The 53-year-old head of InvestHK, the Hong Kong government agency that pursues foreign investment, has renounced his British citizenship to become a Chinese national holding a Hong Kong passport. That makes Middlesex-born Rowse the first Caucasian civil servant to become Chinese. “I sell Hong Kong and want to show that I bought the product myself, that I believe in it,” he says.
Rowse has had a tougher sell since April, when an Economist Intelligence Unit report predicted that in the next five years, Singapore will displace Hong Kong as Asia’s top business destination. “I describe that report as a joke,” he says. “I think they’ve dropped a bit of a clanger. Hong Kong is going to be the business capital of the world in the 21st century.” Rowse says that when skeptical businesspeople approach him for an off-the-record appraisal of Hong Kong’s future, “I just take my passport out of my pocket and say, ,This is what I really think.,”
After 30 years in Hong Kong, Rowse says he feels more a stranger in Britain than in its former colony. “I don’t belong in the U.K.,” he declares. “This is my home.”
