A member of the very first cohort of CW Chu College, Charles WU has taken an unusually reflective path from business studies and Wall Street finance to AI entrepreneurship and, most unexpectedly, the authorship of a major family biography.

Born in the United States to a Shanghai family, he grew up between Hong Kong and Shanghai, chose CW Chu College as his first choice because of its small, fully residential environment, and later went on to Columbia University for a master’s in public administration before working in investment banking in New York and Hong Kong.

During his time at CW Chu College, Charles was closely involved with the College Master and teachers, helping to bring the Harvard Project for Asian and International Relations (HPAIR) to CUHK and briefly serving as president of the college student union. Even then, he was already charting his own course, valuing service to the whole student body over alignment with any single political stance.

After several intense years in investment banking, Charles stepped away from the industry in early 2023, looking for work that was both more challenging and genuinely meaningful. The first project he committed to was not a startup, but a book: a full length biography of his great grandfather, Hu E’gong (1884–1951), an early Chinese Communist Party member who was sent to Taiwan in 1948, long branded a ‘defector’ but in reality engaged in underground intelligence work whose significance only came to light in recent years.

The turning point for Charles came in 2015, when a letter from Zhou Enlai to Hu appeared at auction in mainland China, revealing that this much misunderstood figure had in fact held a senior position in the Party. The great grandson never met the man he was writing about, yet felt a quiet responsibility to set the record straight, to give his ancestor back a voice and a place in history.

With no formal training in historical scholarship or biographical writing, he decided he should be the one to reconstruct Hu’s life, travelling between Hong Kong, Taiwan and the mainland to consult archives such as Academia Historica and Academia Sinica in Taiwan, CUHK libraries, and the Second Historical Archives of China, and eventually compiling nearly 500 pages of research notes.

His first draft, essentially a chronological compilation of facts, was quickly rejected by a publisher, whose feedback pushed him back to the basics: reading about how to write biography, how to structure a narrative, and how to turn raw archival material into a compelling story. Patiently reworking the manuscript from the ground up, and ultimately partnering with an independent publisher, he brought the biography into print—a highly readable narrative rather than a mere ‘pile of data,’ and a work that quietly honours a man history had almost erased.

Alongside this literary labour of remembrance, Charles has quietly launched an independent AI startup that applies his finance background to a very specific niche: developing an AI-powered platform designed specifically for the Hong Kong IPO market, offering features that tackle the heavy lifting of prospectus analysis, document drafting, and intelligent project management. Drawing on his deep industry expertise, he designs and builds solutions that streamline workflows in a space too specialised to attract large platforms.

What has remained constant is the imprint of CW Chu College on his way of thinking. Charles often cites a line from Prof Kenneth Young, founding Master of the College, adapted from Socrates—’The unexamined university life is not worth living’—as a guiding principle in his decisions to leave banking, to write his great grandfather’s story, and to experiment with AI entrepreneurship.

Charles continues to return to CW Chu College to share with current students, help build alumni network in a still young college, and quietly model a path that does not simply follow checklists and mainstream expectations, but asks what is truly worth doing—and then has the courage, and the sense of filial duty, to do it.