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.

Tsang was born in Hong Kong on 7 October 1944 to a Hong Kong police officer.

His family ancestry is from Guangdong Foshan.

He spent his childhood living in the Hollywood Road Police Married Quarters in Central, Hong Kong.

After completing his secondary education at Wah Yan College, Hong Kong, a Jesuit school in Hong Kong, he worked briefly as a salesman at US drug company Pfizer Inc. before joining the civil service.

Tsang joined the colonial civil service as an Executive Officer in 1967, occupying various positions in local administration, finance and trade before he was appointed Financial Secretary of Hong Kong in 1995, becoming the first ethnic Chinese to hold the position under British administration.

Tsang joined the Civil Service as an Executive Officer in January 1967 and held many positions dealing with local administration, finance, trade and policies relating to the return of Hong Kong to China.

In 1977, Tsang was attached to the Asian Development Bank in Manila for a year and worked on water supply and railway development projects in the Philippines and Bangladesh.

He was subsequently sent by the government to complete a master's degree in public administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government of the Harvard University in 1981.

Tsang was responsible for implementing the Sino-British Joint Declaration, signed in 1984 to decide the Hong Kong's sovereignty to be transferred to China in 1997, and the promotion of the British Nationality Selection Scheme as Deputy Secretary of the General Duties Branch between 1985 and 1989.

In 1989, he was appointed Director of Administration to oversee the functioning of the Government Secretariat.

In 1991 he became Director-General of Trade and in charge of all facets of trade negotiation and administration affecting Hong Kong.

In May 1993, he was promoted to Secretary for the Treasury, responsible for the overall resource allocation, the taxation systems and the cost effectiveness of the Hong Kong government.

In September 1995, Tsang was appointed Financial Secretary, becoming the first Chinese to hold the position in 150 years of colonial history.

During his term as Financial Secretary, Tsang coined the term "caring capitalism" in 1996, which describe the governments's approach of giving priority to economic growth and then using the new-found wealth to develop social infrastructure and welfare services.

Hong Kong's public spending grew steadily as public revenue remained robust and government budget in surplus.

Public expenditure to GDP rose to as high as 23%, though still the lowest among developed economies.

He also approved a raise in civil servants' salaries at the beginning of the Asian economic crisis.

He continued to serve in the Hong Kong SAR government after 1997 and gained his reputation internationally for his intervention in Hong Kong's stock market in defending the Hong Kong dollar's peg to the US dollar during the 1997 financial crisis.

He went on to become the first Financial Secretary in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region on 1 July 1997.

Shortly before the handover, he was knighted by Prince Charles at the Government House in June 1997.

The salary raise was finally reversed, aligning civil servants' salaries to 1997 levels.

Tsang was known for his role in defending the Hong Kong dollar's peg to the US dollar during the Asian financial crisis in 1998 from attacks by hedge funds led by George Soros who he dubbed "crocodiles".

He joined hand with Joseph Yam, Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, and bought over $15 billion in Hong Kong stock to defend Hong Kong's exchange rate and to make the government the biggest shareholder in many blue chip firms.

Tsang's action successfully led to the retreat of the hedge funds and earned his reputation internationally.

Tsang became the Chief Secretary for Administration in 2001 and ran for the Chief Executive in 2005 after incumbent Tung Chee-hwa resigned.

In 2001, Tsang succeeded Anson Chan who retired citing personal reasons to be the Chief Secretary for Administration, the second-ranking position in the government.

It was widely believed that Chan resigned from the government in protest against Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa's introduction of the Principal Officials Accountability System, which made the capacity of the Chief Secretary from civil servant to political appointee.

Under the new system, the power of the Chief Secretary as the head of the civil service was largely taken away by the Chief Executive and all ministers would only report to the Chief Executive directly.

Donald Tsang found his major task as Chief Secretary was to implement Tung's order to launch a "Team Clean Campaign" to clean up the city in May 2003 after the SARS outbreak.

As he was generally regarded as being sidelined by Tung, Tsang was untainted by major policy blunders, such as the controversy over the legislation of the Hong Kong Basic Law Article 23 which led to a historic massive demonstration on 1 July 2003.

He remained topping in popularity polls among all the officials in Hong Kong as Chief Secretary.

In his seven years of term, he proposed two constitutional reform proposals in 2005 and 2010 and saw the second ones passed after he reached a compromise with the pro-democracy legislators, making it the first and only political reform proposals to be passed in the SAR history.

He carried out a five-year policy blueprint and ten large-scale infrastructure projects during his term.

His popularity began to decline after the introduction of the Political Appointments System which was marked by controversies and scandals.

In the last months of his term, Tsang was embroiled by various corruption allegations.

He served the remaining term of Tung and was re-elected in 2007.

He served a full five-year term until he stepped down in 2012.

He was subsequently charged by the Independent Commission Against Corruption and was found guilty of one count of misconduct in public office in February 2017 and was sentenced to 20 months imprisonment, becoming the highest officeholder in Hong Kong history to be convicted and imprisoned.

His name was later cleared when the Court of Final Appeal unanimously quashed his conviction and sentence in June 2019, on the ground that the trial judge had misdirected the jury.