Ronnie C. Chan

Ronnie C. Chan is a Hong Kong entrepreneur, the son of Hang Lung Group founder Chan Tseng-hsi, and served for many years as chairman of Hang Lung Group and Hang Lung Properties Limited. In 1986, Chan Tseng-hsi died, and his estate was placed in trust to establish the Chan Tseng-hsi Foundation; his three sons did not directly inherit the assets. Chan Tseng-tao took over as chairman of Hang Lung Group, and Ronnie C. Chan became a director. In the same year, Ronnie C. Chan and his younger brother Gerald Chan founded Morningside Ventures in the United States, investing in start-up and growth-stage technology companies, several of which listed on NASDAQ. In 1991, Ronnie C. Chan succeeded his uncle Chan Tseng-tao as chairman of Hang Lung Group.

After taking over, Ronnie C. Chan helped Hang Lung Group rise again through decisions such as entering the mainland market and successfully avoiding the 1997 Asian financial crisis. In 1992, Hang Lung was the first to enter Shanghai, taking part in a mixed-use property project in Shanghai that later became Shanghai’s Grand Gateway 66, raising the curtain on the development of the “Hang Lung Plaza” brand. On the mainland, Ronnie C. Chan does not do residential property, only high-end commercial property, and only leases rather than sells.

In property circles, Ronnie C. Chan is regarded as a maverick who dares to scold others and also to mock himself: he often calls other people fools and idiots, yet jokes that he himself is “the biggest fool”. Hang Lung adheres to “zero-debt operation”: while peers expanded rapidly like hares, Hang Lung, like a tortoise, advanced only one or two projects a year, which led him to declare that “in commercial real estate, the hare will surely die and the tortoise will surely win”. His views on the commercial real estate boom are sharp: he considers most commercial real estate projects in China to be “rubbish”, malls completed within a year and a half even more so, and holds that there are only six truly competent commercial real estate developers in the whole country. Having led Hang Lung for more than 20 years, he went through several economic cycles and timed several rounds of “buying low and selling high” correctly, earning him the nickname “bear market catcher” in the market, and he describes himself as making long-term money. In 2012, Hang Lung Properties recorded operating revenue of HK$7.372 billion, more than 80% of it from rents; including property revaluation gains, net profit attributable to shareholders was HK$8.395 billion, and the company’s market capitalisation exceeded HK$130 billion. A 2013 report said that over the previous decade he had personally written the “letter to shareholders” in Hang Lung Properties’ financial report every year, and some investors compared it to Warren Buffett’s shareholder letters.

According to a 2010 Caixin report, Ronnie C. Chan told a Caixin reporter that if the government strictly enforced the property policies and regulations it had previously announced, “many bad phenomena” in the property market at the time could be avoided. He cited the crackdown on land hoarding as an example: the state had clear rules on reclaiming land left undeveloped for a certain period after purchase, yet this policy had never been seriously implemented over the past decade. “If developers had to build once they bought, prices could not have soared so crazily,” Ronnie C. Chan said. In September 2010, he told a Caixin reporter that cash flow from a commercial real estate project is mostly negative in the first few years after completion and requires patient cultivation, and that companies should not carry high debt, otherwise early rental income will not cover interest and they easily fall into financial difficulty; Hang Lung Properties invests entirely with its own funds and has zero debt. According to industry insiders, Hang Lung’s Hang Lung Plaza projects in mainland China were loss-making for almost the first eight years, but after the eighth year returned 50% a year.

In June 2012, Ronnie C. Chan pointed out to a Caixin reporter that financial risk is the top risk in commercial real estate, and that for a lease-only model cash flow is especially crucial. At the time, Chinese insurance funds and investment funds generally bought whole buildings and capital investment was inactive, which showed that the value of China’s commercial real estate had not been developed. In April 2013, he further told a Caixin reporter that the more mixed and chaotic the market, the more developers with strong financial resources and mature operating models and experience would be able to attract tenants and consumers and ultimately win. In that year’s “letter to shareholders”, he also wrote that building skyscrapers and large malls in cities is often seen as a symbol of modernisation and of officials’ achievements, helping officials’ future promotion. Ronnie C. Chan said that, excluding bank interest, landlords of Chinese shopping centres on average keep 67 yuan of every 100 yuan of rent, while Hang Lung’s projects keep 84 yuan, the difference lying in the level of overall operation and management. In his view, commercial projects carved up into small units for piecemeal sale are bound to fail; true commercial real estate must be held and operated as a whole, with control over the tenant mix and rental returns raised year by year through operation. After 12 years of operation, the net rental yield of Plaza 66 in Shanghai had reached 40%.

