Businessman benefactor to home town in China

Press, 11 June 1987, Page 22

Businessman benefactor to home town in China

By

MARK O’NEILL

NZPA-Reuter Peking A man who left China months before the Communist take-over and became a shipping magnate and multi-millionaire is a hero in the town he left behind.

Sir Y. K. Pao, head of a global business empire based in Hong Kong, has earned the gratitude of the eastern Chinese port city of Ningbo by making lavish gifts for the construction of a school, a hospital and its first uni-

versity. He has also won the ear of China’s top leadership, Including Deng Xiaoping, who are eager to woo the wealth and talent of overseas Chinese to the modernisation of their motherland.

Sir Pao, aged 68, has a curious background for such a generous benefactor to a Communist State which banned private business for nearly three

decades after it was set up in 1949. He was born into a banking family and went to primary school in Ningbo, his ancestral town. He left in the 1930 s for Shanghai, China’s commercial capital,

where he attended secondary school and went into banking. Like thousands of others, he and his family left China in 1948, ahead of the victorious People’s Liberation Army and moved to Hong Kong,

where he has built a business empire that embraces shipping, trading, banking and an airline. Businessmen who stayed behind had their firms nationalised and some were killed, Ningbo residents say.

Sir Pao did not return to Ningbo until September 1984, when he proposed a gift of 50 million yuan ($27.68 million) toward building the city’s first university. Things have moved fast

since then. The first 280

students were enrolled last September and attended classes in two new red brick buildings. Other buildings are being built nearby.

“Without Sir Pao’s money, there would be no university,” said a Ningbo professor, Ke’an Qlu, a retired diplomat who is the university’s vice-presi-dent. ’ “Efforts were made be- • fore to build a university

but failed for want of funds and talent.” Professor Qiu said Sir Pao would not have returned without the opendoor policy announced by Deng in 1979, under which foreign investment was made welcome. Sir Pao’s hometown was declared one of 14 coastal cities able to give special treatment to such investment. His gifts to China include funds for a swimming pool, a university library and a hotel in Chinese cities other than Ningbo. He has proposed that a steel plant be built on the outskirts of Ningbo, to take advantage of an excellent harbour nearby which offers the deepest anchorage in China. “Sir Pao has given much to Ningbo but has not invested any money here,” said a local official. Driven away by poverty and lack of opportunity, 73,000 Ningbo people, more than 10 per cent of Ningbo’s present population, now live abroad. Homes belonging to overseas Chinese were forcibly occupied, even though relatives still lived

in them, and their land was redistributed. Under Deng’s policies, nearly all the homes have been returned and those who occupied them rehoused elsewhere. Sir Pao’s elegant ancestral home, in a village a few kilometres from. Ningbo, was already being used in 1949 by his teacher whose family have lived in it to this day. To reach it, the traveller goes on a road built last year with his money and named after his father. The road passes a secondary school he and other Ningbo exiles support On the road, peasants in blue cotton smocks pull carts laden with pigs, timber, vegetables or roof-tiles, past fields rich with yellow rape seed in blossom. It is a world away from Sir Pao’s present life — limousines, private yachts, exclusive penthouses and boardroom meetings where the fate of companies and millions of dollars is decided. The Pao ancestral home is surrounded by a

white wall and covered by curving Chinese tiles. The four-poster beds where Sir Pao and his brother used to sleep are in rich sandalwood with inlaid carving. “None of Sir Pao’s close family are left inNingbo,” a local official said. “The last one, a nephew, left for Hong Kong in February, at Sir Pao’s invitation.” Another official said that 170 Ningbo people living overseas had returned since 1949 to settle in their native city. The official was asked about the irony of one of Asia’s richest capitalists contributing to an anticapitalist country. “Sir Pao is a businessman. He is not the enemy of the Communist Party. He left here to develop his business, not to escape communism. “History changes. Policy cannot always be the same. Your enemy today may not be your enemy tomorrow. Our main purpose now is to reunite the motherland and carry oh economic modernisation." ‘ • t ’ •