As Hong Kong prepares to reunite with China, the Shanghainese are leading the way. Like Tung, all the major rivals for the post of chief executive had roots in Shanghai. His No. 2 in Hong Kong’s new Chinese government, Chief Secretary Anson Chan, has Shanghai connections. And when Tung goes to Beijing, he can chat in the Shanghai dialect with President Jiang Zemin, the city’s former mayor, and with Zhu Rongji, the economic czar from Shanghai.
In his new job, Tung will draw on the survival instincts for which Shanghainese as a whole, and his family in particular, are famous. They were the elite of Hong Kong’s postwar refugee society, energizing the sleepy colony with the scope of their dreams and ambitions. Long before ending up in the enclave, some of Shanghai’s big industrial families had lost several fortunes-to the Japanese, to profligate sons, to civil war. They rebounded by constantly coping, morphing Eastern tradition with Western efficiency, street smarts with savoir faire. Their style, in short, couldn’t have made a better fit with Hong Kong. By 1949, hundreds of Shanghai firms had relocated to the territory, most of them assuming that their refuge in the colonial backwater would be brief. It was no coincidence that they included Hong Kong’s great ocean barons, including Tung’s father, C. Y. Tung. “Ships were floating assets,” says Frank Chao, who inherited his father’s WahKwong shipping empire. “When you left, you took them with you.”
AS FIRSTBORN SON OF A Shanghai shipping magnate, C. H. Tung came into a life of high expectations. His Chinese given name, Chee-hwa, means “Building China,” and on the back of his photo taken at the age of 2 his father wrote, “Welcome the dawn of a great new generation!” C. Y. Tung loved the sea. He revered China’s 15th century eunuch admiral, Zheng He. At 21, C.Y. himself joined a shipping firm and married the daughter of a shipping boss.
As his empire grew, so did his political connections. He became closely associated with the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek, and his company shared the same plum-blossom logo as Chiang’s Kuomintang party. As the tide turned against Chiang during China’s civil war, C.Y.’s own days in Shanghai became numbered. In early 1949, as Mao’s communists were routing Chiang’s forces, the elder Tung ordered the ships he controlled to flee Shanghai. Some steamed to Hong Kong, where he had established himself in 1941. Others went to Taiwan, ferrying tens of thousands of defeated Kuo-mintang troops. Also on board, it’s rumored in Taipei Hong Kong, though denied by the family, were crates packed with some of the priceless imperial treasures now held by Taiwan’s National Palace Museum.
Despite his links to Chiang, C.Y. was no Nationalist ideo-logne. In 1950, two British merchants reportedly persuaded him to use his vessels on runs between Hong Kong and Shanghai. That infuriated Chiang’s KMT regime in Taiwan, which ordered C.Y.’s arrest on charges of “assisting banditry.” The elder Tung did not return to Taipei until 1965 (his sister’s marriage to the son of a Nationalist general helped clear up the misunderstanding). A decade later, the Beijing regime that he had fled made its own overtures. Government agents gave the Tungs’ longtime Shanghai retainer, Xu Lianxiang, an exit permit for Hong Kong. “They wanted me to ask C. Y. Tung to come back to the mainland and maybe invest,” Xu, now 90, told Newsweek. She did as instructed, but C.Y. never returned. The “Onassis of the East” passed away in April 1982, while hosting a dinner for Monaco’s Princess Grace, and is buried in Hong Kong.
He left his elder son the inheritance of a true Shanghai dreamer: a huge, boldly constructed shipping empire wallowing in debt. Trying to save the Tungs’ corporate dynasty in the mid-1980s–when the figures in red ink added up to $2.68 billion-was like “debt restructuring for a small country,” recalls Jeffrey Garten, dean of the Yale School. of Management and C. H. Tung’s financial adviser during the crisis. Tung’s approach was “100 percent Chinese and 100 percent Western,” says Garten. As 500 angry bankers prepared for one crucial meeting in Tokyo, Tung at first hesitated to show up himself: a fortuneteller had not yet determined whether it was a good day. Disbelieveing, an associate says he blurted out: “Are you aware this is the biggest day of your life?” Luckily for everybody, the fortuneteller deemed the day auspicious after all.
Like his father, Tung cared about profits more than politics. Seeking a financial bailout for his company, Tung was turned away by Taiwan. But Beijing came to his rescue. A pro-Beijing Hong Kong entrepreneur, Henry Fok, helped arrange a syndicated loan of $120 million, Tung publicly recognized Beijing’s role only last October. “Were there Chinese actors in the group?” he said. “I can say for sure there were.”
