The Last Tycoon : Businessman Gordon Wu Is Building a Road to China -- and Betting His Fortune, and Hong Kong’s, on the Outcome.

GORDON WU IS ENJOYING HIMSELF. ON THIS HAZY spring day he has journeyed in his chauffeur-driven royal-blue Rolls-Royce from his 66-story headquarters in Wanchai, on Hong Kong Island, through the tunnel underneath the harbor to a modest classroom building in Kowloon. He has already patiently answered the questions, in both English and Cantonese, of about 15 Hong Kong reporters and cameramen who surrounded his car as it pulled up to the curb. When one straggling TV reporter who missed this show pleaded for help in matching his competitors, Wu happily obliged by doing the interview all over again.

Now Wu is holding forth to a group of visiting business-school students from Pittsburgh about one of his favorite subjects: what will happen to Hong Kong when China takes control of the colony from the United Kingdom in 1997.

Wu, 56, is one of Hong Kong’s richest businessmen. He is building a mass-transit system for Bangkok that may one day ease that city’s clogged traffic. His donations to his alma mater, Princeton University, have put him on the map of American philanthropy. And most important, with his development company, Hopewell Holdings Ltd., he is the biggest single foreign investor in China and the sponsor of a mammoth effort to build South China’s first expressway, a six-lane toll road from Hong Kong through the heart of dynamic Guangdong province to Canton. For good measure, Wu last year was at the center of Hong Kong’s hottest political firestorm, siding with China against the departing British overlords in an epic struggle for control of a new airport.

The American students proceed to quiz Wu about the expressway, the airport, his Bangkok plans and his other business projects around East Asia. But most of all, they want to know whether the capitalist free-for-all known as Hong Kong can survive into the next century.

“You want to know the future?” says Wu, his voice brimming with confidence. “I can tell you.” The Americans lean forward in their chairs. “I think that in six years and two months we’ll have a changing of the flag, and the British will play their favorite music, called ‘Beat a Retreat’--except that this time it will be for real.”

Wu pauses, teasing his audience.

“And Hong Kong will just go on as usual.”

The students laugh.

Calm? Yes. Self-assured? Yes. Yet a day later, for just a fleeting moment in the privacy of his office, Wu’s guard drops and his heady self-confidence melts away as he ponders the difficulties of doing business with Beijing, the dark side of a nation eager for prosperity but still caught in the grip of ideology and repression.

Wu is talking about former Chinese Premier and Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang. On the wall opposite Wu’s desk hangs a photograph from a happier time. It shows the dumpy, slightly round-shouldered Wu, and a few other Hong Kong businessmen and Chinese officials, leaning respectfully toward a smiling Zhao.

Throughout the decade of the 1980s, Zhao served as the principal supporter and patron in Beijing for Wu’s Hong Kong-Canton expressway. The dapper Chinese leader and the blunt-talking Hong Kong businessman had met in Beijing on numerous occasions. After the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations in China, however, Zhao was dismissed from the party leadership and placed under house arrest. While the restrictions have been eased somewhat since that time, some of his top aides remain either imprisoned or in exile.

A visitor asks Wu if has been able to see Zhao during his trips to Beijing over the past two years. “No, no,” he replies quickly. Then, with a laugh, he adds nervously: “Someday I might ask for that. You see, I don’t know politics that well, so I don’t want to get mangled in it. . . .”

Wu carefully emphasizes that the expressway is still going forward, that he knows many other top Chinese leaders--including President Yang Shangkun and Premier Li Peng, the men who have come to dominate Beijing in the repressive years since Zhao’s downfall.

“With China’s top leadership, I find that they are OK individually,” Wu explains, and then that little bit of doubt creeps into his voice. “But somehow, when it comes to the party line, there is something that I don’t understand.”

GORDON WU IS THE LIVING SYMBOL OF HONG KONG’S current desperate gamble. He, more than anyone else, represents the hope that Chinese pragmatism will triumph over ideology; that capitalism will triumph over socialism; that money will win out over Confucian graces and politesse; and that, in China’s never-ending regional struggles, the hustling, apolitical spirit of Canton will outlast the dictates of the mandarins of Beijing.

The odds might seem encouraging. In 1984, China and Britain reached an agreement returning Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. It guarantees the preservation of the colony’s capitalist economy, its civil liberties and legal system for 50 years after the changeover from British rule.

