Creating Wealth in Twenty-first Century China: Li Ka-shing and His Progenies

Known as "Mr. Money" and "Superman" in Hong Kong and Asia, Li Ka-shing epitomizes China's spectacular rise from a moribund communist state to a free market colossus. One year after Deng Xiaoping launched his modernization process in 1978, Li purchased a British firm in Hong Kong called Hutchison Whampoa. From then on, his ability to create wealth globally exploded exponentially. Using a case study approach, the author analyzes Li's systematic rise from poverty and life as a plastic flower salesman to one of the world's richest individuals with investments in banks, container ports, digital and traditional media, energy, property, and retail. What emerges from this article is an entrepreneur so skilled in reading the market, so astute in hiring talent, so bold in creating and divesting investments, so Chinese in his business values, and so loyal in bringing friends into his financial arena that creating wealth seemed almost like an after-thought. Yet for his sons, Victor and Richard, the challenge is to equal or surpass their father. To know why and how Li Ka-shing became wealthy is to know why China is such a commercial success today.