The Li Ka Shing Tower and the Economics of Naming Rights: Donation Framings, Government Matching, and Post-war Business-Philanthropy Networks

PolyU comprehensive information database · 05 Campus module

In one sentence: The Li Ka Shing Tower at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) grew out of a HK$100 million gift from the Li Ka Shing Foundation in 2000 — then the largest individual donation in the University's history. This article unpacks the framing of that title and the economics of naming rights through donor networks and the government's matching-grant machinery.

A cheque, a ribbon-cutting, a brass plaque that from then on hangs in the lobby — behind the dozen-odd named buildings on PolyU's Hung Hom campus lies the same sequence of gestures, repeated over and over. The companion pieces 〈Signature Buildings and Landmarks〉 and 〈Register of Donor-Named Buildings〉 have already gone through the donor-named buildings one by one — which ones they are, what they look like, who paid for them — ordered by year of completion. This article does not repeat that inventory. Instead it asks three more pointed questions: how exactly is the "largest donation since the University's inception" claim for the Li Ka Shing Tower calculated, and who later drew level with it; how can a private donation be "doubled" into a building by government matching; and, when the names are strung together, what kind of post-war Hong Kong business-philanthropy network emerges? The focus is still naming history, only it shifts from "the building" to "the money and the people."

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# Why does the Li Ka Shing Tower claim the title of "largest donation since the University's inception"?

The origin of the Li Ka Shing Tower (Block M) at PolyU is a matter of one exact date and one exact figure. According to Li Ka Shing Foundation records, the Foundation donated HK$100 million to PolyU on 1 June 2000^※. The University described the gift as "the largest personal contribution ever received by PolyU since its inception." The Council promptly resolved to name the then-under-construction, tallest building on campus after Li Ka Shing. The tower was completed in 2001^※, standing 18 storeys with a floor area of roughly 22,500 m² (for full architectural details, see 〈Signature Buildings and Landmarks〉 — this article does not go into them).

Inside that "largest personal donation" claim sit two qualifiers that need to be called out. The first is "personal." It places a family foundation set up in an individual's name — the Li Ka Shing Foundation being the archetype — on a separate track from institutional donors such as the Hong Kong Jockey Club. During the same period PolyU received more than one institutional gift larger than HK$100 million, but those are never compared on the same footing as "personal donations." The second is the time frame of "since the University's inception." The record is anchored to 2000 (the year of the gift), and whether it still stands depends entirely on whether a larger personal donation has arrived since. Both qualifiers narrow the field of comparison, and precisely for that reason the claim holds within its own terms — it is not saying "the biggest single sum in PolyU's history," but "the largest sum given in a personal capacity up to the year 2000."

Li Ka Shing's own remarks at the donation ceremony spelled out the logic of the gift plainly. According to Foundation records, he said he "loves Hong Kong and sincerely hopes to contribute to the further development of education in Hong Kong," and singled out PolyU's role in nurturing "professionals who can put knowledge into practice." This was no empty pleasantry. PolyU's predecessors were the Government Trade School and the Hong Kong Polytechnic, and "applied learning, strength in engineering and design" is what distinguishes it from comprehensive universities. That a naming donation should flow to such a "practical" university is, in itself, a self-revelation of where the business world's philanthropic preferences lie.

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# Who later drew level with PolyU's "largest personal donation" title?

A title like "largest personal donation since the University's inception" is by nature a record waiting to be challenged. Two decades later, a challenger appeared — with exactly the same figure.

According to PolyU's official announcement of 18 October 2021^※, the engineer and founder of ATAL Engineering Group, Ir Dr Otto Poon Lok-to, donated to PolyU through the Otto Poon Charitable Foundation to name two research institutes — the Otto Poon Charitable Foundation Research Institute for Smart Cities (SCRI) and the Otto Poon Charitable Foundation Research Institute for Sustainable Energy (RISE). According to a South China Morning Post report^※, the gift came to HK$100 million and was described as "the largest personal donation to PolyU in the past decade."

Set the two gifts side by side, and the evolution of PolyU's wording on "personal donation records" becomes clear. The Li Ka Shing Foundation's HK$100 million in 2000 was called "the largest since the University's inception"; Otto Poon's HK$100 million in 2021 was officially described as "the largest in the past decade." The difference in wording is not wordplay — it implicitly acknowledges the earlier title. If Poon's HK$100 million were also "the largest since inception," that would mean drawing level rather than surpassing, so the "past decade" window was adopted instead, and the two statements do not conflict. For the reader, a more accurate conclusion follows: at PolyU, HK$100 million is the recurring high-water mark on the "personal named-donation" line, not a ceiling monopolised by any one individual.