In his 2013 “letter to shareholders”, he devoted considerable space to the relationship between developers and government. He argued that, as a developing country, China may have more widespread corruption than developed Western countries, so “government relations” must be used with particular caution and wisdom, and moral principles must never be sacrificed to close a deal. In an exclusive interview with Caixin, he said that unless there was a reasonable practical need he would not take the initiative to approach government officials, would never court local or central leaders, never gave expensive gifts, and had an explicit rule against hiring former senior government officials. Speaking of counter-cyclical opportunities, he said “without a bear market, there are no heroes”, since cheap land can only be bought when a bear market comes; 2007 to 2008 was a once-in-50-years turning point in the major cycle, during which he bought two plots, for the second Hang Lung Plaza in Wuxi and for the Dalian project, and later bought another plot in Wuhan. He also spoke about corporate governance, saying that more than a decade earlier he had proposed to the board that the nomination and remuneration committees could only be staffed by independent non-executive directors, and that no executive director, himself included, could sit on them; he held that a personality cult “will surely have no second generation”, and that management ultimately comes down to insight into human nature.

Speaking about returns, Ronnie C. Chan told a Caixin reporter that without borrowing Hang Lung’s return was about 30%, and with modest borrowing it could rise to 45%; he believed it would be hard to find a commercial real estate developer in mainland China whose return reached even half of Hang Lung’s. He considered low professionalism and poor execution to be the main reasons dragging down returns on mainland commercial real estate. He was not optimistic about REITs, believing that those keen on them lacked confidence and had not thought things through; faced with China’s once-in-a-century development opportunity, one should not tie one’s own hands with REITs and miss out on growth. He was cautious about developers shifting into commercial real estate: “Standing with two legs on two boats is very dangerous.” He also warned against following others into a market simply because big-name companies had moved in, since followers gain no advantage on land prices or returns; in the high-end commercial real estate sector, the returns of the number one and number two players typically differ by one to two times. In 2014, Ronnie C. Chan told a Caixin reporter that Hong Kong commercial developers were “winners who had passed the test of the 1998 financial crisis”, and that their locations in mainland China often became local landmark business districts. He added that Hang Lung Plaza projects were developed entirely with the company’s own funds without borrowing because returns in the early years were too low to bear interest costs, which showed how hard commercial operation is, and was also why he regarded financial risk as the biggest risk in commercial real estate.

In November 2015, Ronnie C. Chan set out his views on global business trends in a speech. He believed that the United States, possessing the factors of production such as land, energy, capital, technology and management experience, was very likely to become the global manufacturing centre again in the next ten to twenty years; Europe was lifeless and waiting for a strong leader; Japan faced problems of population decline and systemic rigidity, South Korea’s economy depended on large conglomerates, and Huawei and Xiaomi were becoming strong competitors to Samsung. He also stressed the importance of innovation and perseverance, and pointed out that for China to become a strong power, it must have a spirit of craftsmanship. In his speech at the 2015 “Fudan Global Leadership Forum”, he used teapots, fans and road design as examples to criticise sloppiness in craftsmanship and planning, saying that if these simple things could not be done well, “don’t tell me you are a strong power; you are merely a big country”, and cited the meticulous craftsmanship of Japan and Germany to illustrate the necessity of upholding the spirit of craftsmanship. He also mentioned that he had kept a diary every day since 1975, and that he had invested in high-tech companies such as Sohu, Ctrip, Focus Media and Xiaomi.

In 2016 and 2017, mainland real estate companies entered Hong Kong’s land market in force. Ronnie C. Chan repeatedly said in public that he could not understand their bidding for land in Hong Kong at high prices; in July 2017, he wrote a 15-page letter to shareholders in Hang Lung Group’s interim report, stating bluntly that mainland developers newly arriving in Hong Kong had not been tested by a local property bear market and would find it hard to gain a foothold. On 30 January 2019, he recalled to a Caixin reporter that in August 2017 everyone believed Hong Kong’s property market would be taken over by mainland developers and he alone disagreed; about a year later, mainland developers had almost stopped coming to Hong Kong to buy land, and in his view they could not even last a year. During the same period, Hang Lung won no land in Hong Kong’s public land auctions for several years, and shifted its development focus to mainland cities such as Shanghai, Hangzhou and Dalian.

