When he speaks, his Putonghua carries little evidence of his Hong Kong origins. He makes various supportive comments: 'Guangzhou has improved significantly over the past years. Its public hygiene has improved a lot'... and ... 'I am impressed by the progress Nantong has made in recent years.'

The agreeable Ronnie Chan on show in Nanjing is very different to the tycoon so well known here for his critical observations on Hong Kong, the property market, and democracy; and for occasionally crossing swords with Western journalists.

Hours after the vice-mayors' forum, the tycoon is back to form in an interview with the South China Morning Post.

Chan says Hong Kong politics are heading for a dead end, propelled by protesters who espouse Western-style democracy and the judiciary.

The democrats, he says, have switched from opposing Beijing to opposing the Hong Kong government because they 'bully the weak and are afraid of the strong'.

He says the judiciary 'wrongly think they are so almighty that they can rule on everything', and he welcomes the early retirement of Chief Justice Andrew Li.

He is unapologetic for holding and expressing strong views. 'I haven't been buying land for 10 years in Hong Kong. I have no conflict of interest on the subjects I comment on. Still, I'm a Hong Kong person. I want Hong Kong to be good,' he says.

Hung Lung has recently been active developing commercial properties on the mainland, its latest development a shopping mall in Shenyang. Hang Lung's flagship commercial building in Shanghai, the high-end Plaza 66 shopping mall, is a household name on the mainland.

Setting aside the recent warming relationships developing between the Democratic Party and Beijing, Chan said the democrats by and large were 'self-interested, quick to use people's complaints to attack the government, making the government weak'.

'They used to oppose the central government for the sake of opposing. Now they are opposing the Hong Kong government, because they bully the weak and are afraid of the powerful,' he said.

He said the democrats were turning Hong Kong into an irrational society. 'Popularism will lead to socialism,' he said. 'Hong Kong will be over if we go for socialism. The democrats only promote the upside of universal suffrage, they don't discuss the downside. All the countries with the highest debts are Western countries whose governments are elected by the people. Western democracy is a dead end.'

He agreed Hong Kong did not offer young people the same opportunities that it did decades ago but thinks the right way forward is to seek opportunities on the mainland. 'China's development is a rare opportunity which only happens once every few hundred years,' he said.

The last time the world had such a chance was in the United States between 1890 and 1914, he says.

'In 1890, the US had only 36 million people, in the 1960s, it had 63 million. The significant rise of population was because many people moved from Europe. There were people who refused to move to the US. They stayed in the UK and France. Of course there were risks in moving to the US but history proves that those people made the right decision.'

Referring to a common complaint of twenty-somethings in Hong Kong, he says: 'The so-called 'Post 80s'. Who are they? They complain that Hong Kong has no opportunities and they are poor. This way of talking is wrong. All they have to do is go to the mainland and learn Putonghua. I don't know what they are doing in Hong Kong protesting against the high speed railway in the name of protecting a village. My son works in Shanghai. We are the best-positioned people to cash in on the mainland's development.'

Chan is particularly scathing of the judiciary, saying he hopes that High Court chief judge Geoffrey Ma Tao-li, who will succeed Andrew Li Kwok-nang as Chief Justice of the Court of Final Appeal when he retires at the end of August, will lead the court to back to the 'right track'.

'In Hong Kong our legal system wrongly thinks it is so almighty that it can rule on everything,' he said. 'It rules on social issues and moral issues, such as gay marriage. It is wrong to do so. Unlike Supreme Court judges in the US, our judges are non-partisan. We are using the British legal system, the new chief justice should follow the practice of his counterparts in the UK, only ruling on legal issues.'

Chan says the 1999 right of abode case - in which a Court of Final Appeal decision granted residency to mainland children with at least one Hong Kong parent, only for the ruling to be overturned when the National People's Congress reinterpreted the Basic Law - was a 'classic example'.

'Andrew Li should be retiring early. Courts in other countries would not rule this way. [Ma] should not repeat what had happened in Hong Kong over the past 10 years. Cases similar to the right of abode one should not be repeated.'

Chan has disagreements with Hong Kong's land policy, which he says has propped up property prices by suspending land auctions until recently. He adds that Hong Kong does not need subsidised housing. 'The government can do a lot through administrative measures,' he says. 'One way of ensuring developers build for the lower income group is to order them to construct small units and ban car parks and club houses from those projects.'

But he defends the government against accusations that it has colluded with big business and widened the wealth gap.

'It is ridiculous to say the government favours the business sector. It doesn't,' he said. 'And what is wrong with creating a favourable business environment? People doing business create employment and pay tax.'

He says instead that a major cause of the wealth gap is a lowering in the quality of Hong Kong people themselves. 'Some people have no chance of getting married in Hong Kong so they go to the mainland. As a result, we have many people [in Hong Kong] whose education level is low. Because they have received little education, they can't find a job in Hong Kong.'