There is another telling contrast between the two HK$100 million gifts. Li Ka Shing's bought an 18-storey physical tower, the tallest on campus; Otto Poon's named two research institutes with no physical building of their own. The same money, one turned into brick and mortar, the other into institutional structures — which is precisely the most significant turn in PolyU naming history during the 2020s, taken up below.

Table note: both gifts come under the "personal / family foundation" framing. Larger institutional gifts to PolyU in the same period (e.g. from the Hong Kong Jockey Club) belong to a different category of comparison — see below and 〈Register of Donor-Named Buildings〉. "Past decade" is the phrasing as of the 2021 announcement.

Step outside the "personal" category, though, and the numbers change at once. The largest single donation in PolyU's history came not from any tycoon as an individual but from an institution — the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust gave around HK$249 million for the Jockey Club Innovation Tower, more than double the Li Ka Shing Tower's HK$100 million (for an in-depth study of the building see 〈The Jockey Club Innovation Tower: Zaha Hadid's Only Campus Work in Hong Kong〉). This is precisely why the "largest personal" title must cling to the word "personal": once institutional gifts are brought into the ranking, the Li Ka Shing Tower would not even make the top three. PolyU's naming landscape therefore naturally runs on two parallel leaderboards — a "personal / family foundation" board led by HK$100 million-scale donors like Li Ka Shing and Otto Poon, and an "institutional" board topped by the Hong Kong Jockey Club at nearly HK$250 million. The two boards are incommensurable. When reading a naming map, the first step is to sort out which board a name belongs to, so that two orders of magnitude of money are not conflated.

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# How does a donation get "doubled" into a building by the government?

The figures on the books of a named building are often not the whole sum the donor paid out of pocket. The cluster of named buildings PolyU produced in the 2000s happened to fall squarely within the window of a public policy designed specifically to help universities raise funds — the Matching Grant Scheme. Only by understanding this policy can the real arithmetic of "naming economics" be understood.

According to the Education Bureau, the Matching Grant Scheme has been launched in six rounds since 2003^※ with the aim of encouraging post-secondary institutions to develop funding sources beyond government subvention. According to a Wikipedia compilation^※, the six rounds together brought participating institutions roughly HK$22.2 billion in additional resources, of which about HK$14.8 billion came from private donations and about HK$7.4 billion from government matching. In other words, the core mechanism is: the private donor gives first, the government tops up at a set ratio, and the two streams merge into the university's account.

The matching ratio was not fixed but tightened round by round. The first round (July 2003 – June 2004) used a one-to-one (1:1) match, capped at HK$250 million per university. From the second round onward it became a two-tier system: the portion of a donation up to a "threshold" was still matched 1:1, while the portion above the threshold was matched at HK$1 of government money for every HK$2 donated; the threshold was then raised step by step from HK$20 million. The design rationale is plain — the most generous 1:1 tier rewards small and mid-sized gifts and widens the donor base, while the narrower match on very large gifts stops public money from being lavished disproportionately on a handful of the ultra-rich. The scheme did not end with the sixth round: according to a government press release^※, the results of the seventh round were announced in 2019, and the policy has continued in different forms to the present day.

Apply this arithmetic back to PolyU's individual buildings, and the naming economics come into view. The cleanest example is the Lee Shau Kee Building (Block Y): according to a South China Morning Post report^※, Henderson Land founder Lee Shau Kee donated HK$45 million to PolyU; with government matching, this brought roughly HK$90 million in total resources to the 14-storey academic building. In other words, the cash flow behind the name "Lee Shau Kee" on the plaque was half property tycoon, half taxpayer — the naming right belongs to the donor, but the doubling on the books was a gift of public policy. This also explains why PolyU's large named buildings, from the Li Ka Shing Tower and Lee Shau Kee Building onward, cluster so heavily in the early 2000s through the early 2010s: that was precisely when the Matching Grant Scheme was at its most active, and the incentive to give — "spend one dollar, get two dollars' worth" — at its strongest.

Table note: thresholds and match caps were adjusted round by round; the figures above are representative values as published in the cited sources. The matching details of individual buildings follow University and Education Bureau records. Naming rights correspond only to the donor's own contribution; government matching does not alter the attribution of the name.

