Do we like them?

Do we like Li Ka-shing?

Our score: 7 out of 10. A long record of giving and no harmful words of his own turned up, but little is known about his views on the issues we care about.

Li was born in 1928 in Chaozhou and fled to Hong Kong as a wartime refugee in 1940. His education ended when the Japanese invaded, and he worked in a factory while looking after his sick father, who died of tuberculosis. As a teenager he put in 16-hour days at a plastics trading company.

From that start he built Cheung Kong into one of Asia's biggest conglomerates, and in 2018 he announced he was stepping down as chairman at nearly 90. He stayed on as a senior adviser. It is a proper bootstraps story, whatever you think of billionaires.

His biggest run-in has been with Beijing, not with the courts. In 2015 Chinese state media accused him of abandoning China as its economy slowed, after he restructured his holdings towards Europe. His group denied there was any truth in the withdrawal accusations and called the allegations unfounded.

The ports saga is the live one. In February 2026 CK Hutchison said it had started arbitration against Panama after the country's Supreme Court ruled the Cristobal and Balboa port concession unconstitutional. That is a commercial fight between a company and a government, not a story about harm to people.

On the harm check, we searched for anything he has said or done about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the climate and came up empty. We found no campaigning against any group and no conspiracy talk. That is honestly the whole list: a clean slate here partly reflects how little he says publicly on these topics, so we can't call him an ally.

The group is also still cashing up: it has sold its UK mobile stake and, through CK Infrastructure, the UK's biggest power-distribution network this year. These are business moves, and nothing in the reporting ties them to harm.