In the last week of May, the Hong Kong delegation to the Chinese People's Political Consultative Committee and the National People's Congress, the country's annual gatherings of its political elite, made its way to Beijing by bus across the border. They then boarded chartered Air China flights to the capital, where they were assigned hotels by a somewhat arbitrary process, after elaborate tests and waivers of the normal quarantine rules, according to delegates Nikkei Asian Review spoke to.
Attendees were a who's who, both of China's senior political figures but also its entrepreneur rock stars, such as Robin Li of Baidu and William Ding of NetEase, whose gaming company is in the midst of a secondary listing in Hong Kong. The combined wealth of the 2,000 delegates easily amounted to tens of billions of dollars.
