncomfortably with certain analyses. He makes the case that interethnic and class tension are muted in the building mainly because its inhabitants share the same ethics of capitalism: “the exploited seek, in general, not to rebel against their oppressors but to emulate them” (p. 103). This defense of the civilizing effects of neoliberalism leads the author to adopt a value-free assessment of some of the practices he observes: his defense of mobile phone sellers' techniques as “misrepresenting the price or the quality of goods, rather than of claiming that copy goods are genuine” may for example seem disingenuous (p. 114). Similarly, his argument that South Asians settle in the building because they “do not suffer discrimination for their non-Chinese ethnicity and lack of language ability” as they do elsewhere in Hong Kong (p. 70) is qualified by his observation that they continue to dream of returning to India or Pakistan, or of emigrating to the United States or the United Kingdom. The implicit argument is that the beneficial effects of neoliberalism outweigh its corollary exclusionary or iniquitous dynamics. While Mathews's point regarding the social peace and tolerance fostered by capitalism may be convincing, some readers may balk at the implicit characterization of the neoliberal dynamics at work in Chungking as “moral” (p. 152).

This point is extensively discussed in the final chapter, “Future,” where Mathews situates the building in the context of his work on the “global cultural supermarket” and world systems analysis. His final characterization of Chungking describes it as “a ghetto of middle-class striving within a city of wealthier middle-class striving, viewing its denizens with fear and scorn yet letting business as usual be the law of the day. Chungking Mansions is a place where the ambitious from the poorer places in the world come to try to get rich or richer, in the shadow of the truly rich, which they will almost certainly never become” (p. 215). Mathews's on-balance positive view of the dynamics of global capitalism is never simplistic; it no doubt espouses the views of many of his informants, reminding first-world scholars that the developing world middle-class may not share their critical view of the “global supermarket.” However, some readers might also hope for a more critical contextualization of Chungking within the exclusionary dynamics at work in Hong Kong as a whole: postcolonial dynamics of linguistic and social exclusion, or economic dynamics of exploitation based less on the free market than on a form of highly regulated oligarchic capitalism, resting in no small measure on the form of indentured labor provided by domestic helpers (the cheap labor provided by “overstayers” and asylum seekers in Chungking is simply an extension of this legally recognized category, finally challenged in court in 2011), ultimately predicated on the absence of political democracy.