I asked Eric Li, the Shanghai-based private equity investor, which two historic events he prized above others. The first was China’s detonation of the hydrogen bomb in October 1964. This proved the Chinese people had ‘stood up’, as Mao promised in 1949. ‘It was so extraordinary because the People’s Republic was just fifteen years old and very poor,’ said Li.13 The test also proved China was capable of catching up with Western technology. The second was Britain’s transfer of Hong Kong to China in 1997. The handover ‘closed the curtain on China’s “century of humiliation” at the hands of foreign
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