C. H. Tung, who has donated funds to a mainland maritime institute and set up a soft-drinks factory near Shanghai, may now be living an old Chinese proverb: Falling leaves return to their roots. The old saying may also hold true for Hong Kong’s most famous Shanghainese dream spinner, legendary film producer Run Run Shaw, who began his career with his brother Runme in Shanghai’s Chinese City in the 1920s. In the last 10 years, from his base in Hong Kong, Shaw has donated nearly $195 million to philanthropic projects in China.
The Shaws left Shanghai in 1927, moving to Singapore and opening 139 theaters across Malaya. In 1941, three days before Singapore fell to the Japanese, Shaw and his brother buried their gold, jewelry and currency in the garden, and waited out the war. After the Japanese left four years later, the brothers started digging. “The pearls were no good; never bury pearls,” says Shaw with a lepre chaun’s grin. “But everything else was OK: the jade, the diamonds, the paper money.”
When he judged Singapore’s film scene as too expensive, Shaw shifted to Hong Kong in 1959. His approach was bold-big-ger budgets, longer movies-and his Can tonese audiences loved the results. Now a nearly mythical figure, the godfather of Hong Kong’s Shanghainese, Sir Run Run pointedly endorses C. H. Tung, son of his close friend, as chief executive. Tung mixes well with Westerners, he impresses Beijing, “and when his father’s business was poor, he turned it around,” says Shaw. “Those are strong qualities.”
IN MEMORIES BURNISHED BY TIME, many of Hong Kong’s Shang-hainese remember life in the pre-revolutionary city as a spectacle worthy of Sir Run Run. Lee Woo-sing, a gold trader since the age of 15, recalls the smoky jazz club above the Canidrome, where black American musicians played late into the night. He can still hear the all-night fireworks and street dancing that greeted the victory over Japan. And he remembers the wild-eyed inflation that struck Shanghai as Mao’s forces drew near. In the end, stock traders simply left bulging stacks of worthless currency piled on the exchange floor because “there was too much to lock up,” Lee says. In May 1949 he awoke to a strange silence. Peeking outside, he saw People’s Liberation Army soldiers direst in baggy green uniforms, sitting quiet: ly on the pavement. “They were extremely young and very polite,” recalls Lee, “cooking rice in big pots.”
A year later, Lee slipped over the border into Hong Kong. He started trading gold again-at one point sharing an office with C. H. Tung’s firm-and devised the hand signals that traders still use on the floor today. The Shanghainese newcomers had a “long-term financial vision” that they passed on to the Cantonese locals, Lee says. “Together we made a success.”
It was not only the shipping barons and textile tycoons who prospered. Shanghainese who came to Hong Kong also found jobs as barbers, taxi dancers and tailors. North Point’s “Little Shanghai” area teemed with nightclubs. One held Hong Kong’s first beauty contest, won by a Shanghainese beauty queen, of course. “They have a strong sense of self-importance,” says Shanghai-born banker Sin-ming Shaw, who recalls how his refugee family had to bribe their way out of trouble in 1952-after Hong Kong police barged into their flat to find his father smoking opium.
That superior attitude, so Shanghainese, helps explain why the refugees who made it to Hong Kong, even those who have prospered mightily in their adopted home, still hold the great city of their roots in almost mystical affection. The Tung family’s former two-story villa in Shanghai, with its winding staircase and hardwood floors, is a crowded mess of a communal home now. A spacious bathroom, ’ with its elegant, cloverleaf-shaped windows, is adorned with dirty mops and cakes of soap. The Tung children and a nanny slept in the nursery, a room now occupied by the family of Zhu Ailian, 76, a schoolmate of Tung’s aunt. “She asked me to move in a few months after the PLA entered Shanghai,” says Zhu. “It seemed the Tungs weren’t coming back.”
Yet they have come back, spiritually at least. While vis iting the family tomb in 1990, C. H. Tung had to determine the disposition of his ancestors’ violated remains-no small matter for an eldest son and keeper of traditions. “Chinese superstition says moving ancestral bones can change a clan’s entire fortune,” says Xu Lianxiang, the retainer who kept the bones hidden for years. “Who dared disrupt the grave?” Tung dared. He asked for a renovation of the tomb. Two years later he returned to inspect the results and to burn incense before his grandfather’s new, dragon-carved tombstone. In a gesture of filial piety, the future leader of Hong Kong kowtowed before the remains of his ancestors-enlisting the spirits in the cause of his future good fortune. So far, the spirits have obliged.