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# The matching policy did not stop — it changed direction: from "building halls" to "doing research"

The Matching Grant Scheme wound down in the mid-2010s, but the government's "private money first, public top-up second" logic never left the stage. It simply moved its target from "donations for general purposes" to "research." Grasping this step is what makes the earlier timeline — naming shifting from buildings to research institutes — cohere: policy and named objects turned in the same direction.

According to the University Grants Committee, the successor Research Matching Grant Scheme (RMGS) was launched in its first round in 2019 and completed in 2024^※, designed specifically to "incentivise the non-public sector to strengthen its support for R&D." The next round, per the same source, runs from May 2025 to April 2029 (tentative), with the government committing a total of HK$1.5 billion in matching funds, covering eight UGC-funded universities and thirteen self-financing degree-awarding institutions. Compared with the earlier unrestricted scheme, RMGS ties matching firmly to "research-related uses" and requires institutions to declare that the same donation will not be "double-matched" under the old scheme.

This shift in the policy's target supplied the external push for the change in what got named. When government matching only works for donations earmarked for research, a donor who wants his money magnified by public funds has every incentive to point it at research institutes, endowed chairs, and dedicated research funds rather than at a general-purpose teaching building — the Otto Poon Charitable Foundation naming two research institutes in the 2020s and the Seal of Love Charitable Foundation establishing the "Health and Service Impact Fund" in 2023 both move to this policy beat. Naming history may look like a private matter between a university and a tycoon, but underneath there has always been the hand of public policy regulating it: first the 1:1 match produced the wave of named buildings in the 2000s, then the research match pushed 2020s naming toward research structures.

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# String the names together — what kind of post-war business network emerges?

Read one by one, PolyU's named buildings are architecture; strung together, they form an index of characters from Hong Kong's post-war business history. These names are not scattered at random. They concentrate in a handful of industrial sectors that underpinned the post-war economy — classify them by "business of origin," and the naming map immediately reveals its structure.

The property sector is the most conspicuous strand. The two property magnates Li Ka Shing (Cheung Kong group) and Lee Shau Kee (Henderson Land) each have a major named academic building, the Li Ka Shing Tower and the Lee Shau Kee Building, both financed by large personal donations. Vast fortunes accumulated by property capital in the 1980s through the 2000s flowed back into education through family foundations, and named buildings are their most visible outlet. The shipping sector is represented by "world shipping king" Y. K. Pao — the fortune of his Worldwide Shipping Group found its posthumous expression in the naming of PolyU's library, which, according to University records, was officially named the Pao Yue-kong Library in 1995^※. The entertainment and media sector is personified by Sir Run Run Shaw: the Shaw Foundation behind Shaw Brothers and TVB has funded over a thousand institutions across Hong Kong, Macau and mainland China, and PolyU's Run Run Shaw Building and Sir Run Run Shaw Sports Centre are part of that web.

What deserves closer attention in the network are the names that did not rise through property or shipping. In the industrial sector, Chiang Chen (1923–2022), founder of the Chen Hsong Group, used the Chiang Chen Industrial Charity Foundation to fund industrial talent training for decades, and PolyU named a theatre after him. In engineering, Otto Poon (ATAL) is the namesake of the two 2021 research institutes. What these two share is that their wealth is deeply homologous with PolyU's own DNA of "applied, industrial, engineering" — channelling industrial philanthropy into a university born of industry is a meeting of values, not a mere exchange of prestige for money. Among institutional donors, the Hong Kong Jockey Club is the most important non-personal force on campus, having lent its name first to the Jockey Club Auditorium and then to the Jockey Club Innovation Tower (for the latter's architecture, see 〈The Jockey Club Innovation Tower: Zaha Hadid's Only Campus Work in Hong Kong〉), channelling large resources into the campus in institutional form on a sustained basis.

Table note: each donor's business of origin is based on the enterprise they principally founded or ran. Year of completion, amount, and naming-ceremony details for each building appear in 〈Register of Donor-Named Buildings〉; this article only draws out the "industry network" level.

There is one more strand too easily overlooked: long-haul family philanthropy. According to PolyU's December 2023 naming announcement^※, the Seal of Love Foundation Building (Block BC) was named following a gift of HK$45 million from the Seal of Love Foundation and the Chan family. In the University's account, the Chan family has supported PolyU since the 1980s; the family's elder, Chan Chok-fu, strongly supported the School of Hotel and Tourism Management (SHTM), and the next generation has since taken over stewardship of the foundation. This kind of family giving — spanning two generations, accompanying the University from hotel-and-tourism education all the way to mental-health research — shows that the naming network is not a series of one-off "name purchases" but also includes institutional relationships with decades of staying power.

