You're deriding Hong Kong's economy as a "shopping mall" begs the question as to why other ports haven't developed so robustly and constitutes what Thomas Sowell calls the physical fallacy.
"In WW2, war prisoners developed markets in the camps even though everyone’s rations and Red Cross packages were identical. Trade occurred because people’s preferences for the items differed and because the contents became more valuable if they were saved until most packages had run out. Some people—middlemen—saved their rations and arranged trades, providing services that others wanted. But they were also resented.
Why? Sowell explains that the prisoners accepted the “physical fallacy.” Physically, the cigarettes and food packages were all the same. Trade occurred because the values increased when the items were moved through space or time.
But since the physical qualities of the items did not change, many people thought the value hadn’t changed. Prisoners who received what they thought was a pittance for their cigarettes were resentful when the middleman resold them for a higher price. And the people who paid the higher price felt cheated by the middleman who had obtained them so cheaply. Indeed, the failure to understand the role of the middleman helps explain the resentment of people who fulfill this distributive role throughout the world and over centuries."
http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=3116