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“Everybody who is anybody at all in Hong Kong has got one eye on how the mainland sees that,” he said. “And you’ve got to build your bridges with them, otherwise they could confiscate.”

For Li, a billionaire in his autumnal years, the tensions with Beijing mark a dramatic turn. For decades, he enjoyed a position of eminence under Deng Xiaoping and then Jiang Zemin – the two men who led China from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. Li was on committees that drafted Hong Kong’s Basic Law, the mini-constitution governing the city since it was handed to Beijing by the British, and on a body that selected its first government.

Li’s entire life has been framed by the swings of history in Hong Kong and, looming on its edge, mainland China. He was born in 1928 in the river city of Chaozhou, a place known for its local Chinese opera and embroidery work. When he was a child, the southern Chinese city was a target for Japanese bombing runs. He quit school as a 12-year-old boy and his family fled south down the coast to Hong Kong, then a British colony.

Hong Kong fell to the Japanese in 1941. During that occupation, there were food shortages, malnutrition and disease. Li’s father died from tuberculosis not long after they arrived. His company biography describes what came next: “Before he was 15, Mr. Li had to shoulder the responsibility of providing for his family and found a job in a plastics trading company where he labored 16 hours a day.”

During a 1998 interview with public broadcaster Radio Television Hong Kong, Li spoke of his mixed feelings when he went back to the mainland in 1978 for the first time in decades. He’d made a fortune in Hong Kong building his way from manufacturing to real estate to finance. The next year, he became the first Hong Kong Chinese investor to take control of one of the British “hongs,” the great trading houses that accompanied colonial rule from the 19th century.