Lau Wong-fat

Lau Wong-fat, GBM, GBS, OBE, JP (15 October 1936 – 23 July 2017) was a Hong Kong businessman and politician.

Lau was born in the village of Lung Kwu Tan, Tuen Mun, New Territories in 1936.

At the age of 22, Lau was selected by local villagers at the Lung Kwu Tan Village to be a representative of Tuen Mun, the youngest ever village leader.

He became chairman of the Tuen Mun Rural Committee in 1970 under the tutelage of chairman of the Heung Yee Kuk Chan Yat-sen, a position he held for 41 years, until in April 2011 the committee amended its constitution to limit any chairman to no more than two four-year terms.

He had been the long-time chairman of the Rural Council, the most powerful organ representing the interests of the New Territories indigenous inhabitants from 1980 to 2015.

He began to involve in New Territories rural politics as a village representative in the Tuen Mun Rural Committee and climbed to the head of the villagers as the chairman of Heung Yee Kuk in 1980, where he kept the position for 35 years until he passed it on to his son, Kenneth Lau.

He was appointed member of the Hong Kong Basic Law Drafting Committee and played an instrumental role in ensuring rural interests in the drafting of the Basic Law of Hong Kong.

In 1980 Lau became the chairman of the Heung Yee Kuk, which represented established interests of all inhabitants in the New Territories.

He held the position for 35 years and was elected for nine terms.

By the powerful nature of the Kuk he became a high flyer in the Hong Kong politics.

The Melhado Investment Ltd in which Lau was a major shareholder sued the government in the early 1980s for its non-agricultural use of land in the New Territories.

In 1983, the Court of Appeal ruled in favour of the Melhado.

The Melhado case thus became the beginning of widespread use of land in the New Territories for the open storage of containers.

In the capacity of the Kuk chairman, Lau was invited to be a guest at the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration on 19 December 1984 in Beijing.

He was also a member of the Legislative Council of Hong Kong from 1985 to 2016.

He was also the chairman of the Tuen Mun District Council from 1985 to 2011 and the chairman of the Regional Council from 1995 to 1999.

As the rural committee chairman, Lau was automatically an ex-officio member of Tuen Mun District Council, and became its chairman in 1985.

In 1985, he was appointed to the Hong Kong Basic Law Drafting Committee by the Beijing government, which was responsible for drafting the mini-constitution of Hong Kong in 1997, where he played an instrumental role in the insertion of the Article 40 in the Basic Law to ensure indigenous interests remained protected after Hong Kong's handover to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.

Lau first became a member of the Legislative Council of Hong Kong in 1985 after the creation of the newly created functional constituency Regional Council where he was elected by the members of the council.

He was first indirectly elected to the Legislative Council through the Regional Council functional constituency in 1986 and he held his seat through Heung Yee Kuk constituency from 1991 to 2004 and from 2008 until 2016 when he was replaced by his son.

In 1986 Lau also became a member of the Regional Council where he became the chairman of the council from 1995 to 1997 and the chairman of the Provisional Regional Council from 1997 to 1999 until the Regional Council and the Urban Council were abolished in 2000.

He did not stand for the 1988 re-election but was appointed by Governor David Wilson instead.

In 1991, a Rural functional constituency was created where members of the Heung Yee Kuk elected its own Legislative Council representative.

He was a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference from 1993 to 2003.

He was also appointed Hong Kong Affairs Advisors and Preparatory Committee for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region by Beijing ahead of the handover of Hong Kong.

From 2004 to 2008 he was indirectly elected through the District Council constituency.

Lau was uncontestedly elected six times with a brief interruption from 2004 and 2008 where he stood in the District Council functional constituency as the incumbent pro-Beijing legislator Ip Kwok-him of the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong (DAB) lost his District Council seat and therefore ineligible to run.

From 2009 to 2012 he was a non-official member of the Executive Council of Hong Kong.

He had also served as the member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and chairman of the Regional Council and the Tuen Mun District Council.

In 2009, he was appointed by Chief Executive Donald Tsang to the Executive Council, the highest advisory council of the Hong Kong government where he served until 2012.

For this, together with his extensive ownership of land and property, he was known as the "King of the New Territories" (新界王) or the "Land Emperor of the New Territories" (新界土皇帝).

For many years unopposed, in January 2011, he faced the village's approximately 600 voters, after a challenge following the controversy of his failure to disclose some of his property holdings.

He and his ally won comfortably, with even the defeated young candidates claiming "I just want to learn things from Fat Shuk [Uncle Fat]."

He briefly lost this position in April 2011 with his ousting from leadership of the rural committee by another pro-Beijing politician Junius Ho.

After failing to win a seat in the 2011 District Council elections, and against protests by rural committee members and local villagers, he was directly appointed back to the council by Chief Executive Donald Tsang, and on 4 January 2012 was elected by District Councillors back into the post of council chairman.

However, he was re-elected as chairman of the rural committee in 2015.

His longstanding membership of the rural committee was as village representative for Lung Kwu Tan.

He held the chairmanship of the Tuen Mun District Council again from 2015 to 2016 until he retired from the rural committee.

In May 2015, he stepped down as chairman and was succeeded by his son, Kenneth Lau.

He died in 2017 at the age of 80.