Dynasties Rule OK Thanks To Unwritten Law Of Succession
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Rowan Callick
05/21/2001
Australian Financial Review
Page 9
Copyright of John Fairmfax Group Pty Ltd
Asia's business leaders are at last starting to get the message from the economic collapse of the late 1990s: keep it all inside the family, and you may end up losing it all. But the region's politicians seem to have drawn the opposite conclusion. They are keeping power in the family, now more than ever.
Hong Kong's iconoclastic new-wave entrepreneur Jimmy Lai has issued a manifesto for a change in business culture, as the new economy presses on towards dominance of the region despite the bursting of the internet bubble.
He says that in the 21st century the new priorities must be: empower your employees, and offer stock options and partnerships.
Lai, founder of the Giordano garment empire, has just launched a new magazine in Taiwan after closing a loss-making e-commerce bid to break Hong Kong's supermarket duopoly.
He says: ``We in Asia need to change and to learn to be more creative. We must be bold enough to let go of our conservative legacies.
``Nepotism and cronyism must give way to transparency and free competition.''
But few political leaders are in a position to urge such challenges on their private sectors. For Asia is today throwing up the same names as earlier generations, even as it edges towards democracy.
The Philippines' President, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, and Indonesia's Vice-President and president-in-waiting, Megawati Soekarnoputri, often swap notes. Both grew up in their countries' presidential palaces when their fathers were in office.
Aung San Su Kyi, who will almost certainly take power in Burma at some time, is the daughter of the country's founding father.
Kim Jong-nam, the crown prince to North Korea's ``dear leader'' Kim Jong-il, was a few days ago deported from Japan after trying to enter with a counterfeit passport bought in the Dominican Republic.
The ``young general,'' set to follow his father and grandfather Kim Il Sung as national leader if the communist dynasty survives, wished to take his wife and four-year-old son to Tokyo's Disneyworld.
Two of the most powerful people in Thailand and Cambodia, arguably the most influential, are their hereditary monarchs, King Bhumibol Adulyadej and King Norodom Sihanouk. The third most powerful man in China's official hierarchy, Li Peng, chairman of the parliament, is the adopted son of the late, long-serving premier Zhou Enlai.
Japan's undiplomatic new Foreign Minister, Makiko Tanaka, is the daughter of the most influential postwar prime minister, Kakuei Tanaka. In last year's general election, 145 candidates for the 500 Lower House seats were the children of MPs.
Singapore's Deputy Prime Minister is Lee Hsien Loong, son of the Senior Minister and founding father, Lee Kuan Yew.
And in Papua New Guinea, Arthur Somare has succeeded his father, the country's first prime minister, Michael Somare, as governor of East Sepik province.
Asia is not, of course, unique in adopting a particularly oligarchic form of democracy.
But in Asia, more than in the West, business tends to look for a political lead.
And the region retains more than its share of dynastic corporations. These include Hong Kong-based Cheung Kong (Holdings), the flagship of Li Ka-shing, named in a survey last year as the most powerful man in Asia and today the biggest single foreign investor in Australia.
His elder son Victor Li is the heir apparent at Cheung Kong the most profitable company in the world in 1999 while younger son Richard Li has been making his own name at Pacific Century CyberWorks , the main Asian partner of Telstra.
In mainland China, the emerging generation of leaders' children many of them educated at US business schools is shifting into the new source of power there business.
Jiang Mianheng, son of President Jiang Zemin, is a major telecoms player, while Zhu Yunlai, son of Premier Zhu Rongji, is operating a joint venture between Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and China Construction Bank.
Jimmy Lai whose Hong Kong Chinese language publications, including Apple Daily, earn him about $75 million profit a year reflects, in an essay in Asiaweek magazine: ``The new generation of Asian entrepreneurs is facing up to the new challenges.
``They know that the hubris of `Asian values', the idea that somehow our business values should be different from the West's, was debunked during the financial crisis that ravaged the region.
``Until recently, Asian markets were heavily protected and corporate bosses often the heads of big, family-owned concerns could plan everything as certainly as clockwork.''
Lai says the internet has taught the new generation that business can change in revolutionary ways, and that creativity and innovation, not connections, are what count. The concept of the state as family business, however, is dying hard.
Used with permission of wsj.com |
