Tycoons are as synonymous with the story of modern Hong Kong as founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew is with Singapore.
Mr Li Ka-shing, the Cheng family and others fled poverty, chaos and war in mainland China for the relative stability of the then British colony of Hong Kong.
With minimal education and capital but vast amounts of nous and ambition, they built multibillion-dollar empires that dominate the economy of the semi-autonomous Chinese territory today and stretch far beyond, from Australia to the United States.
Their tales ought to be as inspiring as they are unlikely. But in writing a book about the aspirations of young people in Hong Kong, I learned that fewer and fewer look up to these big beasts of business, many of whom are now in their late eighties. On the contrary. Once the disrupters who built Hong Kong’s leading role in shipping and manufacturing, today many see them as the bed-blockers.
They are blamed for leaving Hong Kong with the most unaffordable housing in the world, after parlaying their business skills into property empires that generate billions of dollars in dividends each year, while apartment sizes continue to shrink and prices continue to rise.
The power of the tycoons in every sector, from transportation to retail, stifles opportunities for young entrepreneurs to build businesses, even if they can afford the astronomical office or shop rents.
In many ways, the frustrations of young Hong Kongers about the high cost of living and declining social mobility mirror the complaints of other millennials about the power of elites from London to New York.
What is different about Hong Kong is its unique political status as a territory that has many civic liberties but no democracy, a mostly free city inside the world’s most powerful authoritarian state. When Hong Kong was handed over from British to Chinese control in 1997, Beijing promised that the city would retain a “high degree of autonomy” and rights such as freedom of speech for 50 years.
Twenty years later, the generation that has come of age since the handover feels that China is reneging on its promises, with intensifying interventions in Hong Kong life from the kidnapping of booksellers who criticised the Communist party to tighter control of the media, arts and politics.
These teenagers and twenty- and thirty-somethings grew up with weaker connections to mainland China, or the British legacy, than their parents. They feel they are first and foremost native Hong Kongers, rejecting a Chinese identity they believe has been co-opted by Beijing.
Their frustration is also directed at the Hong Kong tycoons, who maintain outsized influence in the city’s partially democratic political system, from selecting the city’s leader (fittingly known as the chief executive) to stuffing the Legislative Council with their supporters thanks to corporate voting.
Rather than aspiring to follow in the footsteps of the Li or Cheng families, many blame them for selling out their future to Beijing.
Keen to let the much-maligned tycoons speak for themselves, I set out to interview the young billionaires of this Generation HK. But the problem with detached, self-serving billionaires is that they tend to be detached and self-serving.
Few would meet me, let alone agree to talk on the record. In the end, only one was brave — or foolhardy — enough to do so.
Still only 36, Lau Ming-wai has a CV long enough to make even the most accomplished of polymaths feel like they have wasted their life. Having trained as a flight instructor, lawyer, financial analyst and academic, he has finally settled (for now) as chairman of Chinese Estates, his family’s property group, and head of the government’s youth commission.
Looking at the track record of his father, Joseph Lau, it is clear why the younger Lau wants to make his own way in the world. Lau senior is a fugitive from justice in neighbouring Macau, where he was convicted of bribery in 2014 and is also known for buying up some of the world’s most expensive diamonds and announcing a split with his girlfriend in front-page advertisements in local newspapers.
Lau junior projects a much humbler image and he was surprisingly open about the challenges facing the city’s elite. Those who came of age since the handover grew up in an “identity vacuum”, he said, and that space has been filled by a stronger Hong Kong identity.
Efforts by Beijing and the Hong Kong government to lecture young Hong Kongers about the greatness of China or the bountiful opportunities on offer just across the narrow Shenzhen river are likely to fall on deaf ears for two main reasons.
First, the Communist party, and increasingly its allies in the Hong Kong establishment, communicates at a propagandist frequency that Hong Kongers do not receive well. Second, Mr Lau acknowledged, the gains of China’s economic transformation have been shared in a very unequal manner in Hong Kong.
“The business community may have benefited a lot,” he told me. “But Joe Public’s standard of living, Joe Public’s wage growth, has no relation to GDP growth.” Some of the other young tycoons, who only agreed to speak to me if I did not name them, argued more simplistically that their less well-off peers could be easily assuaged if given cheap housing (which of course they would like their companies to build, so long as the government subsidises them).
Only Mr Lau understood, or was willing to admit, that Generation HK’s frustrations go beyond mere material issues. Hong Kong’s business community needs more spokesmen like Mr Lau, as the most senior generation of Hong Kong tycoons leaves the stage.
Cheng Yu-tung, the patriarch of the Cheng family, died last year. Li Ka-shing regularly fends off rumours that he will retire soon. And CC Tung, whose brother Tung Chee-hwa was appointed by Beijing as Hong Kong’s first chief executive in 1997, recently agreed to sell the family’s storied shipping group to a Chinese state company.
Many older Hong Kongers will feel a tinge of sadness at the passing of a great crop of self-made men. But, feeling alienated by this plutocratic history, Generation HK is looking to write its own Hong Kong story, at a time of growing uncertainty. THE FINANCIAL TIMES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ben Bland is the South China correspondent for the Financial Times and the author of “Generation HK: Seeking Identity in China’s Shadow”, published by Penguin