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In the aftermath of the Tiananmen debacle, the Chinese leadership turned to Tung to help repair the shattered relationship with its coveted city-state. When newly arrived Governor Patten consulted the communists for a pro-China figure on his Hong Kong Executive Council, Beijing nominated Tung. In 1995 China named him to the preparatory committee set up to manage the transition. So it hardly came as a surprise when Chinese President Jiang Zemin publicly shook Tung's hand at the inaugural meeting of the committee, thereby anointing him as Beijing's choice for chief executive.
The man himself defies easy categorization. The very model of a conservative Chinese patriarch, his personal style is highly Westernized. Until he acquired his new title last December, he welcomed visitors to his harbor-front office with a warm smile, a firm handshake and an invitation to "call me C.H." For years, he was on the list of virtually every important American who visited the territory, and he made frequent trips to the U.S. Tung blends his American know-how with Chinese social values. "Some of our traditional ideas are very precious," he says. "The way we respect older people, the way we value the order of a society, the way we give equal emphasis to obligations rather than rights." He often cites the social chaos he saw in the U.S. in the '60s as evidence of why private rights must be balanced by the need for public order.
That deeply conservative philosophy suits the money class that runs Hong Kong. Many of them agree when he says the territory has become too "politicized." By reputation he is no yes-man even if his traditional ideas often align with Beijing's. "Very often I find that C.H. seems to toe the official line, not because he feels obliged to do so or because he is Beijing's puppet," says Tsang Yok-sing, chairman of a pro-China party, "but because he naturally sees many things the way Beijing does."
But many among Hong Kong's worldly younger generation suspect Tung's rhetorical emphasis on Chinese values merely parrots Beijing's code for democratic retrenchment. His defense of the new laws has made a negative first impression among the anxious populace. His popularity, once rated at 66%, has slipped to 57%.
That, of course, has made him the perfect target for Martin Lee, whose mission in life is to fuel resistance to Beijing's attempts to rein in Hong Kong. Although Lee does not oppose the reassertion of Chinese sovereignty over Hong Kong's soil, friends and enemies alike believe he secretly yearns to be hailed as "the father of Chinese democracy." So he has spent the past 13 years educating citizens on how to exercise their personal and political rights and setting up a system of alarms to signal when those rights are in danger. He resolutely believes that China's communists will never live up to their promise of separate legal, political and economic systems for Hong Kong. Like that of many others in the territory, his impression of China, says Tsang, a political adversary and friend, "is very much as it was immediately after June 4, 1989. I have to say that Martin is rather out of touch with Chinese politics over the past eight years. He has not seen the profound changes taking place there."