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Hong Kong is a global metropolitan city and a former British colony. Beneath its modern outlook and Western influences, many inhabitants of Hong Kong with Chinese ancestry still held on to traditional Chinese values and customs. As such, it would be a mistake to think that the laws transplanted from Britain to Hong Kong have been unproblematic. Then again, this does not mean that the local Chinese reject or oppose the transplanted laws outright. Rather, the differences in the value systems embedded in the laws and the local Chinese culture have created some ideological tensions. Such is the case for the directors of Chinese family wholly owned and operated companies in the territory.
Whilst the transplanted British company laws might suit non-family and public companies with diverse share ownership structure, this is not the case for Chinese family companies. Instead, directors of these types of compliance comply with a normative order emanating from Chinese values and norms rooted in Confucianism. Yet the incongruences between legal duties and Chinese norms mean that it is not simply a matter of amending the law to incorporate the Chinese values because the divide between the two is impossible to bridge.
This book not only examines why the transplanted directors’ duties are inappropriate for these companies, it recommends that a separate self-regulated regime for Chinese family companies should be established. Critics might argue that this gap in corporate governance regulation had not created upheavals in Hong Kong, so there is no urgency in changing status quo. But if we look closer the lack of regulation for Chinese family companies had not been trouble free as a growing number of cases have shown that it has adversely affected the workings of these companies. Governance problems usually emerge when tensions within families are unresolved, and in the worst-case scenario, fen jia (division of assets leading to liquidation) occurs. Given that Hong Kong has an estimated half a million Chinese family companies, this regulatory oversight could negatively impact on the territory’s spirit of entrepreneurialism. Therefore, this monograph advocates that the informal network of Chinese family businesses should band together and adapt Chinese value system to resolve an essentially Chinese regulatory problem.
