First UN Leader from China
The election of Dr. Margaret Chan as the Director-General of WHO in
November 2006 marks the first time that a Chinese national has
headed a United Nations agency.
The 60-year-old woman is known to mainland people for her solid
professional background, strong leadership and tremendous
experience in public health, for which the Chinese Central
Government nominated her and supported her bid.
The former Hong Kong health chief joined the WHO in 2003, and
she had been the UN agency's Assistant Director-General for
communicable diseases before announcing her campaign for the top
post of director-general in July 2006.
As health chief of Hong Kong in 1997, Chan was credited with
successfully tackling the first known outbreak of the virulent H5N1
strain of avian influenza by ordering a swift and massive cull of
chickens, despite strong opposition to the move.
Chan has stated that her five-year term starting from January
2007 will focus on the health of Africans and women.
A Hong Kong Hero
As Asia's richest and most influential investor, Hong Kong tycoon
Li Ka-shing has a fortune valued at $23 billion in Forbes
magazine's latest world billionaire rankings, which makes him the
ninth richest person in the world. The 79-year-old controls a real
estate developer, a cell phone provider, retailers, a major
supplier of electricity to Hong Kong and the world's largest
operator of container terminals.
Born in Guangdong Province, he fled with his family to Hong Kong
in 1940 when Japanese forces launched their invasion of south China
during World War II. As a high school drop out, Li had to support
his family, including his widowed mother and three younger siblings
by doing manual work at the age of 14. Li began his rise in the
business world founding a Hong Kong plastics firm and burst onto
the public stage in 1979, when he made a deal giving him control of
the ailing British-owned conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa.
Li's legions of fans admire his rags-to-riches story, work
ethics, soft-spoken business style, business shrewdness and nose
for buying and selling at just the right time. Li has further
burnished his reputation by becoming perhaps Asia's most prominent
philanthropist, who has pledged to donate one third of his wealth
to the Li Ka-shing Foundation, a private fund he established purely
for charitable purposes. Up to 2001, Shantou University, in Li's
hometown in Guangdong and considered a life-time commitment by Li,
had received over HK$ 2 billion in donations since its founding in
1981.
Fighter Economist
Larry Hsien Ping Lang, Chair Professor of Finance at the Chinese
University of Hong Kong, began publishing a series of articles in
2004 exposing allegedly flawed management buy-outs (MBOs) during
the restructuring of some state-owned enterprises (SOEs).
The U.S.-educated economist argued that private entrepreneurs on
the Chinese mainland have depressed the value of state-owned assets
to buy them at lower prices. Lang also suggested some SOE managers
embezzled state-owned assets via MBO reforms.
The companies under Lang's direct questioning about irregular
merger and acquisition deals included Hong Kong-listed Greencool
Group and electric appliance giants Haier and TCL. His fierce
attacks earned him the nickname "supervisor Lang." Lang went on to
condemn the widening wealth gap in China by saying "100 million
people becoming better-off has made the other 1.2 billion people
even poorer."
Though no official response was directly made to address the
problems Lang raised, the State-Owned Assets Supervision and
Administration Commission announced in December 2004 that MBOs
could no longer be conducted in large SOEs and issued a series of
regulations against irregularities in future MBOs of SOEs.
