In January of 1993, an ambitious Chinese Communist Party boss, a 39-year-old off...
HONG KONG - In January of 1993, an ambitious Chinese Communist Party boss, a 39-year-old official with chubby cheeks and a mop of black hair, visited Hong Kong. He was seeking out the city’s rich among the shimmering skyscrapers, hoping to secure investment in Fuzhou, the second-tier city he ran in mainland China. His name was Xi Jinping.
Xi is now the strongman leader of a rich and rising power that controls Hong Kong. Instead of feting the 91-year-old businessman, Beijing has harangued him for failing to deliver in the rebellious city. When the Party was looking for a chorus of influential voices to counter the protests that began this summer, Li offered only even-handed pleas for restraint. In an online video of comments he made at a monastery, Li asked that the leadership show “humanity” when dealing with young protesters.
Li and other tycoons have long held dominion over Hong Kong, tracing its post-World War II economic rise through manufacturing, real estate and finance. But the ascent of Xi Jinping, who became General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, has fundamentally altered the status quo. Shortly after protests over the bill escalated in early June, some wealthy Hong Kongers began moving money outside of the region or setting up accounts that would allow them to do so, according to six private bankers whose institutions collectively handle hundreds of billions of dollars in assets.
Asked about those numbers, a spokesperson for Li said that as Hutchison Whampoa sought large acquisitions overseas in the late 1990s and early 2000s, “the diversification changed the geographical proportions, but we are nevertheless growing in the mainland and in Hong Kong.” In addition, the spokesperson said, a 2015 reorganization of the group brought down the proportion of earnings from the region for the current flagship.
Li’s entire life has been framed by the swings of history in Hong Kong and, looming on its edge, mainland China. He was born in 1928 in the river city of Chaozhou, a place known for its local Chinese opera and embroidery work. When he was a child, the southern Chinese city was a target for Japanese bombing runs. He quit school as a 12-year-old boy and his family fled south down the coast to Hong Kong, then a British colony.
Li’s doubts about mainland control of Hong Kong appear to be longstanding. Britain’s conversation with China about the future handover of Hong Kong began heating up in the 1980s. Even back then, Murray said, Li discussed his anxiety about the financial future of his corporate empire. “It was like a Buddha came to town to build a temple,” said Ruan Yisan, an architecture professor in Shanghai acclaimed for his historical preservation projects who opposed the development. “Officials thought he could do magic here and change the city in a dramatic way.”
“In a political and cultural center like Beijing, one has to put business and economics in a lesser position,” he said. “Although I’ve run into all sorts of trouble, I now have a better understanding of China.”After Xi took power, Beijing adopted a harder line toward Hong Kong. In a 2014 white paper, Beijing said the autonomy the city enjoys was not a given but, instead, contingent on the permission of the central leadership. And Li himself began facing criticism from Chinese state media.
In that period, though, companies under Li’s control were plowing billions of dollars into stakes of firms abroad while pulling back in Hong Kong and on the mainland. That trend hasn’t slowed. Beyond investments, the Communist Party has other demands of Hong Kong’s tycoons. Xi Jinping’s directive was unambiguous at a 2017 meeting between the Chinese leader and the city’s elite, said a senior executive at a major Chinese state-owned enterprise in Hong Kong. Li was in attendance.
To be sure, said the head of a private banking operation in the city, most of Hong Kong’s prominent families have been diversifying their personal wealth overseas for many years. The executive works at one of the five largest private banks in the Asia-Pacific region, which handles more than $200 billion in assets.That changed as Beijing began to flex its muscles. One event that caught the tycoons’ attention, he said, was the 2017 disappearance of China-born billionaire Xiao Jianhua.
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