Tung Chee-hwa

Tung Chee Hwa (董建華) (born May 29, 1937) took office as the first Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special administrative region of China in 1997, following the reversion of sovereignty by from U.K. back to China. Mr. Tung suddenly found himself responsible for the development of Hong Kong with its new identity as part of the People's Republic of China.

Born in Shanghai, Mr. Tung's family moved to Hong Kong when he was ten and his father went on to became a very successful entrepreneur. After the death of his father, Mr. Tung took over his old man's multi-million dollar business. However, poor management and bad decisions took him to the brink of bankruptcy. Desperate for help, Mr. Tung turned to the Beijing government, which helped stabilize his business with political intervention. Thankful for rescuing his family enterprise, Mr. Tung vowed loyalty to the Beijing government. The central government also saw Mr. Tung as the ideal person to head a puppet government, mainly due to his loyalty. Thus Mr. Tung won a landslide victory in the election for Chief Executive of the new government as many had expected (the 400 voters of the election were carefully chosen by the Beijing government and did not represent the people of Hong Kong).

Following years of prosperity and promises of stability from Beijing, the people of Hong Kong had high hopes as their city broke free from British colonial rules. However, the economy started deteriorating only a few months after Mr. Tung took power and never recovered since. Although the the economic situation was a result of a global stock market crisis and could not be accounted as his fault, people started to lose faith with him and his new government as jobs were lost and property values plunged.

Nevertheless, Mr. Tung's leadership in his first five years in office was often the subject of jokes and ridicules. First of all, he used every chance he had to get his close friends and associates into his cabinet, regardless of the abilities they had. He also systemetically purged high ranking officials who had years of experience in the government but did not display total obedience toward him. At the start of his second five-year term, the majority of Mr. Tung's cabinet were personally chosen by him, but many of them do not possess relevant qualifications and/or experience to their respective posts.

In an attempt to show his usefulness to the Beijing government and to prove his critics wrong, Mr. Tung came up with a long list of reform proposals during his five years in office. They include reforms in housing, finance, education, industry, labor, etc. Every one of them ended up with disastrous results.