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# Why are PolyU's recent names more and more often "research institutes" and not "buildings"?

Run a timeline across PolyU's naming history and a clear dividing line appears: from 2001 to 2014, large donations bought physical towers one after another; entering the 2020s, money of the same order increasingly buys institutional units such as "research institutes." Behind this shift lie one hard physical constraint and one functional upgrade.

The physical constraint is that the campus has run out of land. PolyU's Hung Hom campus expanded phase by phase from the first red-brick complex in 1976 through to Block Z in 2013, built on the former Ho Man Tin goods yard site, by which point the main campus had almost exhausted the land available for large-scale new construction. When there are no new buildings to put up, named donations naturally shift from "naming a building" to "naming an institution." Otto Poon's HK$100 million in 2021 naming the SCRI and RISE institutes^※ was on a par with the Li Ka Shing Tower of its day, yet what got named was a research structure rather than brick and mortar — not a coincidence but the inevitable result of scarce space.

The functional upgrade is that the purpose of giving has moved from "hardware" to "mission." According to PolyU's 2021 announcement, the Otto Poon Charitable Foundation Research Institute for Smart Cities was positioned as "a global centre of excellence in smart city research," bringing together experts scattered across departments to serve Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area. Under the 2023 Seal of Love Foundation Building announcement^※ , the HK$45 million established a "Health and Service Impact Fund," whose first project is a five-year student mental-health programme (ReST Hub). PolyU President Teng Jinguang said on that occasion that the University was "most honoured to receive this generous donation from the Foundation, in support of PolyU's education and research development in promoting the mental wellness of students and young people." The same formula of thanks, but the emphasis has shifted from "thank you for building a hall" to "thank you for funding a service." The money behind named gifts now flows increasingly into research institutes, endowed chairs, and dedicated funds, and no longer necessarily corresponds to a plot of land — this is the most substantive structural change in PolyU naming history since the land ran out.

(A full register of institute-level named spaces, including the Otto Poon institutes and the Jockey Club Social Innovation Design Institute, appears under the "Research Institutes and Specially Named Spaces" section of 〈Signature Buildings and Landmarks〉; it is not repeated here.)

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# What kind of "contract" is a naming donation? What can a donor have, and what can they not ask for?

Naming a building looks, on the surface, like an honour; underneath, it is an exchange with defined boundaries. Seeing what is "given" and what is "not given" in that exchange is what stops a naming from being misread as the donor buying the building outright.

What a donor gets is visibility and permanence: a plaque in the lobby bearing his or the family's name, a naming ceremony with speeches from the University and the family, and a name repeated for decades thereafter by staff, students, visitors and maps. The publicity of this honour is intense — it is not a private thank-you but a public record, "ritualised" by the ceremony and "institutionalised" by campus communications and official maps. PolyU naming ceremonies follow almost the same script: donation agreement, identifying or building the corresponding space, the ceremony itself, the unveiling of the plaque. The dedication of the Ho Yue-kwong Building, attended by several children of the donor family together, is a typical instance of the ritual.

What a donor cannot obtain is the University's academic autonomy. A naming is a tribute to "contribution," not a right of control over "how the building is used, what is taught and researched, or who is appointed" — what is taught in the building, who is hired, what is studied, all remain with the University's academic and governance structures. This boundary matters all the more in the age of large gifts: precisely because the Matching Grant Scheme deploys public money (see above), named giving has to maintain a clean division of "honour to the donor, decisions to the University," or accusations of "buying influence with money" could never be answered. PolyU's two-track naming system — "block number (function) + name (honour)" — is, to a degree, this boundary made daily visible: the Li Ka Shing Tower is also Block M, the Pao Yue-kong Library is also Block L. The functional identity of a building is fixed by the University through a neutral block number, while the donor's name is layered on as an honour — the two layers coexist without trespassing on each other.

Worth noting too is the half-hidden logic of matching between name and object. A whole academic tower corresponds to a large personal donation (Li Ka Shing Tower, Lee Shau Kee Building); a sports centre to a donor with sporting connections (Sir Run Run Shaw Sports Centre); a library, that "temple of knowledge," to the posthumous honour of a shipping tycoon (Pao Yue-kong Library) — between a building's function and a donor's public image there is often a visible or hinted echo, not simply "the highest bidder gets the name." This echo makes naming more than a financial event: it becomes a piece of cultural choreography about "who deserves what name."

