Mike Rowse
Mike Rowse, 60, was born to a lower-class family in small-town England, but he ended up in Hong Kong in the 70s during the ICAC crackdown on corrupt police. He later went on to join the civil service where he became a naturalized Chinese citizen after the handover and was attacked for his controversial role in Hong Kong Disneyland and the HarbourFest fiasco. He talks to Winnie Yeung about life after the launch of his new book, “No Minister & No, Minister.”
I was the first person in my family to have ever attended university.
I agreed to go travel around the world with my best friend. But two weeks before we started, he changed his mind. So I had a decision to make. In the end, I decided to go on my own, and it changed my life.
The worst thing one can do to himself is to be too afraid to choose—when you sit at a junction because you are too scared to make a decision about which road to take.
Usually in life, big decisions are actually quite small at the time you make them. But it’s just like what the ads say—I made the journey and the journey made me.
When I got to Hong Kong, I lived in an apartment with three Indonesian-Chinese families, my room was 36 square feet.
I ended up as a reporter for The Star for 16 months, covering corruption and crime. Then I joined the ICAC in 1974.