Last March, when the U.S. slapped drastic new quotas on its imports of cotton textiles. Hong Kong's burgeoning textile industry suffered a severe case of the shudders. Among the hardest hit was C.C. (for Chen Che) Lee, 51, the shrewd, Shanghai-born entrepreneur who built Hong Kong's first postwar textile mill. As the Crown Colony's biggest producer of finished cotton garments. Lee had been selling up to a million dollars' worth of garments a month in the U.S. Lee had to do something fast or his profit margin would be wiped out.
He found a fellow sufferer in the venerable British trading firm...