The cancellation of its dividends in 2020 (it has now resumed payouts at a much lower rate) and its own “pivot to Asia” – it has shipped senior executives and moved about $US6 billion ($8.7 billion) of extra capital out of its Western operations into the region to capitalise on its superior growth rates – have helped fuel the Ping An campaign and give it credibility.

The campaign and the proposed division of HSBC’s operations between East and West, highlight the wider issues HSBC has experienced as it tries to straddle the increasing divide between China and the West, and China and the US in particular.

The bank has been caught up in some controversies amid Donald Trump’s trade war, the increasingly aggressive anti-China stance by an increasingly protectionist US and rising concerns by America’s allies about a more overtly ambitious and belligerent China.

It angered the West when it accepted China’s controversial and heavy-handed crackdown on democracy protests in Hong Kong and the imposition of China’s national security law on the city-state, and infuriated China when it co-operated with US prosecutors and handed over bank documents that helped lead to the arrest of Huawei’s chief financial officer in Canada in 2018.

Ping An, China’s largest insurer, isn’t a state-controlled entity, although it has state entities as shareholders. But any systemically important Chinese company effectively does what Beijing wants, and you wouldn’t need to be overly cynical to think that Beijing, at the very least, approves of Ping An’s campaign.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has been exerting ever-increasing and increasingly intrusive control over all facets of China’s economy, and has been strengthening mainland China’s authoritarian approach to governance of Hong Kong.

The UK regulation of HSBC, one of the world’s top 10 and most globalised banks, and the dominance of its Western shareholders and executives and its lack of any direct accountability to China would irk Beijing. A split that brought the Asian operations of HSBC firmly within its orbit and control would be more in keeping with China’s own ambitions.

China, having seen the central role the US dollar and the global banking system have played in the sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, would also be concerned about the vulnerability HSBC could represent in the event similar sanctions were ever imposed on China.

HSBC dominates dollar-denominated clearance transactions in Hong Kong. Its global operations couldn’t function if it tried to defy financial sanctions imposed by the US.

A split of its operations would, however, effectively gut HSBC and further weaken Hong Kong’s already-damaged status as a global financial centre.

HSBC has throughout its history positioned itself across the trade flows between Asia and the rest of the world, and much of its success and profitability relies on it providing the financing and transactional support for those trades. A split would wipe out a global web of infrastructure, relationships, activity, profits and shareholder value.

Through its 157-year-existence, the bank has adroitly managed to navigate its way through, and exploit, the shifts in the relationship between China and the West, but its pivot to Asia and the sharp rise in geopolitical frictions between China and the West will challenge its ability to maintain its independence.

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A business built on being the intermediary between the East and the West in a globalised environment is going to struggle to retain that independence and its current structure during a period where the increasingly adversarial relationship between China and the US is creating a decoupling of their economies and a broader fracturing of that environment.