But no one can know for sure what China will do in Hong Kong after 1997. In the years since the agreement was signed, Chinese officials have already made it clear that they will not be shy about wielding their influence. The Chinese regime has persuaded Britain to restrict moves in Hong Kong toward a popularly elected legislature, and China’s state-controlled institutions, such as the Bank of China and the Chinese International Trade and Investment Corp., have played an ever-more-powerful role in Hong Kong. And come 1997, China will have the right both to appoint the chief executive of Hong Kong and to station troops there.

Many long-established British institutions, such as Jardine Matheon, the old-line trading company, and the Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corp., have reacted by transferring their holdings or corporate ownerships out of the colony to places such as Britain or Bermuda. Thousands of Hong Kong Chinese have followed suit by emigrating. By contrast, Wu has stayed very visibly in the game. Indeed, while others have run from the specter of China, Wu has moved toward it, becoming increasingly active in Guangdong province, the area of South China adjoining Hong Kong, which has become the most vibrant and fastest-growing part of the Chinese economy.

Wu and his associates have staked $1 billion on the Hong Kong-Canton expressway project alone--even more money, Wu likes to remind listeners, than the late Armand Hammer risked with a $600-million coal-mine joint venture in central China. In addition, Wu has built a hotel in Canton and a power plant elsewhere in Guangdong province, with still another in the works.

Although Wu has put his money into China and courted its leaders, he also keeps his distance. And his enthusiasm for China, Wu makes clear, is not a matter of political loyalty, admiration or gullibility. “Everybody in China will try to screw you if they can,” he says. “As long as you understand the ground rules and play accordingly, you’ll be OK.”

He stresses how important it is that Hong Kong remain separate from China, as promised in the 1984 agreement. Asked about a Chinese proposal to build a Hong Kong airport on Chinese soil, he shoots back: “What would happen if they don’t grant you landing rights? Those buggers could mess it up. How would you like to be in the hands of those buggers?”

In one sense, Wu’s move toward China is merely the upholding of a long Hong Kong tradition. He sees a moneymaking opportunity, and he is grabbing it. Beginning with the British opium traders of the 1800s, and continuing with Chinese immigrant moguls, Hong Kong has thrived on laissez-faire capitalism for 150 years.

Yet Gordon Wu may also be Hong Kong’s Last Tycoon. It is not yet clear whether anyone will become wealthy enough to qualify for the title of tycoon after China takes over in 1997. But if so, the next generation will probably be in the truest sense Chinese, not Hong Kong, tycoons. They will lose their independence; they will make money at China’s sufferance; they will be the creatures of a different power structure. They may well even turn out to be relatives or friends of Chinese leaders. In any event, it is hard to imagine a post-1997 tycoon openly referring to Chinese officials as “those buggers.”

THE FIRST TIME GORDON WU visited China in 1972, he was simply a tourist. It was the year of President Richard M. Nixon’s historic trip, when Mao Tse-tung and his revolutionary allies were just beginning to raise the Bamboo Curtain. Many Americans and Europeans were fascinated by their glimpse of the Forbidden Kingdom. But Wu, who went only as far as Canton, was shocked by what he saw. The government controlled everything: when people married, what job they had, what schools their children attended.

Even then, Hong Kong citizens knew that China might be in their future--the lease that gave control of the territory to Britain would be up one way or another in 1997. When Wu got back to Hong Kong, he was shaken by his firsthand vision of China and what it portended for his homeland.

“Honey, don’t argue. Let’s get the hell out of Hong Kong,” he remembers telling his wife, Ivy. “Do you want our kids to have to live under that system?”

But his wife refused to leave their Hong Kong home. “It’s a real nice place here,” she told Wu, “and 1997 is very far away.” Wu, who relishes confrontation, often jokes that he has never yet won an argument with his wife.

From that first trip, Wu seems to have gleaned a heavy dose of realism, too, about the extent to which Hong Kong’s future would depend on China’s. “If China goes, so does Hong Kong. Economically, we’re tied to them, whether we like it or not,” he says. Hong Kong gets its water--and even its vegetables--from China.

In the late 1970s, China’s new leader, Deng Xiaoping, beckoned for help from the outside world, particularly from overseas and Hong Kong Chinese. So in 1979, imbued with his sense of pragmatism, Wu decided to go back to the country that had so frightened him a few years earlier, this time scouring for business prospects.

