Donald Tsang

Sir Donald Tsang Yam-kuen (born 7 October 1944) is a former Hong Kong civil servant who served as the second Chief Executive of Hong Kong from 2005 to 2012. Born in Hong Kong to a police officer, with family roots in Foshan, Guangdong, he spent his childhood in police quarters in Central and attended Wah Yan College, a Jesuit school. After a brief stint as a salesman for Pfizer, he joined the colonial civil service as an Executive Officer in 1967. Over the following decades, he held posts in local administration, finance, and trade, including a year attached to the Asian Development Bank in Manila and a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School in 1981. He helped implement the Sino-British Joint Declaration and the British Nationality Selection Scheme in the late 1980s, later serving as Director of Administration, Director-General of Trade, and Secretary for the Treasury. In 1995, he became the first ethnic Chinese Financial Secretary under British rule, a role he continued after the 1997 handover. He was knighted by Prince Charles just before the handover. As Financial Secretary, he coined the term “caring capitalism” and oversaw rising public spending. His international reputation grew from his 1998 intervention in Hong Kong’s stock market, where he coordinated with the Monetary Authority to buy over $15 billion in shares to defend the Hong Kong dollar’s peg to the US dollar against hedge funds he called “crocodiles,” led by George Soros. He became Chief Secretary for Administration in 2001, succeeding Anson Chan. In 2005, after Tung Chee-hwa resigned, Tsang ran for Chief Executive, serving the remainder of Tung’s term and winning re-election in 2007. During his seven-year tenure, he proposed constitutional reforms in 2005 and 2010, with the latter passing after a compromise with pro-democracy legislators—the only such reforms passed in SAR history. He launched a five-year policy blueprint and ten large-scale infrastructure projects. His popularity declined after introducing the Political Appointments System, which became mired in controversies and scandals. In his final months in office, corruption allegations emerged. He was later charged by the Independent Commission Against Corruption, found guilty of one count of misconduct in public office in February 2017, and sentenced to 20 months in prison—the highest-ranking Hong Kon