Emily Lau
Emily Lau Wai-hing New Territories East | |
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Personal details | |
Born | Hong Kong Chinese | 21 January 1952
Political party | Democratic Party (2008–present) |
Other political affiliations | Frontier (1996–2008) |
Spouses | John Ball
(m. 1983; div. 1985)Winston Poon
(m. 1989; div. 2006) |
Residence | Happy Valley, Hong Kong |
Alma mater | University of Southern California London School of Economics |
Occupation | Journalist (former), politician |
Website | emilylau |
Emily Lau | |
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Hanyu Pinyin | Liú Huìqīng |
Yue: Cantonese | |
Yale Romanization | Làuh Wai hīng |
Jyutping | Lau4 Wai3 hing1 |
Emily Lau Wai-hing,
Early life
Lau was born on 21 January 1952 in Hong Kong. In 1948, Lau's parents moved from Guangdong to Hong Kong during the Chinese Civil War. 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.[2]
Education
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.[2]
Journalism career
After returning to Hong Kong, Lau worked between 1976 and 1978 as a reporter for the
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 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."[2]
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 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).[2]
In December 1984, after signing the
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.[2]
Legislative Councillor
Last years of the colonial period
When the direct elections for the
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. 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 1993, Lau tabled a motion to seek assurances of
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.[2] Growing disillusioned with the Democratic Party, the pro-democracy party formed in 1994 to replace the United Democrats of Hong Kong, in August 1996 Lau founded a new political group, The Frontier, which took a more aggressively pro-democracy, pro-human rights and anti-Communist Party stance, with left wing positions on economic matters. Lau became the Convenor of the new party, which managed to obtain five legislators and become the fourth largest political group in the legislature before the handover. Lau remained in the Legislative Council until it was disbanded by the PRC following the handover on 1 July 1997.[2]
Lau also participated in street protests and in December 1996 she scuffled with the riot police outside the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre together with Andrew Cheng and Lee Cheuk-yan, while demonstrating outside the closed-door election for the post-handover Chief executive.[7] She was therefore arrested with 29 other pro-democracy activists. Over the months leading up to the
Early post-handover era
After the handover in 1998 she was required to relinquish her British passport and adopt Chinese citizenship to be eligible in running for the 1998 Hong Kong legislative election. The pro-democracy camp ended up winning 63 per cent of the popular vote and Lau was returned again to the Legislative Council where she remained until her retirement.[2]
Lau led The Frontier to put pressure on the government for an early democratisation of Hong Kong and was an outspoken critic of a number of LedCo motions, especially on the topic of human rights; she was also sceptical of the reliability of the "
In 1998, Lau sued the Hong Kong branch of the Xinhua News Agency over its slow response to her queries for personal information. She lost the case and was ordered by the court to pay legal fees of HK$1.6 million. Claiming that her lawsuit was in the public interest, she attempted to raise funds from the general public to pay for this injunction. By December 2000 she was still $1 million short and the agency (now the Central People's Government Liaison Office) applied to the court for her bankruptcy.
In the 2002 Chief executive election, Lau was against supporting an alternative candidate as some pro-democracy allies argued: "As it is not a fair, open and democratic election, we should not participate in it and give it any legitimacy." Lau co-founded the Coalition Against Second Term (CAST) to draw attention to the flawed process of choosing the Chief executive, the lack of competition and the need for real democracy.[8]
On international issues, Lau is supportive of self-determination for Taiwan. In 2003, she and another legislator,
Beside her legal problems, Lau has been the victim of several criminal nuisance cases, including telephone nuisance to her office in January and October 2003, and two occasions when food and/or faeces were splashed outside her office in
She fiercely opposed the controversial
In the Chief executive election held in 2005 after unpopular Tung Chee-hwa stepped down, Lau announced her interest in running for the post, to foster discussions over Hong Kong's democratic development.[10] Due to the opposition from secretary-general Andrew To and from other members of The Frontier, Lau ultimately did not run in the election. Democratic Party chairman Lee Wing-tat remained the sole pro-democratic candidate in this election, but he did not manage to secure the threshold of 100 nominations necessary for the job.