“One, I want to find out if they (are) honest or not,” he told his wife at the time. “Second, if they are honest, then we can make some money. Of course, the third and most important factor is, if we can make things work in China, then Hong Kong is absolutely safe.”

Wu’s ambition even then was to build a toll road, a superhighway that would link Canton, a metropolitan area of 7 million and the hub of Guangdong province, with Hong Kong and Macao. The idea was to cut the driving time for the 80 miles between Canton and Hong Kong from about seven hours to little more than an hour. Wu figured that a company that owned a transportation franchise between two major cities couldn’t help but make money.

At first, Chinese leaders demurred. The newly appointed premier, Zhao Ziyang, told Wu that what China really wanted was new railroads. “The railway belongs to the 19th Century,” Wu countered. “This century is superhighways, particularly for short distances. You need door-to-door capability.”

The talks in Beijing brought out Wu’s strengths: persistence, persuasiveness, an ability to make it seem as if complex problems have simple answers. It didn’t hurt, either, that over the years, he drank, by his own estimate, about five gallons of maotai , the potent liquor that lubricates Chinese banquets. Finally, in 1984, he persuaded the Chinese. Guangdong province would contribute the land and labor, and Wu’s company would build the road. At first, Wu talked about splitting the profits from the tolls 50-50, but later, after obtaining Chinese guarantees of his loans, he agreed to give China 60% of the profits during the first 10 years and 70% after that.

“I need that extra protection (the loan guarantees) in case some stupid jerk comes in and closes the (China-Hong Kong) border,” Wu quips. “And (the deal) fit the business philosophy my mother taught me: 30% of a sure thing is better than 50% of nothing.” Back then, Wu was telling the press his road would be finished within a year or two. He admits ruefully: “I thought that in a communist state, since the state owns all the land, you get the land just like that.”

Instead, he discovered, communism had not wiped out the Chinese knack for making, demanding or extorting a buck. “The land was occupied by farmers, by huts, by trees,” Wu recalls. “You had to pay off each person individually.” Moreover, local bureaucrats held up their approval for some of the land acquisition, looking for favors or control over construction contracts. It took six painful years--and the influence of Zhao, who had become the general secretary of the party and a Wu supporter--for Wu to acquire the rights of way to the land.

Once the struggle was over, Wu decided that it had been, in its way, a good sign. Look, there’s nothing to worry about from China, he told associates in Hong Kong. They are capitalists up there, just like you and me.

Then came China’s 1989 political cataclysm.

By early that year Wu was ready to raise money to finance construction of his road. A stock offering for $500 million in new Hopewell shares was scheduled for June 5. But throughout the spring, the massive pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing and other Chinese cities raised questions about the country’s political stability, and Hopewell’s stock plummeted by about 25%. A week before the stock offering was supposed to take place, Wu canceled it. As it turned out, he was lucky he did. On the night of June 3, Chinese troops shot their way into Beijing, recapturing Tian An Men Square at a cost of at least several hundred lives and China’s reputation in the world.

Wu was stunned. The bloodshed brought him face-to-face with the dark side of China that he couldn’t fathom. Why would a country do something that ran so strongly against its pocketbook interests? How could ideology be worth so high a cost or such great trouble?

In the months following the massacre, Wu’s expressway, like everything else in the country, was put on hold.

“Tanks don’t pay tolls,” sighed a shaken Wu to a group of Chinese officials a few days afterward. He began concentrating his efforts to develop new business elsewhere in Asia.

IN PERSON, WU HARDLY CASTS AN IMPOSING OR authoritative figure. He is about 5-foot-6, wears simple pin-striped suits, and in business meetings lets his paunchy belly stretch out along and under the edge of the conference table in his office.

He makes not the slightest effort at grace or elegance. Other members of the Hong Kong Chinese elite speak in lofty Oxonian tones and with manners acquired at British public schools. Wu, educated at Princeton, has the blunt directness associated with the U.S. style of doing business. Bullshit is one of Wu’s favorite nouns, verbs and adjectives. And in one of his frequent moments of irritation with British officials in Hong Kong, Wu raises his hand in the air, middle finger extended, in a distinctly American hand gesture.

