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How entrepreneur William Louey pioneered efforts to bring China’s top scholars to the UK

Students from China have accounted for the highest number of UK international students according to data collected by the Higher Education Statistics Agency. But this phenomenon would have been unheard of thirty years ago when philanthropist William Louey first started to pioneer efforts to support the education of China’s brightest scholars at schools and universities in the UK. 

In 1995 China was far from the global economic powerhouse that we know today. China’s GDP was $609 US dollars compared to Britain’s $23,168 US dollars, and Chinese scholars, especially those low socio-economic backgrounds, were extremely rare within the UK education landscape.  There were many highly talented scholars in China at that time, but they had little exposure to the outside world.

A Radical Social Experiment

It was during this time that William Louey stepped in with a radical proposition and social experiment to see what talented scholars from underprivileged backgrounds in China would be able to achieve if they had access to the same high quality UK education that he had received thanks to his family’s wealth. Thirty years on, and the results have vastly exceeded his expectations.

William Louey is the fourth generation heir of one of Hong Kong’s oldest businesses, the Kowloon Motor Bus Company, which was founded by his grandfather William S.D. Louey in 1921.  Inspired by his late grandfather, in 1995 William Louey set up the William S.D. Louey Educational Foundation to provide scholarships to poor but outstanding students from mainland China.

William Louey believed that giving China’s top young talents access to world class institutions, especially Oxford and Cambridge Universities, would enhance their personal development and help them to make global connections that would lead to very successful careers.

“We never heard of scholarships that would support you to go through your A-levels as well as your university. It was unheard of,” a 2005 scholar Harry Jinyang Liu said. He went on to graduate from Cambridge and is now a Goldman Sachs banker based in Hong Kong, with a prolific career in finance.

With the help of his friend Richard Yan, who was then China’s only representative at the global Young Presidents’ Organization network, William Louey made several trips to Beijing where he met outstanding but economically underprivileged students from the capital city’s top schools. After identifying the first batch of students that he wanted to sponsor, Louey faced hurdles in getting them passports from China in order for them to receive visas from the British Council.

“China was a new world,” said Qi Yan, who was one of the first 1995 batch consisting of six students whom William Louey selected for the scholarship.  “We grew up in a world where, number one, there was very little exposure to the outside world, that was even before the internet. Number two, people’s choices, whether it’s education choices or career choices, didn’t exist — we grew up in a planned economy."

The challenge never hindered William Louey’s ambitious plan to nurture and educate China’s top young minds. “To convince the government to give them passports was very, very difficult,” William Louey said. “I had to go to Shanghai, to the Education Department and talk to the head. And they said, ‘Oh, you’re stealing all our national treasures’. And I just said to them, ‘They’re not national treasures until they see the world. I told them that whether they come back to China or not is not my problem. It’s your problem, because you have to attract them to come back’.”

William Louey successfully convinced China’s government to allow him to sponsor the first, and then the subsequent batches of scholars. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the William SD Louey Foundation, which unofficially began its operations in 1994.  More than £6 million has been spent by Louey so far on funding scholars’ education, from A-levels at top UK boarding schools such as Millfield School, to funding degrees and masters at Oxford and Cambridge.

Incubating Social Mobility

“Really, William started something that didn’t exist,” says Charlie Feng Gao, another scholar from the 1995 batch who went on to pursue engineering at Cambridge. He is now a successful financier, with more than 20 years of experience working for firms such as Morgan Stanley and setting up his own private equity firm, Fengshion Capital. In 2021 he was ranked as one of China’s top investors in private equity.

This trajectory of success among many of the William Louey scholars is common, with many of them going on to pursue careers in finance, law, life sciences and engineering in London, Hong Kong and China. One scholar, Shield Dun Xiao, even went on to become a serial entrepreneur and is now running an AI startup in Palo Alto, California after creating China’s biggest educational technology company, 17EdTech, which was once valued at $5 billion on Nasdaq.

News of the talented scholars from the William S.D. Louey Educational Foundation travelled fast, especially after one student completed a Cambridge mathematics entrance test in less than half the allocated time. This story even reached the then Prince Charles in 1998, who was then head of the Cambridge Overseas Trust. He instructed Professor Anil Seal to invite William Louey to a private dinner to find out more about his scholarships.

“I received the email from Professor Anil on the 1st of April, so I thought, ‘Oh, somebody played a prank on me’. So I didn’t reply,” William Louey recalled. Only when the follow up email arrived did William Louey’s PA persuade him to respond.

“So I called Professor Anil, and he said, ‘You have to come and meet the prince and he knows so much about your scholarship and he wants to talk to you because the Cambridge Overseas Trust is a foundation that also gives a small amount of donation to each of the brightest foreign students. The foreign students actually bring culture from the outside to enrich the English students’.”

After this conversation, William Louey made a trip to Downing College to attend a private dinner with Prince Charles. "We talked about why I created the foundation when I was very young, I was then in my thirties. You know, my father died young, when he was 49, so I had control of my family wealth from the age of 18. Not many people can have my privilege to set up a scholarship at such a young age” William Louey said.

In 2013, the University of Oxford awarded William Louey the Elizabeth Wordsworth Fellowship in recognition of his contribution to UK higher education. 

Paying It Forward

What’s unique about William Louey’s scholars is that from a status of poverty, they have all climbed to the heights of success and are now themselves involved in various charitable activities inspired by William Louey’s philanthropy. Many of the early William Louey scholars have since also founded their own scholarships, including the 'Pay It Forward' scholarship, which sits under the China Oxford Scholarship Fund umbrella.

“The reason why they called it 'Pay It Forward' is because I told them right from the first day that they never have to pay me back. They don’t have to work for me. So you have to pay it forward. That was my only condition,” he said, adding “so this is a second generation of scholars that my scholars are now sponsoring, because their scholarships are meant to be paid forward”.

Harry Jinyang Liu, who is a 2005 scholar, is part of the Pay It Forward fund which is still ongoing. “William’s approach to philanthropy has a sense of responsibility for society, of giving back. To me personally, sometimes I feel like it’s more important than money itself,” he said.

Another example of this is Anna Jin Xiang Zhao, a Hong Kong-based Goldman Sachs investment banker who set up her own family foundation with her husband, the Wang Family Foundation, to help talented Chinese students study at masters and PhD level at the University of Oxford. She hopes that her young daughter learns from her philanthropy and will be inspired to give in the future. “Now I really appreciate the importance and joy of doing charity work myself. I hope my children can continue the same and hopefully make the world better."

The William Louey Foundation continues its work today, but focuses primarily on postgraduate students.   William Louey, now 65, remains down to earth and is still enthusiastic about doing more.  "The efforts are definitely worth it" he concluded. “I have a big family, with all my scholars. I go to their graduation, I go to their weddings, I go to see their newborns. We become like families.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Jane Wang .