That a plaything could help save the Southeast Asian nation's economy may be a little optimistic, but Dennis Ting '60 could give anyone a reason to believe it. "When I was a little boy in Shanghai," says the Hong Kong billionaire, "I was taught that anything could happen. It sounds like a cliché, but my life is proof of that."
The king of Hong Kong's booming toy trade, Ting heads two plastics companies, Kader Holdings and Qualidux Industrial, whose products include Power Rangers, Cabbage Patch Kids and Star Wars action figures (80 million R2-D2 robots and counting).They employ more than 15,000 people in Shenzhen, the Chinese-designated Special Economic Zone that borders Hong Kong.
Ting's story, like that of many others in Hong Kong, is enough to make a Horatio Alger wannabe adopt the Asian enclave as his new home. Ting's family fled mainland China almost 50 years ago to escape communism. They settled in Hong Kong, where an influx of refugees powered the territory's transition from sleepy colonial backwater to humming economic center. Despite the lean years after World War II, Ting's father made enough money with his company to send one son to Germany for a coveted college degree and another to the U.S. "What mattered to my father most," says Ting, "was to build a future for his children through education."
Not that a liberal arts college in frosty Maine could have been what Ting's father imagined. Neither father nor son had heard of Colby until a few months before Ting applied to enter the Class of 1960. But the lure of an American college education was irresistible, and Ting soon found himself on a plane to the States. On the West Coast, where Ting stopped briefly to visit family friends, he had his first taste of American life. "In Hong Kong, we were always told that America had plenty of everything," recalled Ting. "I found out that it had too much of everything." In contrast to a Hong Kong still hungry from World War II, America was a land of leftovers sitting cold on a plate and jumbo-size soft drinks that rarely were finished. "I never saw so much excess in my life," Ting said.
When Ting arrived in Waterville, no welcoming committee greeted him. No buses picked up students at the now-defunct train station. In fact, Ting had to hitchhike up to Mayflower Hill. A dean of international students was a foreign concept, so to speak, and few people knew to dispense friendly tips on such things as how to set up a bank account in town. Ting spoke good English, but the rapid-fire Northeastern accents caught him off guard. "People would say something," Ting recalls, "and I wouldn't know whether I should nod or shake my head." Worst of all, there was only one Chinese restaurant in town, he says, and "it wasn't very good."
Still, Ting's trans-Pacific ordeal could not compare with the anxiety his father must have felt on the morning of December 9, 1949, when he transplanted his seven children to begin a new life in British-ruled Hong Kong. A plastics manufacturer in Shanghai, Ting's father left China when he realized Mao Zedong's reforms would stifle entrepreneurs. "In a place like that," said Ting, "how could he keep his business spirit alive?" That same exuberance for business drove the multitudes of mainlanders who flooded Hong Kong during the communist takeover of China in 1949 and later during the grim days leading up to the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. Between 1945 and 1951, the enclave's population quadrupled, to 2.4 million people. Hong Kong grew up--mainly in the form of jutting skyscrapers, piling lives on top of each other in ever-taller buildings. The mechanized crane was adopted as the territory's unofficial bird, and it worked through the night to accommodate the refugees who poured in from the north. Hong Kong was no longer "a barren island," as a British foreign secretary once called it, but a bustling city filled with savvy small businessmen like Ting's father.
From a humble start manufacturing waterproof flashlights, Ting's father eventually built a vast plastics enterprise in Hong Kong. The company's success was based largely on a convergence of two events. First, the United States, playing Cold War hardball, slapped a trade embargo on China, ending Hong Kong's traditional role as conduit to the north. Instead of passing a dollar to China and collecting a penny for its services, Hong Kong realized that the buck suddenly stopped in its own Victoria Harbor. Second, eager refugees needed jobs to jumpstart their new lives in Hong Kong. For Ting and other transplanted industrialists, the chance to nurture Hong Kong's indigenous manufacturing sector proved irresistible. A surplus of busy fingers quickly molded the strips of plastic that formed the foundation of the Ting family business. Products stamped "Made in Hong Kong" flooded foreign markets. Flush with cash, the Tings and other entrepreneurs watched their economy blossom.
But Hong Kong, thanks to its own success, soon faced rising labor costs that threatened its manufacturing sector. People wanted service-sector jobs that taxed their brains and not their bodies. As education levels rose, the mainland exiles were increasingly employed as bank tellers, not factory workers, and Ting's father had to look elsewhere for manual labor. China was closed for business. Besides, Ting's father was morally opposed to investing in a communist society. But Taiwan, dubbed the renegade province by Beijing since the island split from the mainland at the end of the Chinese Civil War, was bursting with cheap labor. In the mid-1960s, Ting's father set up his first factory on the island, taking advantage of Taiwan's cut-rate export zones. By the time Ting's father died in 1976, Taiwanese factories were the backbone of the Ting family business.
Ting soon learned, however, that Taiwan was experiencing the same growing pains that Hong Kong had undergone earlier. With investment pouring in--not least from the U.S., which was determined that tiny Taiwan would succeed where communist China would not--the Taiwanese government realized that the island could thrive without offering cheap labor to its richer neighbors, Hong Kong and Japan. Taiwan's rising labor costs coincided with a remarkable set of economic reforms in Deng Xiaoping's China. Seduced by the possibility of attracting sorely needed foreign exchange and investment that could finance the country's developing infrastructure, Beijing's economic czars set about creating carefully guarded islands of capitalism on the nation's southern flank.
