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How a Renowned HK Tycoon Ended Up on Beijing’s Bad Side Over Panama Canal Deal

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WSJ

Mar 21, 2025 10:40 AM IST

Li Ka-shing (96) earned the nickname “superman” for his uncanny sense of when to sell. Not for the first time, one of his deals has angered Beijing.

No one embodies the rise of Hong Kong as a global commercial center better than Li Ka-shing, who arrived as a refugee in 1940 and became one of Asia’s richest businessmen.

How a Renowned Hong Kong Tycoon Ended Up on Beijing’s Bad Side Over Panama Canal Deal PREMIUM

How a Renowned Hong Kong Tycoon Ended Up on Beijing’s Bad Side Over Panama Canal Deal

Now, in the twilight of a business career that has spanned eight decades, the 96-year-old billionaire is staring down a fusillade of criticism from Beijing, which is imposing ever-tighter control over the territory.

The standoff was triggered by the kind of deal that earned Li the nickname “superman” for his uncanny sense of when to buy—and sell. With the growth of trade threatened by Trump-era tariffs, Li’s flagship company, CK Hutchison, announced a deal in early March to sell dozens of ports to a group led by BlackRock.

The $23 billion deal would limit Hutchison’s exposure to a global trade downturn. But the assets for sale included politically sensitive ports at either end of the Panama Canal. President Trump, apparently referring to the two ports, said in his inaugural address that “China is operating the Panama Canal” and “we’re taking it back.”

Trump said the BlackRock group’s purchase meant that the U.S. was starting to reclaim its rights. In Beijing, the deal stirred the opposite reaction. Chinese leader Xi Jinping fumed that he had lost a potential card in negotiations with Washington without getting a heads-up.

The Panama Canal is a point of contention between the U.S. and China.

Pro-Beijing Hong Kong media have published commentaries denouncing the deal, without mentioning Li by name. A nationalist commentator—Hu Xijin, former editor in chief of the state-run tabloid Global Times—took on the tycoon directly.

“I’d advise the person in charge of CK Hutchison to stand up for himself and bravely contend with the threats from the U.S.,” Hu wrote recently in a blog post titled “What Should Li Ka-shing Do in the Eye of the Storm?” If the Hong Kong company was attracted only by the financial terms, Hu said, it was “trading integrity for profits.”

Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London, said asking for Beijing’s permission was out of the question for Li because he never would have received it.

“He would have lost the deal, and he would have confirmed to Donald Trump that Hutchison operates on behalf of the Communist Party of China,” Tsang said.

The episode marks an unsettling coda to a business career that brought Li the ear of Chinese leaders and a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II in 2000.

Li Ka-shing has become the richest person in Hong Kong, with estimated wealth of $38 billion.

Born in China, Li started his empire in Hong Kong in the 1950s manufacturing plastic flowers. His 1979 takeover of the trading group Hutchison Whampoa was considered a landmark because it put a local person in charge of the kind of business that had always been run by British nationals.

Li built the company into a global conglomerate, with interests in ports, telecommunications, drugstores and more. He became the richest person in Hong Kong, with his wealth recently estimated by Forbes at $38 billion.

Li is renowned for his sense of timing—whether buying Hong Kong real estate during downturns in the 1960s or selling Hutchison’s controlling stake in the U.K. mobile-phone operator Orange in 1999 for about $15 billion, near the peak of the dot-com bubble.

After Beijing’s 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown on students led many investors to flee, Li signaled his belief in China’s economic prospects by committing more than $1 billion in 1992 to develop a container-handling port in Shanghai—betting correctly that the mainland would compete directly with Hong Kong.

As the mainland’s economic power eclipsed the territory, Beijing grew assertive over national interests in business deals—especially after Xi took power in 2012. If Beijing had once consulted Li and Hong Kong’s other tycoons, it now lectured them.

Li Ka-shing was among Hong Kong business people who greeted Chinese leader Xi Jinping in 2017.

At times, it appeared that Li wasn’t listening. In the midst of turmoil for China’s financial markets in 2015, including a stock-market slide and a fumbled reset of the country’s currency, Li pursued the sale of Shanghai property. To some in Beijing, it looked as though he was endorsing a charge toward the exits.

“Don’t Let Li Ka-shing Get Away,” declared a commentary at the time from a think tank affiliated with the official Xinhua News Agency. It described Li as a “monster with fangs” who had forgotten that his fortune derived from supportive government policies in ports, property and telecommunications.

Li defended his business strategy and expressed confidence in the Chinese leadership, and the furor died down. People’s Daily, the official Communist Party mouthpiece, showed sympathy for Li, saying in a commentary that it was natural for capitalists to seek profits.

In 2018, shortly before his 90th birthday, Li stepped down as chairman of CK Hutchison and handed the reins to his son Victor Li, now 60.

But he didn’t fully retire. The next year, the elder Li raised Beijing’s ire anew by trying to take a middle ground when fierce clashes broke out on Hong Kong streets between pro-democracy advocates and local authorities.

He took out a pair of ads that wrapped the front pages of several Hong Kong newspapers. One addressed protesters, saying the best intentions can have the worst outcomes, while the other appeared aimed at authorities by referring to a Tang dynasty poem that called on an empress not to kill her own children.

In recent years, CK Hutchison has trimmed its reliance on mainland China and Hong Kong while investing in Europe. Still, it continues to invest in the mainland and Hong Kong, and Li is widely admired as a philanthropist in both places for the billions of dollars his foundation has spent supporting education, health and other causes.

Other Hong Kong tycoons will be watching whether Beijing interferes with the Panama ports deal and might consider moving more business out of Hong Kong if Li is punished too much over it, said Tsang at SOAS. “I think it’s going to be counterproductive to what the Chinese government wants,” he said.

Write to Rebecca Feng at rebecca.feng@wsj.com and James T. Areddy at James.Areddy@wsj.com

How a Renowned Hong Kong Tycoon Ended Up on Beijing’s Bad Side Over Panama Canal Deal

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