HONG KONG'S POWERBROKER IS OUR BENEFACTOR

ERIC ELLIS

June 1994

IN THE rarified air of his art gallery, it's difficult to imagine Hong Kong billionaire Tsui Tsin-tong, Gordon Gekko-immaculate in braces and starched white shirt, rummaging through the back alleys of a sweaty Hong Kong flea market.
But if his staff and the hype surrounding his vast private collection of ancient Chinese dynastic art are to be believed, Tsui (pronounced choy) has found some of his most valued pieces sifting through the wheat and chaff of the Cat Street markets.

It's a classic kind of Hong Kong Chinese story, in a way that Tsui is a classic kind of a Hong Kong Chinese tycoon.
The story gives him great "face", implying that he has an expert eye for a treasure and that despite his vast wealth, business success and lofty perch in society, he is enough of a "man of the people" to even consider going to a grubby market.

It also implies that as a Chinese he was both generous and savvy, paying the (lesser mortal) dealer many times his asking price for the piece, giving him face, but many times under its true worth, thus getting a bargain.

Stories like this abound in Hong Kong. Most are apocryphal, put around by sycophantic staff and pawing retainers to boost the face and public image of their boss.

But some are true and whether or not the one surrounding Tsui is or is not, it is related often enough for its veracity to become largely irrelevant. It makes Tsui a big man.

Fifty-four year-old Tsui owns what is considered one of the world's largest and most valuable private collections of Chinese art, valued at between $US400 million and $600 million.

A fraction of it will soon find its way to Canberra's Australian National Gallery, donated by Tsui to a new gallery named after him following (more face here) a meeting with one Paul Keating.

In the verbal equivalent of displaying a portrait of yourself shaking hands with a powerful man, Tsui and his curator in Hong Kong tell the story in broken English of how he visited the National Gallery some years ago and then went to meet Keating.

Collectors both, Keating asked this "giant of a man" (his curator's recollection of the conversation) what he thought of the National Gallery.

Tsui was supposed to have said that Australia didn't have a significant gallery dealing with Chinese or Asian art.

"He (Keating) agreed with me and he said he was planning to make an Asian art gallery," Tsui recollects. "I told him if he decides to make a Chinese gallery, I'm very happy to donate some pieces." The name came as a bonus. More face.

Tsui says altruism is the motivating factor behind his donation of some of his 3,000-strong collection to the Canberra gallery.

"I have very little business connections to Australia," he says. Tsui says the same is true in the donations he's made to galleries in Chicago, New York, Toronto and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

"There must be three reasons why I donate a piece. The management of the gallery must be good, they must have a strong interest in Chinese art collection and there must be a Chinese community to support the museum."

Tsui first began collecting 20 years ago, his first piece, a porcelain dish.

"In the beginning, it was just for fun, not very serious, but now I am very active and there are few auctions that I don't know about or am not represented at."

Collecting and connecting is something Tsui seems quite skilled at.

With as much vigour as his art collection, Tsui has spent an active past few years putting together one of Asia's most intriguing venture-capital funds, the New China Hong Kong Group.

In the NCHKG, he has collected such divergent Chinese business interests that politics might not readily understand - Taiwanese money, Chinese Communist Party backers, various powerful Hong Kong Chinese interests, mainland provincial governments and a selection of the region's notable overseas Chinese tycoons. Oh, and Wall Streeter Goldman Sachs. Tsui says it's all strictly business. Like his art collecting, there is no higher goal.

"They (the investors) are all getting returns of about 10 per cent, which is all right in this market," he says.

But gossip in Hong Kong's emerging political salons finds it impossible to exclude Tsui from the running to be Hong Kong's first "chief executive" when Beijing takes over the colony from Britain on July 1, 1997.

The chief executive slot broadly equates to the current colonial position of Governor, the most senior political figure in what China will call the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong.

Under the British, the governorship has tended to be selected from diplomatic, or, like the current Chris Patten, political ranks in London.

Under economically reforming and rampant China, Hong Kong will likely become, in effect, the world's first truly corporate State, a city solely designed for business, one to make China richer.

That would suggest a businessman would be the best person for the task, if only to preserve one's own business interests far away from those inconvenient Western notions of conflicts of interest that Hong Kongers get burdened by through the British link.

Tsui keeps them guessing, saying he has no interests in politics, that rumours of his becoming SAR chief executive are just that.

And yet his actions tend to sometimes contradict him, as well as confuse pundits.

His gallery, significantly on a floor of the old communist Bank of China headquarters in Hong Kong, shows pictures of him, smiling, next to Princess Diana.

He has a knight of the realm, former Hong Kong senior civil servant Sir David Akers-Jones, controversially China's only foreign "adviser" in Hong Kong, on the boards of his companies.

He is said to have mediated during the often bitter wrangling between London and Beijing over Hong Kong's new airport, shuttling between Number 10 Downing Street to secretly meet John Major, and then to Zhongnanhai, the Chinese leadership compound, to deal with Chinese Premier Li Peng.

He is famous for his extremely close links to the Hong Kong office of the New China News Agency, Britain's shadow in Hong Kong and Beijing's influential unofficial embassy. He is supposed to give each senior Xinhua official a box of moon-cakes every Chinese mid-autumn festival and donated a karaoke machine to them, karaoke being the most common pastime favoured by Xinhua spin-doctors when generating a human face for China's steely bureaucrats in Hong Kong.

The main office of his CNT Group holding company - which controls the main bus company that transits Hong Kong and southern China, a big building and paint supplies group and myriad property holdings - is in the new Bank of China building in Hong Kong, usually taken here as a symbol of support to Beijing.

"China trusts him," says Sir David Akers-Jones, who is also the figurehead chairman of National Mutual operations in Hong Kong. "They know what he is capable of and they admire his broad vision."

Tsui boasts long-standing links to China, even before the accession of Deng Xiaoping and his far-reaching reform process.

Although Tsui denies it, he reportedly made a lot of money in the late 1970s and early '80s from his connections with the mainland-owned China North Industries Corporation, or Norinco.

Norinco is closely linked to the People's Liberation Army. Deng Xiaoping's son-in-law is a senior Norinco official and the group is often the subject of intense foreign diplomatic scrutiny, frequently suspected by foreign embassies in Beijing of being the PLA's procurement and selling agency.

Even though Tsui denies he has ever dealt in military items, his public-relations machine in Hong Kong willingly dispenses articles detailing his links. An exhaustive Far Eastern Economic Review profile in May 1993 reported that in 1981 Tsui set up a company in Hong Kong called Overseas Industrial, which described its business in its articles of association to "carry forth the trade or business of manufactures of explosives, gunpowder of every description (whether sporting or military) nitroglycerine, dynamite, gun cotton, blasting powder or other substances or things and to purchase, manufacture, sell and generally deal in explosives".

The spectre haunts Tsui and it is clearly a touchy subject. After telling the AFR in an interview that such rumours were "100 per cent wrong", he quickly and uncomfortably moved the conversation back to his art.

In 1991, he told a Chinese-language magazine, "I can say to you honestly that every penny of my wealth comes from legal business, not from arms sales. I would not take money from dead bodies."

Tsui is clearly a wealthy man, and a secretive one at that. Having made his pile, these days he prefers to let his art collection do the introductions for him. But come July 1, 1997, a lot of smart money is riding on his eventually transferring that gallery from downtown Central to a colonial building above it, perhaps even Tsui's.