Tung Chee-hwa (1937– )

Hong Kong business executive and politician, chief executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) from 1997. As the SAR chief executive he launched a populist initiative to make housing more affordable, and had to deal with a succession of currency crises. In May 1998 he suffered a setback when pro-democracy opposition candidates polled strongly in elections to the legislative council.

Born into a wealthy household, his father, C Y Tung, a shipping magnate, moved his family from Shanghai, then a French concession, to Hong Kong at the time of the communist revolution in China in 1949. Chee-hwa Tung studied engineering at Liverpool University in the UK, and worked for General Electric in the USA. When his father died in 1982, he took charge of the family's huge shipping empire, Orient Overseas, and rescued it from collapse, with financial assistance in 1985 from mainland China. A conservative but affable and conciliatory figure, he was effectively selected by the Chinese to be SAR chief executive from July 1997. He was a particular admirer of Lee Kuan Yew, the authoritarian capitalist former prime minister of the city state of Singapore.