Hong Kong tycoon bets China will overtake US economy ‘in next decade or so’

Hong Kong property tycoon Gordon Wu Ying-sheung has predicted that China will overtake the US as the world’s 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.

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’s role as a premier trading hub to attract highly fluid American private wealth.

Speaking to the South China Morning Post, the Princeton-educated civil engineer – dubbed the “King of Highways” for building China’s first toll road and later a 380km (236 miles) network across the mainland – outlined a pragmatic view of the nation’s economic trajectory.

He predicted that in “a decade or so”, China would overtake the US to become the world’s biggest economy, saying that Washington’s US$39 trillion national debt and the proposed record defence budget of US$1.5 trillion were its “Achilles’ heel”.

“How can you keep on spending like this? Throughout history, countries that spend money on war will go bankrupt. That’s why I believe that China, which spends much less money on defence, will prosper,” he said. “I predict it will take a decade or so [for China] to overtake the US.”

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 “Asian tigers” in recent decades.