Wei Sun Christianson, Morgan Stanley’s most senior woman in Asia and a key fixture of Greater China capital markets for the past 25 years, is to retire from her role as co-CEO of Asia-Pacific.
It concludes a striking and important career. Everyone knows her for her 20 years in Morgan Stanley investment banking, punctuated by brief spells at Credit Suisse and Citi, but in some sense she set up her career at the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission in 1992.
While there, she was involved in drawing up the regulatory structure for Chinese companies to be listed in Hong Kong. The 1993 dual listing of Shanghai Petrochemical in Hong Kong and New York was the first of its kind under these new rules; when she crossed the fence to join Stanley in 1998, deals such as that would make her name.
[Christianson is] a true leader, culture carrier, and a respected and sought-after adviser to global and China clients
Beijing-born, a child of the Cultural Revolution who became the first mainland Chinese student to graduate from Amherst College before going on to Columbia University School of Law, Christianson often appeared the right person in the right place at the right time.
