Hong Kong property tycoon Gordon Wu Ying-sheung has predicted that China will overtake the US as the world\u2019s largest economy in the next decade or so, propelled by rapid technological advances while Washington is weighed down by massive defence expenditure and national debt.<\/p>\n
Yet the 90-year-old founder and chairman of Hopewell Holdings, who rarely speaks to the press, said Hong Kong should look past geopolitical tensions between Beijing and Washington to build closer ties with the United States, leveraging the city\u2019s role as a premier trading hub to attract highly fluid American private wealth.<\/p>\n
Speaking to the South China Morning Post, the Princeton-educated civil engineer \u2013 dubbed the \u201cKing of Highways\u201d for building China\u2019s first toll road and later a 380km (236 miles) network across the mainland \u2013 outlined a pragmatic view of the nation\u2019s economic trajectory.<\/p>\n
He predicted that in \u201ca decade or so\u201d, China would overtake the US to become the world\u2019s biggest economy, saying that Washington\u2019s US$39 trillion national debt and the proposed record defence budget of US$1.5 trillion were its \u201cAchilles\u2019 heel\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow can you keep on spending like this? Throughout history, countries that spend money on war will go bankrupt. That\u2019s why I believe that China, which spends much less money on defence, will prosper,\u201d he said. \u201cI predict it will take a decade or so [for China] to overtake the US.\u201d<\/p>\n
Property tycoon Gordon Wu backs reclamation in Hong Kong<\/p>\n
Wu said technological advancement propelled Britain to global economic dominance during the Industrial Revolution, followed by the US, before rising production costs shifted manufacturing hubs to Japan and the four \u201cAsian tigers\u201d in recent decades.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hong Kong property tycoon Gordon Wu Ying-sheung has predicted that China will overtake the US as the world\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":626938,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[212519,5713,84,891,141,1294,212515,212517,6875,212516,36683,28111,56,54,158,55,741,2866,5926,212518],"class_list":["post-626937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-asia-society-hong-kong","tag-beijing","tag-business","tag-china","tag-donald-trump","tag-economy","tag-gordon-wu","tag-gu-mu","tag-hong-kong","tag-hopewell","tag-princeton-university","tag-south-china-morning-post","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-united-states","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-us","tag-washington","tag-xi-jinping","tag-zhao-ziyang"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=626937"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626937\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/626938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=626937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=626937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=626937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}