China's New Banker

By Chaim Estulin/Hong Kong

Vincent Cheng bristles at the suggestion that ethnicity played a part in his becoming chairman of Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corp. last month. "I don't see myself as different from my Indian or British colleagues," he says. But Cheng--the former anticolonial student leader who is the first Chinese to head the once colonial bastion--has long defied expectations. After being detained in the early 1970s while protesting for better treatment of Hong Kong's poor, he became an in-house adviser to the colony's British Governor in the late 1980s. Now he will have to prove he can navigate the bulky $316 billion Asia-Pacific arm of the London-based HSBC Holdings into a booming banking frontier: China. In 2001 the bank became the first foreign commercial bank to buy into a mainland counterpart since the 1949 communist takeover, and it is now the largest foreign financial institution there. But it is limited by regulation to owning just a minority stake in two mainland banks. One of Cheng's goals is to encourage Beijing to relax foreign-ownership regulations, part of a broader effort to help write China's banking history. --By Chaim Estulin/Hong Kong