Hang Lung has since continued to expand its mainland footprint, successively developing Hang Lung Plazas in Shanghai, Shenyang, Jinan, Wuxi, Tianjin, Dalian, Kunming and Wuhan; in March 2021, Wuhan Hang Lung Plaza, its tenth Hang Lung Plaza on the mainland, opened.

Beyond business, Ronnie C. Chan has long been involved in think tanks and public welfare. While holding posts at US think tanks, he also holds posts at several Hong Kong think tanks: he is chairman of the executive committee of the One Country Two Systems Research Institute, chairman of the Better Hong Kong Foundation and convenor of the Hong Kong Development Forum, all three of which he helped found and to which he donated large sums. The Better Hong Kong Foundation was established in 1995 on the initiative of 20 Hong Kong business figures including Li Ka-shing, Cheng Yu-tung, Run Run Shaw, Tsang Hin-chi and Ronnie C. Chan, each contributing HK$5 million. Wang Huiyao, vice president of the Western Returned Scholars Association, told China Philanthropist magazine that among Hong Kong entrepreneurs, very few are like Ronnie C. Chan in combining an international outlook, an interest in think tanks, activity on the international stage and influence both at home and abroad; he also noted that Ronnie C. Chan had recently twice led delegations of Chinese entrepreneurs to Israel, each of twenty to thirty people, which were received by Israel’s president and prime minister and promoted cooperation between the two countries in fields such as technology and education. Ronnie C. Chan himself said his fondness for international relations think tanks is “a personal interest. In this globalised environment, you lose out badly if you do not understand the world well enough.” He has also written as a commentator for Hong Kong newspapers such as Ming Pao and the Hong Kong Economic Journal, analysing, explaining and presenting China to the outside world.

In 1997, the brothers Ronnie C. Chan and Gerald Chan founded the Morningside Foundation in the United States as their main platform for philanthropy. The foundation has funded several leading American universities, including Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles. In China, the foundation donated the Morningside Mathematics Building to the Chinese Academy of Sciences and established the Morningside Center of Mathematics; Ronnie C. Chan also co-founded the Morningside Medal of Mathematics with the mathematician Professor Shing-Tung Yau, honouring ethnic Chinese mathematicians under the age of 45 whose achievements are of world standard. The foundation’s largest gift in recent years was HK$100 million to the Chinese University of Hong Kong to build Morningside College. Morningside College was planned in 2006, broke ground in 2008 and began admitting students in 2010, taking only about 300 undergraduates a year; its master is the Nobel laureate in economics James Mirrlees. At the college’s groundbreaking ceremony, Ronnie C. Chan said: “Morningside College not only encourages students to learn, but also teaches them to serve society.” Ronnie C. Chan never publicises the amounts he donates; when asked, he always asks back why everyone focuses on money, saying “money is the least valuable thing”; his view is that one cannot do without wealth, but wealth is by no means the most important thing.

In mid-July 2023, Ronnie C. Chan discussed international affairs with Henry Kissinger, arguing that the greatest risk in international affairs today lies precisely in the United States’ domestic problems, which would have far-reaching effects on the world. On 30 January 2026, the Asia Society Hong Kong Center invited Chandran Nair, a Malaysian Indian businessman and founder of the Hong Kong independent think tank Global Institute For Tomorrow, to hold a fireside chat with the center’s chairman Ronnie C. Chan titled “Understanding China in a Divided World”, discussing the world’s consumption-driven economic model, the distinctive strengths of China’s governance model and system, and Western misunderstanding and fear of China. In the conversation, Ronnie C. Chan said that China’s risks lie mostly within, rather than in posing a threat to the outside world, and that its problems stem mainly from its own weaknesses and mistakes, all of which are controllable; he also suggested that without Chinese government regulation, the Chinese people, if “left to their own devices”, are highly capitalistic, entrepreneurial and extremely hardworking, and might do many bad things to the world; for example, exporting “involution” to the world would be disastrous.