Emily Lau

In 1948, Lau's parents moved from Guangdong to Hong Kong during the Chinese Civil War.

Emily Lau Wai-hing, JP (born 21 January 1952) is a politician in Hong Kong who champions press freedom and human rights.

Lau was born on 21 January 1952 in Hong Kong.

In 1962, attended the new English-language Maryknoll Sisters' School in Happy Valley, where she studied until 1972.

When she was in primary school, she was given the English name Emily by her aunt.

In 1976, Lau earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Broadcast Journalism from University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California.

She later cited the Watergate scandal and investigative journalism having had a major formative effect on her views on the role and potential of the free press.

After returning to Hong Kong, Lau worked between 1976 and 1978 as a reporter for the South China Morning Post, the major English-language newspaper in Hong Kong.

She continued her studies in the early 1980s at the London School of Economics and completed an MSc in International Relations in 1982.

She then started doing television journalism when she joined the Television Broadcasts (TVB) and was promoted to senior producer in 1981.

She held a position as assistant producer at the BBC between 1982 and 1984, while concurrently working as the London correspondent of Hong Kong TVB News.

She later noted, "My passion for politics began to develop in 1982, when China told Britain that it would impose a settlement on Hong Kong if the two sides could not reach an agreement by 1984. From that moment, politics began to matter."

Lau returned to Hong Kong as Hong Kong correspondent of the Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review in 1984.

The position allowed her access and insights into the politics of the colonial Hong Kong.

In December 1984, after signing the Sino-British Joint Declaration, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher flew to Hong Kong to give a press conference.

Lau questioned Thatcher: "Prime Minister, two days ago you signed an agreement with China promising to deliver over 5 million people into the hands of a communist dictatorship. Is that morally defensible, or is it really true that in international politics the highest form of morality is one's own national interest?"

Thatcher replied by saying that everyone in Hong Kong was happy with the agreement, and Lau may be a solitary exception.

In 1987 Lau took up a position at the Journalism and Communication Department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) and subsequently at the Extra-Mural Department of the University of Hong Kong (HKU).

Lau was also involved with the Hong Kong Journalists Association during this period, serving first as an executive committee member, then vice-chair and finally chairperson from 1989 to 1991.

Their success was in part due to the fear of Communist China by the Hong Kong population after the Tiananmen massacre of early June 1989.

In this period, Lau became a household name in Hong Kong politics and the legislator came to be known as both a champion of her constituents and a thorn in the side of the Hong Kong administration.

She was equally a critic of Britain and Beijing.

The last British Governor Chris Patten aimed at a faster pace of democratisation.

Governor Patten carried out the reform packages which extended voting rights to millions of people in the revised functional constituency indirect elections.

The reform packages were ferociously criticised by the Beijing government for violating the Sino-British agreements.

She has served as Legislative Councillor for the New Territories East Constituency throughout the 1990s and 2000s until she stepped down in 2016.

A former journalist, she became the first woman directly elected on the Legislative Council of Hong Kong in the 1991 LegCo elections.

When the direct elections for the Legislative Council of Hong Kong (LegCo) were first introduced in the 1991 elections, Lau resigned from her posts and ran for office in the New Territories East geographical constituency (GC).

She campaigned for five months portraying herself as a new breed of politician in Hong Kong, appealing to a broad section of the Hong Kong population.

The elections saw a liberal landslide victory and she became the first woman elected in direct elections, together with her fellow pro-democracy politicians of the United Democrats of Hong Kong (UDHK).

In 1993, Lau tabled a motion to seek assurances of right of abode in Britain for the British National (Overseas) passport holders in case they were expelled from Hong Kong after 1997.

The motion was supported by 36 legislators but was rejected by the Secretary for Security Alistair Asprey.

In October 1994, Lau led legislators in urging Britain to grant full citizenship to 3.5 million native Hong Kong British Dependent Territories Citizens (BDTC).

As part of this action, she led a cross-party delegation of Hong Kong legislators to Britain to lobby government and opposition politicians ahead of the LegCo debate.

The five councillors met the British Foreign Secretary and other senior officials, but achieved little.

During the reform packages discussions, Lau proposed a private member's bill which would have allowed all 60 Legislative Council seats to be directly elected in the 1995 election.

The bill was beaten by only one vote.

In the 1995 Legislative Council elections Lau was re-elected in her constituency with 58.51 per cent of votes cast, the highest figure among all of the geographical constituencies.

It was at this time that the People's Republic of China and the United Kingdom discussed the fate of Hong Kong after 1997.

She was chairperson of the Democratic Party of Hong Kong until 2016.