Rebecca Fung
speaker
36 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 6 Jul
Rebecca Fung’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So, yeah, for like a business person, it makes sense to de-risk, as they would say.
President Trump kind of bragged about it as a victory. He said that we're taking it back.
It changed pretty dramatically. You know, Xi was infuriated by it. And that's according to people familiar with the matter, because they were caught off guard that they suddenly lost this very important bargaining chip.
Our reporting basically showed that before CK and BlackRock signed the deal, Chinese officials were trying to include the ports in the massive negotiation deal with the U.S. And suddenly the deal itself became geopolitically sensitive. Yeah.
Basically, the biggest question is like, is the deal going to get done or not?
It'll be a really, really risky move if he does that because... China right now is in the middle of courting foreign investors and hoping for foreign direct investment into China.
And if he actually forcefully pulled the deal, it sends quite a bad signal, I think, to global investors, especially because the ports are not actually in mainland China or Hong Kong.
So there's like a three-part response to this, basically. Okay. First, that there's, you know, that series of attacks on newspapers. And then, secondly, officials were telling some of the Chinese state-owned businesses to not do new business with Li Ka-shing. And the state-owned firms, you know, were told to hold off on any new collaboration.
With businesses linked to Li Ka-shing and his family, that's already sort of an escalation. Yeah. And then there's like a third tool that Beijing can do, and it has done, basically, that they can throw in an antitrust review.
We had reporting that basically shows that the officials in Beijing are hoping that by sending signals about potential regulatory challenges, the two sides, Hutchinson and BlackRock, would just pull back by themselves voluntarily.
This is the most serious hurdle yet that this deal is facing. China and Panama are... close and the Chinese corporations invested a lot in Panama. This audit began after the deal was announced. And now that the auditor is looking into it, it could potentially drag on for months and that could definitely scuttle the deal.
We really don't know. It kind of depends on what else at the moment that Beijing can do to make Li Ka-shing and his son care. People kept saying and investors kept saying that Li Ka-shing only has 12% of revenue from Hong Kong and mainland China. So it's not that much in the grander scheme of things. Maybe he just doesn't care. However, 12% is still 12%.
It's not nothing. Yeah. So I think right now the decision kind of rests within Li Ka-shing and his son and, you know, his close advisors to basically weigh going through with the deal. How much would that anger Beijing? And what's sort of the tradeoff here?
I mean, he's 96. It does seem to be a bit of an unfortunate final act of his decades of business career. But I think what it says more is just that the company that Li Ka-shing built many decades ago is now in a different environment.
It sends a very chilling signal to other Hong Kong tycoons and their kids, second generation, basically. And these tycoons will be watching very closely because many of these tycoons are the people and the families who made Hong Kong Hong Kong over the years. And it basically says that, you know, doing business is... is no longer just business. There's political risk involved in that.
I think they're going to ask themselves which side they want to be on, whether it's US or China. And I'm not sure which side they will end up choosing, but that's a question that they would definitely ask themselves because it seems now that you can't just do like a commercial deal. You do need to choose a side.
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