Wu’s appearance, manner and speech all converge in a single message: Money talks, efficiency counts, nothing else matters. His heroes are America’s 19th-Century tycoons--rich men like Morgan, Harriman and Stanford. You may call them robber barons, he says, but they helped build the United States. Wu dreams of doing the same for China--and for himself. His favorite American businessman today is H. Ross Perot, the Texas maverick and individualist who, Wu believes, should have been allowed to run General Motors. Perot, he says, is “very straight talking,” just as Wu believes himself to be.

Greeting visitors in his office, Wu wastes little time in small talk and can be downright curt. When former U.S. Ambassador to China Arthur W. Hummel Jr., now retired, stops by on a cloudy spring morning to make a pitch for a contribution to a Johns Hopkins University Center in the Chinese city of Nanjing, Wu listens for a few minutes and then cuts him off.

“I’m partial to Princeton,” he says.

“Oh, dear,” murmurs Hummel.

Like his father, Wu was raised in the once-tawdry Suzy Wong district of Wanchai on Hong Kong Island. His father started out as a cabdriver and eventually came to own a fleet of taxis. His mother, who was born in China, insisted that all of her offspring get the best education possible. Wu, one of nine children, graduated from a Jesuit high school in Hong Kong and then set sail for Princeton to study civil engineering.

In the mid-1950s, Wu was one of only a handful of Asians at Princeton. It was the era when the best-selling new books on campus included Sloan Wilson’s novel “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” and William H. Whyte’s “The Organization Man.” American business ruled the world, and no one could even imagine a time when it wouldn’t. “There were only about three blacks in the whole undergraduate student body,” recalls author William Greider, like Wu a member of Princeton’s class of 1958. “Princeton was Princeton then, with all that implies. It was a very aristocratic, upper-class place, but I don’t remember it as being anti-Asian. That wasn’t even an issue back then.”

Greider recalls Gordon Wu as “this sweet, gentle little guy, seemingly delighted by Princeton.” And Wu himself recalls his four years at the college with great fondness, saying that the school treated him very well--although, he admits, he was only a “gentleman’s C-plus” student.

Wu has since paid back his alma mater. He ranks with Laurance Rockefeller and Malcolm Forbes as one of the top individual donors to Princeton of all time. An example of his largess: the student residence-and-dining complex designed by noted Philadelphia architect Robert Venturi and called Gordon Wu Hall. Wu arranged to have the building dedicated in 1983, in front of his classmates at their 25th reunion.

After Princeton, Wu didn’t tarry in the United States. He left for Hong Kong soon after graduation. As he explains it now, his main gripe with America then was the Internal Revenue Service. One summer during college, he had worked as a surveyor in the United States, earning $1,485 but losing 28% of it in taxes. In Hong Kong, the tax rate was only 12%.

Wu returned home determined to put his engineering education to good use at lower tax rates. He worked briefly for a local engineer and for the Hong Kong government. Then he joined his father’s company, which by then had branched out into real estate.

In 1969, his father retired, and Wu decided to launch his own real estate firm. With guarantees provided by his father, Wu borrowed money from the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank. Wu called his new company Hopewell, the name of a town in New Jersey close to his beloved Princeton.

At first, Hopewell bought and developed small pieces of property. But within a short time, Wu was demonstrating the characteristics for which he is known in Hong Kong today: a penchant for big projects, contrarian thinking and a willingness to defy the Hong Kong government.

Early on, Wu sank about 40% of his money into a proposal for a 66-floor circular office building in Wanchai, the area where he grew up, which at the time was known mostly for the bars and nightclubs frequented by American GIs on R & R tours from Vietnam.

Cynics said the proposed location would never attract tenants, and the Hong Kong government sought to use zoning laws to bar the project. But Wu challenged the government in the courts and eventually won a Supreme Court ruling permitting him to proceed. When it opened in 1979, the building, Hopewell Centre, was the tallest structure in Hong Kong and, critics complained, one of the ugliest. But as Wu had foreseen, Wanchai itself changed, and his building succeeded in attracting tenants--among them Wu himself, who moved his corporate headquarters onto a top floor.

