TO GET A sense of how Hong Kong’s magnates and China’s Communist Party have coexisted, consider Tung Chee-hwa. When his family shipping concern, Orient Overseas Container Line (OOCL), faced bankruptcy in the mid-1980s, a Chinese state-owned bank swooped in to bail it out. Mr Tung became the territory’s chief executive after Britain handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997, until protests pushed him out of office in 2005. In 2017 he cashed out of OOCL through a $6.3bn sale to Cosco, another state-owned giant.
Closeness to power has characterised the entrepot’s business elites for decades. The relationship hinged on the “high-land-price policy”, an informal agreement to constrict the supply
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