The writer is author of ‘The Gate to China: A new history of the People’s Republic and Hong Kong’
Some very sharp minds are currently trying to divine the future of HSBC by working out how its return on equity, dividends, regulation and capital base would change if the bank is broken up as its biggest shareholder, the Chinese insurer Ping An, has recently demanded.
These are prudent calculations. It is politics, not metrics, that decide how China acts and President Xi Jinping is set on dominating the financial sector in Hong Kong as part of his “great national rejuvenation”. However, history is not on HSBC’s side. Ever since the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation was founded in 1865, its managers have turned adversity into profit. They have ridden out war, revolution and the return of the British colony to China in 1997 with a stiff upper lip and a seemingly effortless insistence that all was well.