Regina Ip

Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee (' Lau'''; born 24 August 1950) is a Chinese politician.

She is currently the Convenor of the Executive Council (ExCo) and a member of the Legislative Council of Hong Kong (LegCo), as well as the founder and current chairperson of the New People's Party.

She was formerly a prominent government official of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) and was the first woman to be appointed the Secretary for Security to head the disciplinary service.

She is also the founder and Chairwoman of Savantas Policy Institute, a think-tank in Hong Kong.

Ip became a controversial figure for her role advocating the passage of the national security legislation to implement Hong Kong Basic Law Article 23, and after this legislation was withdrawn, she became the first principal official to resign from the administration of Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa.

She took a sabbatical to study for a master's degree.

Ip was born in what was then British Hong Kong in 1950; her father was a Chinese Singaporean trader Lau Fook-seng, and her mother was actress Wa Choi-Fung (華彩鳳), the second wife of her father.

She attended St. Stephen's Girls' College, after which she read English literature at the University of Hong Kong, graduating with first-class honours; she later obtained a Master of Letters degree from the University of Glasgow, where she studied Elizabethan poet, Sir Philip Sidney.

In the 1970s Ip joined the Hong Kong Government as an Administrative Officer.

In 1986, she, accompanied by her husband, went to Stanford Graduate School of Business to study for an MS in Management under the Sloan Programme.

She took various bureaucratic positions before she was appointed Director of Industry Department in September 1995.

In August 1996, she was appointed Director of Immigration – a post usually filled by officials from within the Immigration Department.

She was the first woman to hold the post, and continued until after the 1997 handover.

While she held that post, the UK government decided to grant full British citizenship for 50,000 Hong Kong families.

She was also head of immigration during the right of abode saga, when the Hong Kong government requested the National People's Congress in Beijing to intervene after the courts ruled against the government, essentially granting the Hong Kong government the ability to simply ignore the court's ruling after it granted right of abode to the children of Hong Kong residents who held right of abode whether or not those children were born in Hong Kong.

In July 1998, Ip was appointed to the post of Secretary for Security – again, the first woman to hold that post.

She became the first government minister to "declare her political stance".

Ip became one of the so-called 14 principal officials and a member of the Executive Council during Tung Chee-hwa's second term in government on 1 July 2002.

She was well known at that time as a hawkish, uncompromising figure in the Government, with some describing her as "a staunch, arrogant, authoritarian and yet outspoken bureaucrat".

As security minister, she promoted the adoption of the controversial Article 23 of Hong Kong's Basic Law.

After massive public protests and the government's withdrawal of the proposed national security legislation, Ip resigned from office on 25 June 2003, citing personal reasons.

In 2003, Ip returned to Stanford University to pursue a master's degree in East Asian Studies, with Larry Diamond as her supervisor.

Her thesis, Hong Kong: Case Study in Democratic Development in Transitional Society, reportedly expressed admiration for a bicameral system and suggested that political parties in Hong Kong be strengthened and be more inclusive.

She returned to Hong Kong in 2006.

She set up a policy think tank, Savantas Policy Institute, giving rise to media speculation that she was planning to run for the office of Chief Executive sometime in the future.

She contested the 2007 Hong Kong Island by-election for the Legislative Council but was defeated by Anson Chan in the two-horse race.

In September 2007, she declared her intention to run for the Legislative Council in the Hong Kong Island by-election.

She apologised for her handling of the Article 23 situation, hoped to put it behind her.

However, she received only 43% of the vote, defeated by Anson Chan.

She ran again in the 2008 Legislative Council election and won, gaining a seat in the Hong Kong Island.

Ip ran in the 2008 Hong Kong legislative election in the Hong Kong Island geographical constituency, forming a ticket including dermatologist Louis Shih and two elected District Councillors, Albert Wong and Ronald Chan.

Her ticket won a total of 61,073 votes, the second highest on Hong Kong Island and the fourth highest Hong Kong wide.

She was sworn in as Legislative Councillor on 8 October 2008.

In January 2011, she launched a middle-class oriented party called New People's Party.

She was re-elected in the 2012 and 2016 elections.

Ip is widely known to be keen on the Chief Executive top post.

She ran in both 2012 and 2017 Chief Executive elections but did not secure a minimum number of 150 nominations from the 1,200-member Election Committee to enter the race on both occasions.

The party held two seats in the legislature, herself and Michael Tien, after the 2012 Legislative council election, in which Ip was elected with 30,289 votes, despite losing almost half of the votes.

She was subsequently appointed to the Executive Council of Hong Kong by Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying after the election, in which she served until December 2016 when she ran for the Chief Executive for the second time.

In 2020, Larry Diamond, her supervisor at Stanford University, publicly criticized Ip's handling of the democracy movement and freedom of the press in Hong Kong.