Hong Kong vs. Shanghai

New York Times, January 16, 2007

Hong Kong and Shanghai Duel for Financial Capital

By KEITH BRADSHER AND DAVID BARBOZA; KEITH BRADSHER REPORTED FROM HONG KONG AND DAVID BARBOZA FROM SHANGHAI.

Hong Kong and Shanghai are locked in an increasingly public struggle to become China's main financial center as a top-level committee in the capital, Beijing, prepares to meet later this month to map out a national financial regulatory strategy.
On Monday, Hong Kong's highest government leaders and best-known business tycoons made the city's case at a series of televised conferences and briefings. They called for China to continue letting the biggest state-owned companies make their initial public offerings here, allow the Chinese currency, the yuan, to circulate more widely here and dismantle many remaining financial barriers between the mainland and Hong Kong, a former British colony.
Shanghai's efforts have been less public. They have also been harmed by a spreading corruption scandal that has led to the arrest of the city's top Communist Party official and a growing number of business leaders.
But as the traditional center of Chinese business life, Shanghai still has many allies in the capital. It has also emerged as the center of Chinese bond trading and as a favorite headquarters for Chinese and foreign companies.
The jostling between the two cities is coming close to name calling. Ronald Arculli, chairman of the company that runs Hong Kong's stock exchanges, said that just as New York is the main financial center for the Americas even though Chicago or Toronto may not like it, Hong Kong is poised to become the main international financial center for Asia.
Asked if he was suggesting that Hong Kong was becoming like New York and Shanghai like Chicago, Mr. Arculli said twice that this was his goal, adding, ''We stand a decent shot of making it there.''
That is hardly the view from Shanghai. City leaders and academics point out their biggest advantage: the currency circulating in the streets and markets is the yuan, which foreigners can buy and sell only with difficulty.
Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China, has its own currency, the Hong Kong dollar, which is linked to the United States dollar. The Hong Kong dollar is internationally convertible but cannot be easily exchanged for yuan on the mainland because of China's capital controls.
''The independent monetary system restricts Hong Kong's ambition to become the financial capital of the country,'' said Pan Yingli, a professor in the School of Management at Shanghai Jiaotong University.
Hong Kong and Shanghai are not just competing with each other -- they are also vying with Tokyo and Singapore to become the most important financial center in Asia. Each wants to be the place where investment banks, hedge funds, insurance companies and other big investors send their best and brightest to oversee trading during the hours after the sun sets in New York and before it rises in London.
But the most intense rivalry is between Hong Kong and Shanghai. Each strives to impress businesses and regulators that it is the best place for Chinese businesses to raise money and investors to give it to them.
It is one of the oldest rivalries in Asia, dating back more than a century. The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, these days HSBC, was started in Hong Kong on March 3, 1865, and opened for business in Shanghai a month later.
While Shanghai overshadowed Hong Kong in many ways before World War II, Hong Kong regained leadership after the Communist takeover in 1949, and benefited from the emigration of thousands of Shanghai business people. And in the 1990's, the rise of a Shanghai faction of politicians in China, including President Jiang Zemin, resulted in many policies that favored their city.
Since taking China's top jobs in late 2002 and 2003, President Hu Jintao has tried to limit Shanghai's influence. Hong Kong is trying to seize the initiative again. As Hong Kong's leaders repeated again and again Monday, Hong Kong has advantages now that include the rule of law, extensive financial expertise, a tradition of strong corporate governance, widespread knowledge of English and close ties to global markets.
As a result of listings by big Chinese banks and other institutions, Hong Kong's main stock exchange had a greater volume of initial public offerings last year -- valued at $41.22 billion -- than any other stock exchange, although more money was raised in London over all.
But while Hong Kong aspires to be an international financial center, it is sometimes derided in Asia as a one-legged stool -- a powerhouse in equities trading, including a doubling of trading in stocks and derivative warrants last year, but without another leg to stand on.
Close to 200 bond issues are listed here, but local banks and insurance companies tend to buy them up when issued and then sit on them for years, with minimal trading. The local government runs a budget surplus, and while it has issued a small volume of bonds to help create a market, these also trade in very low volume.
While corporate bond trading is still in its infancy in Shanghai as well, the trading of government debt securities there has picked up. The Chinese central bank has had to issue tens of billions of dollars worth of notes to sop up the enormous amounts in yuan it is pushing into the market to prevent China's currency from appreciating in value against other currencies.
But although Shanghai's stock market is still considerably smaller than Hong Kong's, it is also rising faster and was the world's top performer last year, up 130 percent. Shanghai is also becoming an important center of commodities trading. It has just passed Tokyo in the biggest market for trading natural rubber.
Experts said that Shanghai was likely to become an increasingly formidable competitor in years to come, and expressed doubt that Hong Kong leaders would succeed in persuading the Chinese government to give their city clear regulatory preference over its rival to the north.