Introduction

Abstract

On 11 December 1996, a 400 member Selection Committee, handpicked by the Chinese government, nominated Tung Cheehwa, a conservative businessman, to serve as the first Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.¹ Chinese officials, including Vice-Premier, Qian Qichen, who presided over the selection process, hailed this procedure as the ‘dawn of [a] democracy’ which gave the people of the territory a greater voice in the choice of their Chief Executive than under the departing British administration (Gilley, 1996a). The distinction between a governor, selected by a handful of politicians and bureaucrats in Whitehall, and a chief executive, favoured by the Chinese government and then endorsed by a few hundred of its trusted followers, appears to have been lost, however, on demonstrators outside the voting chamber who denounced the process as a ‘sham’ (South China Morning Post (SCMP), 12 December 1996).² It was a distinction lost, too, on the democratic parties who had advocated the election of the Chief Executive on universal suffrage but who were excluded from the selection process despite receiving 61 per cent of the vote in the directly elected seats in the previous year’s Legislative Council elections (Scott, 1996, p. 143). And it was probably lost also on the wider Hong Kong public who had shown a strong, consistent preference for the selection of Anson Chan Fang On-sang, the head of the Hong Kong civil service (see Chapter 2, Table 2.20). According to one commentator, Tung’s selection was greeted with a mixture of emotions ranging from ‘cowed admiration to downright loathing’ (Gilley, 1996b) while another expected that he would face ‘persistent challenges to [the] legitimacy and authority’ of his office (Yeung, 1996).