Such sound business judgment has allowed Wu to live well. He skis in Japan and Colorado, keeps an apartment in Manhattan and has three yachts in Hong Kong. A few years ago, when his father insisted on having a Cadillac, Wu bought one for him from an American factory, shipped it to Los Angeles, paid $7,000 to have it converted to right-hand drive, then shipped it on to Hong Kong. And when his children were old enough to be shown Disneyland, Wu and his wife bought a home in Los Angeles’ Mt. Olympus neighborhood and kept it for a few years, leaving it empty except for the few weeks a year they opened it up for family vacations to visit the sights of Southern California. You can do these sorts of things when your net worth is $500 million, as Wu estimates his is.

As the way he spends his money shows, Wu has always maintained close ties to the United States. Some of his siblings have become U.S. citizens, and all four of his children are in school here--his daughter June and son Thomas are at Princeton; another daughter, Carol, is at Harvard, and a son, Marcus, is at a special school for handicapped children in Connecticut. And although Wu has indulged in mah-jongg and horse racing--typical passions of a Hong Kong businessman--he also avidly follows American football games, both college and pro, via videotapes that a brother-in-law ships him from the United States.

Despite the American trappings, Wu is Hong Kong Chinese to the core. “I can move to any other country and I think they would welcome me,” he says. “But I don’t think I will be happy. If I went off to the United States, I’d probably be able to retire in luxury and comfort. But I don’t want to face the Greenies.”

Greenies , it turns out, is Wu’s derogatory term for environmentalists and government regulators. “No matter what you want to do in the United States, there are the Greenies. They stop progress,” Wu complains. “Even when you want to build your house, they say, no, no. Even when you want to build an extension in your back yard, you probably have to get 14 permits. The United States is run by a bunch of people who shout about things and don’t care about the costs.”

To a Hong Kong Chinese, living in a culture where money has regularly triumphed over almost everything, the Greenies seem to be the ultimate nightmare, to be feared even more than the Communist leaders of Beijing, because they don’t listen to the logic of the cash register. “In Canton,” says Wu, “they don’t like Greenies, they like greenbacks.”

IN AUGUST OF 1989,two months after the Tian An Men Square crackdown, Wu flew off to Bangkok. He was scouting for new business, looking to keep Hopewell occupied outside the Chinese maelstrom.

On the ride in from the airport, Wu and his aides got stuck in one of Bangkok’s infamous traffic snarls. Where others might merely fume, Wu, ever the civil engineer and entrepreneur, began planning, scheming and hustling. Sitting in the airport van, he pulled out a map and began studying where in Bangkok one might build mass-transit facilities.

By the end of 1990, after more than 30 trips to Bangkok, Hopewell beat out its competitors and was awarded a $3.2-billion contract to ease the city’s traffic congestion. Under Wu’s plan, a mammoth elevated rail-and-road system will be constructed along Bangkok’s canals, or klongs , and its railroad rights of way. The fares for the rail system will be 25 cents, Wu says, a figure kept low because the project will earn revenues by selling the air rights for commercial real estate development. The contract calls for the transit system to be completed by 1999.

Meanwhile, back in Hong Kong, Wu determinedly played his China card. He had finally rationalized the massacre in Tian An Men Square: It had all been a colossal mistake. “The shooting was not planned,” he says. “It was one of those things. If they had planned to start shooting, they should have started shooting five weeks earlier. . . . I believe, on the last day, they didn’t want to shoot.”

Last spring, Wu joined China in a nasty dispute with Hong Kong’s remaining British overlords. The contretemps broke out over plans for a new and desperately needed Hong Kong airport. Two years earlier, the Hong Kong government and British officials had unveiled a plan for an ambitious new facility, including port structures, roads and bridges. The British portrayed the project as an altruistic attempt to bolster Hong Kong’s commercial future by modernizing its infrastructure. But in Beijing, the $16-billion scheme was viewed as a final raid on the Hong Kong treasury by British engineering and construction companies.

Wu issued a stinging written critique of the airport project, which he gave to Chinese and British officials and which quickly appeared in the Hong Kong press. He also made his own recommendations for the airport, arguing that the project could be scaled back, at a savings of $9 billion--and that it could be paid for with private funds and car tolls, like his Canton expressway, rather than with money from the Hong Kong treasury. British officials were compelled to issue a public report disputing Wu’s figures.

In the process, Wu gave voice to the current mood among Hong Kong Chinese of fin de siecle contempt for the British. “We don’t like what the British are doing,” volunteers one Hong Kong shop owner, who asked not to be quoted by name. “It looks to us like they’re trying to get their last money out of Hong Kong. And we don’t have the faintest idea what’s going on. It’s like the races, like mah-jongg. We have no control over it.”

