Li Ka-shing: Hong Kong's Elusive Billionaire

Duncan McDowall is a professor of history at Carleton University, and
the author of Quick to the Frontier: Canada’s Royal Bank.

There is an ethnocentricity in the way most Canadians regard the
business world around them. They know their Conrad Blacks, Ken Thomsons,
and Tom Batas, but would not have a clue who Li Ka-shing is. Tell them
that Forbes magazine ranks Li as one of the wealthiest men in the world
and they’d be intrigued; tell them that he has at various times owned
significant chunks of the Canadian economy—Husky Oil, Vancouver’s
Pacific Place—and they’d be amazed. Canadians have been very slow in
waking up to the business power of the Pacific Rim. Anthony Chan’s
biography of Li Ka-shing will make the Far East and its business moguls
a little less inscrutable.

This is a rags-to-riches story of a Chinese boy who fled his native
Guangdong to escape the invading Japanese army in late 1940. A dying
father in 1943 imparted real Horatio Alger advice to his impoverished
son: “You must have the strength of character. Then you can rise as
tall as the sky...Don’t forget your roots.” Young Li bounced high
off the springboard of Hong Kong’s postwar economy. He combined the
use of cheap labor with an uncanny knack for divining North America’s
appetite for consumer novelty. Plastic was his first niche; by the
1950s, he was “the King of Plastic Flowers.” As the plastic trade
matured, he diversified into real estate and rode Hong Kong’s land
boom. Li became the colony’s “most revered dealmaker.” En route,
we learn much about the colony’s history and the mores of Chinese
business, especially the powerful hong trading companies. Gaining
control of the venerable Hutchinson Whampoa hong, Li expanded abroad
into foreign banking, real estate, and telecommunications. He acquired
Canadian friends—the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce—and even
helped to bail out the beleaguered Reichmanns. In the 1980s, this
capitalist heeded his father’s advice and returned to his roots,
befriending Beijing and counseling the Communists on how to take control
of the Crown colony in 1997.

Chan, a Canadian-born academic who teaches in Seattle, tells a
competent story; but his writing lacks grace, and his business analysis
seldom probes deeper than newspaper reporting. Most disappointing is the
fact that Li (“Mr. Money,” as he is known to his compatriots) never
comes alive in his hands. There are no interviews with the “elusive”
billionaire, so he remains a rather cardboard figure. His personal life
is only vaguely sketched; his wife is mentioned but once, and his sons
parachute into the story. There are no illustrations, just a stiff,
official photo of the $10-billion man. We never learn what makes him
“tick” and are often left with nothing more than Algeresque
rhetoric. This is not surprising; wheelers and dealers seldom welcome
the biographer’s entreaties.