Go East, young man: if I was 25 again, this is where I’d try my luck
Hong Kong
Not four hours since the plane touched down at Chek Lap Kok and I’m howling ‘My Way’ into a Wanchai karaoke machine to the discomfort of my Chinese friends, who all sing like Charles Aznavour. I’ll give some of the credit — for my energy level, not my singing — to Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Class ‘flatbed’, which is so comfortable that Sir Richard Branson is busy claiming patent rights so he can sue competitors who copy the design. But I’ll give most of the credit to Hong Kong itself: brash, noisy, diesel-fumed, neon-lit, money-crazy, and always energising. After the pessimism and backbiting of recession-weary England, what a joy to be in a place that is unashamedly upbeat and — at least by comparison with the tensions when I used to live here — at ease with itself.
Back then, particularly after the crushing of the Tiananmen protests, everyone was deeply apprehensive about what life would be like after the handover to China. Now they’ve had a dozen years to find out — and very evidently it’s business as usual, with no suppression of public debate or of the cosmopolitan raffishness that makes the place fun, and many small improvements perhaps most notice-able to one so long absent. There’s more civic pride, more evidence of civil society, even a bit more civility: the roughness of Cantonese manners seems to have been mellowed by advancing prosperity, despite half a dozen cyclical downturns since I left in 1989.
It’s hard to tell whether the global recession now ending has hit Hong Kong harder than, say, the Asian financial crisis of 1997 or the Sars crisis of 2003. The impact was at least as painful this time, but relatively brief. ‘When the economy’s down, I really miss the sound of the piledrivers,’ one long-time British resident told me; piledrivers and construction cranes are not yet back in profusion, but with cash pouring in from the mainland, shares and high-end residential real estate have been moving ahead strongly, and that always makes Hong Kongers feel good.
Hot news is the £34 million — an all-time record price per square foot — allegedly paid by a mainlander for a new-build Mid-Levels duplex. This gilded apartment appears from the lift buttons to be on what locals regard as the lucky 68th floor, but is in fact only 43 storeys from the ground, an arrangement its developer declares to be ‘not misleading at all’. My Chinese friends say the more misleading aspect of the story is the headline-making sky-high price: they suspect it might just be someone puffing hot air into a bubble.
Corporate crusader
When I worked here in my early thirties, I ran an investment banking business in Alexandra House, adjacent to the Mandarin hotel; the area still teems with expats who might have been me, though Americans well outnumber Brits. After I returned to the City, it was my task to persuade junior bankers to accept overseas postings — and it was in their nature to demand tiresomely detailed contract terms. Instead, what they got from me was: ‘Just get on the plane and go. You’ll never regret it.’ One intense young man with whom I had that conversation never came home again. David Webb is now Hong Kong’s leading corporate governance campaigner, a crusader (through webb-site.com) for minority shareholders’ rights and greater transparency in all the dealings of the territory’s power elite. He has even done battle against the princely Richard Li, son of billionaire Li Ka-Shing, whose bid to take his telecoms company PCCW private earlier this year was finally blocked by an appeal court after Webb complained to regulators.
A computer programmer by training, Webb deploys a fiercely analytical mind combined with (almost literally) a refusal to blink. He makes his living these days by investing in smaller, undervalued Hong Kong companies, and regards his activist work as a form of public service, ‘a substitute for the political career I might have had if I’d stayed in London,’ he told me. If I hadn’t given him that talking-to long ago, he might by now be a younger John Redwood, tirelessly exposing the detail of Gordon Brown’s mishandling of the public finances: London’s loss, I’d say.
In Chinatown
It’s almost 25 years since I first came here for Christmas 1984, in the week of the Joint Declaration by Margaret Thatcher and Zhao Ziyang that sealed the colony’s post-1997 destiny as a special administrative region of the People’s Republic. One of the touristy things I did was to take a day-trip to Shenzhen, the town across the river that separates Hong Kong from the mainland. I took the train to the border post of Lo Wu, walked across the bridge under the hostile gaze of Chinese soldiers, and wandered the rather desolate main street of Shenzhen, where sparse shops sold cheap clothes and souvenirs: I still have the butterfly kites that I bought. But beyond the novelty of setting foot on communist concrete, it wasn’t much of a day out.
I repeated the trip this week, and landed on a different planet. The border post has the scale and style of an international airport. Where the kite shop stood, or thereabouts, is a Bentley showroom. A metropolis of shiny towers stretches towards distant suburbs, connected by an eight-lane highway lined with manicured shrubbery. I was shown penthouse duplexes with panoramic views at £2 million-plus apiece — still a fraction of Hong Kong prices, but thereby all the more attractive to Hong Kong buyers. Given that local banks are under-capitalised and heavily exposed to property lending, all this has the feel of an even bigger bubble. But a glance at Shenzhen on Google Earth reminds me that beyond the unsold apartment towers are thousands upon thousands of factories now responding to an uptick in orders that — if China’s official 8.9 per cent third-quarter GDP growth figure is anything like reality — will swiftly turn into full-blown recovery. Real estate markets everywhere are full of froth and puff; manufacturing is what really matters.
Get up and go
If I was 25 years younger I’d be back out here by Christmas, hunting for a job or a business opportunity or a book or a column to write. If you’re one of those ‘recession generation’ graduates whom Matthew Lynn wrote about recently, or a thirtysomething whose City career has imploded, take my advice: just get on the plane and go, you’ll never regret it.
Comments