“They are a bunch of arrogant people up there in Government House,” Wu said in the midst of the dispute. “Hong Kong is run by a bunch of consultants. (They) don’t have to be accountable to anybody. Even Maggie Thatcher, she was arrogant on the poll tax and she’s out. Here in Hong Kong, these fellows can be as arrogant as they want, and no one can kick them out.”

The airport furor finally ended last summer when British and Chinese officials reached an agreement giving China some control over the project. Wu had no role in the deal, but his scathing attack had given validity to China’s argument that it deserved a say in such an expensive undertaking. It also cemented Wu’s position as a tycoon with more interest in the future than the past.

Amid these diversions, Wu and his company went back to work on the Canton expressway. In March, 1991, the land acquisition was completed. Wu also succeeded in obtaining a massive $800-million loan package to finance construction of the road. Fourteen of the 29 underwriting banks were Japanese; since Tian An Men, the Japanese have played the leading role in seeking to resume lending to China.

Wu hopes to begin paving the first 12-mile stretch of the expressway within the next few months and to complete the whole stretch from Hong Kong to Canton by 1993. A separate stretch of road running from Canton south to Macao, on the opposite side of the Pearl River from Hong Kong, is scheduled for completion by 1996. And Wu, still thinking big, is doing feasibility studies for a new scheme, to begin extending the road northward after 1997 from Canton to the Yangtze River, a distance of about 400 miles.

Wu can almost start adding up the profits. Once the first stretch from Hong Kong to Canton is finished, a car carrying Chinese visitors to Hong Kong--or a truck driver carrying a load from South China’s factories to Hong Kong--will pay a toll of 90 Hong Kong dollars (about $11.50) for the privilege. And the drivers may also spend money at the 12 rest stations along the way.

Over time, Wu has softened his damning aphorism, murmured shortly after the Tian An Men bloodshed, that “tanks don’t pay tolls.” He has modified the words slightly, just enough to take account of the chaotic, slightly zany, life-goes-on nature of Chinese repression. “I asked whether the tanks pay tolls,” he explains. “One smart guy answered, ‘If they’re on duty, no. If they’re off duty, then they’ll have to pay.’ ”

ONE DAY LAST YEAR, Gordon Wu’s Japanese bankers dropped by his Hopewell headquarters for a chat. Hiroshi Arai, deputy president of Dai-Ichi Kangyo Ltd.--one of the largest banks in the world--had flown in from Tokyo to attend a lavish cocktail party at the Hong Kong Hilton Hotel in honor of Wu’s expressway and, in particular, the $800-million financing of the road.

Arai entered the conference room flanked by four aides, all dressed in blue suits. Wu greeted them alone, suit jacket off, blue shirt sleeves rolled up.

“We are always grateful for the support that Dai-Ichi Kangyo has given us,” Wu said, speaking in English and pausing for the translation into Japanese. His opening was standard Asian politesse, but moments later Wu offered what might be construed as an impolitic dig at Japan’s economic power. “We certainly recognize Dai-Ichi Kangyo as a very good representative of Japan Incorporated.”

If the Japanese visitors took offense, they didn’t show it. Arai, thin, gray-haired and wearing wire-rimmed glasses, sat without expression, his hands folded on the table, like a judge presiding over a case. As Wu rehashed the details of the Canton expressway project, Arai nodded occasionally and murmured, “Ah.”

Soon Kunimoto Kojima, one of Arai’s aides and the head of Dai-Ichi Kangyo’s Hong Kong branch, changed the subject. He asked about the running dispute between China and Britain over the airport and, in particular, about Wu’s own ideas for the project. After a few minutes, the bankers got down to serious business.

“Japanese business groups are looking for business opportunities out of this (airport construction),” one of them told Wu. It seemed to be an indirect request that contracts be steered to Japanese firms.

Wu’s answer was characteristically blunt. If he had control of the construction of a new Hong Kong airport, he told his visitors, the main contractors would be Hong Kong, Japanese, American and Chinese.

The Dai-Ichi Kangyo bankers seemed puzzled. “Why Chinese?” one of them asked. China is not among the world leaders in the international construction and engineering business.

“We want China to be in,” Wu answered. “China, most favored nation.” And, looking out at Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor, he chuckled at his little joke.