Richard Li was widely regarded as just another rich man's son when he returned to Hong Kong three and a half years ago after spending 10 years abroad. Only the fame of his father, businessman Li Kashing, set him apart.

But in his role as creator of Star TV, Asia's first satellite-television service, the 26-year-old Mr. Li has won grudging respect. The sale of a majority stake in Star to media magnate Rupert Murdoch in July for a profit of about $400 million won him even more. These achievements, and the energy and focus he brought to them, suggest that Mr. Li may have what it takes to become one of the region's leading lights in the decades to come.

If so, he would be somewhat of a rarity. Bankruptcy courts around the world are littered with the failures of billionaire sons. As a new generation takes over from the builders of Asia's prosperity, few of its designated heirs have distinguished themselves as anything more than able custodians.

The empire that Richard and his brother Victor, 29, stand to inherit is valued today at more than $8 billion. It spans Canada, China and much of Southeast Asia, and it includes controlling stakes in Hutchison Whampoa Ltd. and Cheung Kong (Holdings) Ltd., two of Hong Kong's largest-listed companies.

More than his brother, Richard has stepped forward as an aggressive achiever bent on repeating the successes of his 65-year-old father, who dropped out of middle school to support his widowed mother and two siblings. Richard recently turned down an offer from his father to run Hutchison Whampoa, a diversified company with sales of HK$21 billion (US$2.72 billion) a year. Instead, he plans to start a new technology-based company -- the details of which are to be announced soonwith the profit earned from the Star sale.

He moves easily among the world's most powerful business leaders. And, like his father, he works obsessively. "It's a family religion," says Steve Moss, a member of Star's founding team.

His critics attribute his early success largely to his father's power. To them, Richard is arrogant, "rules by fear" and is quick to humiliate subordinates. They doubt he can maintain the frenetic pace he kept up at Star, and argue that he will find it increasingly difficult to top his achievements to date. "He may burn out if he keeps up this pace," says a Hutchison executive.

His self-conscious mannerisms endear him to some people and grate on others. Though educated in the U.S., he speaks with a British accent. His sometimes stiff deportment parodies the television image of the billionaire boy: At a gathering of Stanford University alumni last year on the Li family yacht, Richard arrived via speedboat wearing white slacks, a blue blazer and a white nautical cap.

Nearly everyone agrees that Richard is under tremendous pressure, from both his father and the close-knit, conservative Hong Kong society to which his family belongs. By his own admission, he would have been content to remain abroad had his father not summoned him home in early 1990.

Back in the colony, Richard quickly found his freedom crimped by his fame as Li Ka-shing's son. When something as innocuous as his dancing at a Janet Jackson concert found its way into the gossip pages of the territory's press, his father pointed it out. The message: Hong Kong is watching, so behave.

Though associates say Victor is the crown prince of the Li empire, he has attracted little attention to himself or his business pursuits, other than in his role in the US$1.5 billion redevelopment of Vancouver's Expo '86 site. "Victor is becoming very much his father's deputy," says a senior Cheung Kong executive.

People close to the family say Victor's position has forced Richard to work harder for his father's approval. Richard attributes the marked difference between himself and his brother to his early exposure to American culture. "I've been infected," he laughs.

He left Hong Kong at 13 to attend prep school in Menlo Park, Calif., where he was installed alone in an apartment, without chaperone or maid (the school took no boarders). With imperfect English and only a handful of Asian-American classmates at the school, his first couple of years abroad were stressful and lonely. "I wasn't happy at all," he says.

After finishing prep school in 1983, he entered Stanford, where he took a degree in computer engineering, and then went to work as an investment banker at Gordon Capital Corp., one of the top investment banks in Canada. He was there for four years before his father called him home.

Once here, Richard quickly latched onto satellite television as the project he would use to prove himself, drawing the attention of the press and skeptics eager to see him fail.

Hutchison already owned a third of the AsiaSat I satellite, and had been mulling ways to make use of that stake when Richard visited the Hutchison Telecommunications Ltd. division early in 1990. Smitten by the high-tech wizardry of earthstations and transponders, Richard called a meeting of the satellite team to decide whether a satellite-TV concept was viable. With an airtight business plan hammered out, Richard went to his father for approval. The elder Mr. Li and Hutchison agreed to share start-up costs, which eventually totaled about US$110 million.

For the next three years, Richard applied himself to his project with a passion that amazes even his critics. Six months after his father signed off on the business plan, Richard coaxed a reluctant Hong Kong government into granting Star a license to beam its programming to the satellite from Hong Kong. By April 1991, less than a year after Star's conception, the first test signal -- a video of clouds moving across a blue sky -- was bounced off the AsiaSat satellite back to the colony.

On April 14, Star broadcast its first preview channel, and within eight months, all five of its channels, delivered to viewers free of charge, were going 24 hours a day. Today, the service is received in 11.5 million households from Egypt to Indonesia and as far north as Siberia.

Richard was by all accounts the driving force behind Star. A core group of executives met Mondays and Thursdays for as long as five hours at a stretch, debating issues such as how to improve poor reception on Hong Kong televisions.

It was in these meetings that Richard built his reputation for dogged determination and for confrontation. Gatherings often degenerated into shouting matches, with Richard usually winning in the volume stakes. Before long, talk of his bad temper coursed through the halls of Star and into the Hong Kong rumor mill. To his fans, these flares showed a gifted businessman under pressure; to his critics, they were the tantrums of a spoiled heir.

By July of this year, with Star's free service up and running and plans under way to launch four pay channels, Richard seized his opportunity to cash out. When he reached agreement with Mr. Murdoch's News Corp., he was holding talks with five separate buyers.

For now, his attention is fixed on his new venture. The as-yet-unnamed company, capitalized at US$400 million and formed with a core of executives that include most of the original Star team, will focus on infrastructure projects, particularly in high technology, and strategic investments.

"Maybe when I'm 35," he says, "I will have decided that I want to call it quits and I don't want to be in business, and I want some other form of challenge."

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