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# PolyU in the Hong Kong context: where do the universities' naming donations converge and diverge?

PolyU's naming logic is no isolated case; it is one specimen of a phenomenon common across Hong Kong higher education. Set against the territory-wide picture, PolyU's peculiarities come into sharper focus.

The common ground lies in the shared foundations of business-community dominance and the matching-grant policy. Across Hong Kong's universities, the donors behind named buildings are overwhelmingly business elites and their family foundations, and all of them have benefited from the same government Matching Grant Scheme — the same names of property, shipping and industry tycoons appear on campuses of different universities at once. Lee Shau Kee is a living specimen of "cross-campus naming": his Lee Shau Kee Building (Block Y) at PolyU corresponds to a HK$45 million-grade academic building, whereas, according to Lee Shau Kee Foundation materials^※, in 2007 he gave HK$400 million to the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, naming the entire "Lee Shau Kee Campus" (opened 2013, covering about 15% of the campus area), and his son Martin Lee Ka-shing later added HK$150 million toward the Innovation Tower. The same donor — one building at PolyU, an entire campus at HKUST. The disparity in naming scale tracks not only the size of the gift but each institution's spatial and fundraising circumstances at the time. This pattern of a single tycoon family "casting its net across campuses" reflects the structural fact that named giving in Hong Kong is highly concentrated in a small number of ultra-wealthy families.

The divergence lies in the composition of "donor origins." At elite British and American universities, named giving is anchored principally in alumni; in Hong Kong — and at PolyU most typically — the mainstay of named giving is external business figures and institutions, not the university's own graduates. This is bound up with PolyU's history: as a young university strong in applied studies, engineering and design (it gained university title only in 1994), its alumni wealth has not yet caught up with that of century-old institutions, so its naming network depends more heavily on outside forces like the business community and the Hong Kong Jockey Club. A second PolyU characteristic is the weight of institutional donors, above all the Hong Kong Jockey Club — the Club's model of returning gambling revenue to society makes it a super-institutional donor across many universities, and at PolyU it has named both the Auditorium and the Innovation Tower, a role that would never appear in a pure alumni-donation system.

The point of this comparison is this: read PolyU's "donor map," and what emerges is not merely the generosity of a few tycoons but an entire Hong Kong ecology of higher-education fundraising — "business gives back to education, government matching magnifies it, institutions invest for the long term." Sitting through a lecture in the Li Ka Shing Tower, every dollar of the building's cost can be traced back to some node in that network — which is exactly what makes the PolyU campus so rewarding to read as a "physical archive of post-war Hong Kong business philanthropy." The place of individual gifts within PolyU's overall finances and fundraising strategy is treated separately in 〈08-finances · Register of Benefactors and Donors〉 and is not repeated here.

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# FAQ

Q: Does the Li Ka Shing Tower's claim to be the "largest donation since the University's inception" still hold? A: Within its own framing (personal / family foundation, anchored to the year 2000), yes. In 2021 the Otto Poon Charitable Foundation also gave HK$100 million, but the official wording became "the largest personal donation in the past decade," using a different time window to avoid direct comparison with the earlier claim — the two statements can coexist. The way to read it: HK$100 million is the high-water mark for personal named giving at PolyU, not a ceiling owned by any one person.

Q: Is the donation amount on the plaque what the donor actually paid out of pocket? A: Not necessarily. Many PolyU named buildings of the 2000s benefited from the government Matching Grant Scheme, so the resources on the books often include the government match. The Lee Shau Kee Building is the clearest case: per the SCMP report, the donor paid about HK$45 million, which with government matching came to roughly HK$90 million — the name belongs to the donor, but the books were doubled by public policy.

Q: Why are PolyU's recent namings mostly research institutes rather than buildings? A: Mainly because the main campus has nearly run out of land (there has been almost no scope for large-scale new construction since Block Z in 2013), combined with a shift in the purpose of giving from "building hardware" to "funding missions." Otto Poon's HK$100 million in 2021 named the SCRI and RISE institutes rather than a building — the marker case of this turn.

Q: With a named donation, can the donor decide how the building is used or who gets hired? A: No. A naming is an honour paid to a contribution; it carries no right of control over teaching and research content, appointments, or use, all of which remain with the University's governance structures. PolyU's two-track naming — block number (function) plus name (honour) — is the daily embodiment of this boundary of "honour to the donor, decisions to the University."

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