Tung Chee-hwa

Tung Chee-hwa was a Hong Kong shipping heir, businessman and politician who became the first Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region when sovereignty passed from Britain to China on 1 July 1997. Born in Shanghai in 1937 as the eldest son of the shipping magnate Tung Chao Yung, he took over the family firm, Orient Overseas Container Line, after his father died, and the company survived a near collapse in the mid 1980s only through support arranged with Beijing. He sat on the colonial Executive Council from 1992, was chosen by a 400-member Selection Committee in December 1996, and was re-elected unopposed in 2002. His tenure was marked by the Asian financial crisis, the avian influenza outbreak, the SARS epidemic and the mass protests of July 2003 over proposed national security legislation under Article 23 of the Basic Law. He resigned on 10 March 2005, midway through his second term, and was then made a vice-chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. He later founded the China-United States Exchange Foundation and the think tank Our Hong Kong Foundation.