A Chinese tycoon once offered millions to marry lesbian daughter

Do you remember that story from 2012 about the Chinese business tycoon who tried to find a man to marry his lesbian daughter, Gigi Chao, for a handsome sum?

Hong Kong property tycoon Cecil Chao (趙世曾) offered US$65 million to any man who wanted to take on the ‘challenge’ – and as a consequence made his daughter an LGBTQ+ icon.

Chao, now 45, was bombarded with thousands of unwanted marriage proposals from across the world in an attempt to make her straight. She’s now a leading Hong Kong business woman and activist.

It was reported that some women even offered their own husbands. In total, 20,000 offers were said to have been made, but Chao remained unmoved – because she was a lesbian, and also in a civil partnership with another woman – her partner of nine years, who she eloped to Paris to marry.

When her father found out about the elopement, he came up with the idea to throw money at the “issue.”

“I am glad it happened,” Gigi Chao said to the Thomson Reuters Foundation a few years later, in 2018.

“It has been able to put a comic spin on a topic that is often marred by a lot of tragedies and taboos,” said the then 38-year-old to the human rights organisation.

The 81-year-old billionaire later doubled the offer to HK$1 billion (US$127 million) in 2014 to the suitor.

In response to her dad’s demands, Chao decided to pen an open letter which was published in Hong Kong’s national newspapers.

Entitled: “Dear daddy, you must accept I’m a lesbian,” it urged him to treat her partner like a “normal, dignified human being.”

Homosexuality has been decriminalized since 1991 in Hong Kong.

Gigi Chao, inspiringly, turned her negative experience into vital activism. In 2017, she was heavily involved in campaigning on behalf of a British lesbian who had been denied a visa to live with her wife in Hong Kong.

The woman would have been allowed to bring a husband on a spousal visa, but because same-sex unions are not recognised under Hong Kong law, immigration authorities in the former British colony have repeatedly rejected her wife’s spousal visa application.

The plaintiff eventually won her case, a landmark ruling for LGBTQ+ rights in Hong Kong.

In 2019, Gigi Chao also founded the organisation Hong Kong Marriage Equality to advocate for the legalisation of same-sex marriage in Hong Kong.