Joining the Democratic Party and 2012 reform package
At the time of her election to LegCo in 1991, Lau was generally considered to be the most radical legislator in Hong Kong.[11] However over time her radical image was overshadowed by activist Leung Kwok-hung and other radicals and her popular votes continuously declined. In September 2008 LegCo elections Emily Lau was barely re-elected in the New Territories East constituency, obtaining much fewer votes than in past elections. After reviewing the election results, in November 2008 The Frontier decided to merge with the more mainstream Democratic Party and Lau became one of its two vice-chairpersons. After this, her earlier strident stance toward the Beijing government and her fierce opposition to pro-Beijing supporters mellowed somewhat: this was perceived by some in a very negative way.[12]
On 24 May 2010, Emily Lau and Democratic Party chairman
Chairperson of the Democratic Party
In September 2012, the Democratic Party suffered the worst defeat in the party's history in the 2012 Legislative Council election. Chairman Albert Ho resigned as chairman and Lau became acting Chairperson of the party for three months.[1] In the party leadership election on 16 December 2012 she was elected chairperson, narrowly defeating vice-chairman Sin Chung-kai (149 votes to 133), therefore becoming the first female leader of the party since its formation in 1994.[14]
Emily Lau and other Democratic Party members supported the 2014 Hong Kong protests. On 11 December 2014, Lau was arrested by the police with a group of about a hundred demonstrators staging a final sit-in, after a 75-day street occupation. Among these were other prominent democratic legislators including Martin Lee and Alan Leong.[15]
On 14 December 2014, she was re-elected chairperson in the party leadership election, beating three rivals in the party's 20-year history.[16]
On 1 January 2016, Emily Lau announced that she would not seek to be elected for an eighth term in the
Lau announced her resignation from the party chair post in December 2016 and was succeeded by legislator Wu Chi-wai. She also relinquished all of her party positions in the coming months. After her retirement from the LedCo, she kept working as a television journalist, interviewing several political heavyweights in her shows.
Reputation
Lau is considered a politician with strong convictions on the promotion of democratic human rights and equal opportunities in Hong Kong. She was labelled by the Hong Kong government as "radical", "outside mainstream public opinion" and a "solitary exception".[18] She was among the most popular legislators throughout the 1990s.[19] The last British Governor Chris Patten regarded Lau as a "professional politician, handsome, well informed and dashingly eloquent, who would have got to the top in any Western political system" and an "exponent of the incisive soundbite."[20]
Since she joined the Democratic Party, her earlier strident stance toward the Beijing government mellowed somewhat.[12] After she met with the mainland officials for negotiations over the 2010 Hong Kong electoral reform and voted with her party in favour of the reforms, she received ferocious attacks from radical democrats for her compromise.
Personal life
In 1983, Lau married John Ball, a British journalist from the
Stephen Lau Sing-hung, Emily Lau's brother, was a Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference Guangzhou committee member in the 1980s, was the chairman of Ernst & Young's tax service before he left in 2006 and was chief executive of China Timber Resources Group from 2007 to 2010. Despite his sister's political stance, he came to notoriety when he filed a claim in the
See also
- Human rights in Hong Kong
- Politics of Hong Kong
- Women in politics
References
- ^ a b "Emily Lau Wai-hing elected Democratic Party chairwoman". South China Morning Post. 16 December 2012.
- ^ ISBN 9780765607980.
- ^ "Hon Emily LAU Wai-hing, JP". Legislative Council of Hong Kong. Archived from the original on 6 December 2010.
- ^ "Hong Kong Iron Lady's nightmare scenario comes true".
- ^ "Featured Alumni: Emily Lau (MSc in International Relations, 1982)". Department of International Relations blog. 20 March 2013.
- ^ McMillen, Donald H. (1994). The Other Hong Kong Report 1994. Chinese University Press. p. 14.
- ISBN 962-209-441-4.
- ^ "The Promise of Democratization in Hong Kong: The 2002 Chief Executive Election and the Transition Five Years after Reversion" (PDF). National Democratic Institute. 2002.
- ^ Ping, Xiao (2 September 2003). "Do not show toleration of Emily Lau's Offence". China Daily.
- ^ "參與特首選舉推動民主運動". Apple Daily. 25 March 2005.
- ^ a b Cheng, Joseph Yu-shek (p.217). "The Emergence of Radical Politics in Hong Kong: Causes and Impact" Archived 26 October 2018 at the Wayback Machine. China Review, Vol. 14, No. 1, Special Issue: Urban and Regional Governance in China (Spring 2014).
- ^ a b "Democratic Party becomes moderate but no wiser"[permanent dead link]. Ta Kung Po, 28 May 2010.
- ^ Cheung, Gary; Wong, Albert; Fung, Fanny WY. (25 June 2010). "Cheers and jeers for political reform vote", South China Morning Post
- ^ Lau makes political history Archived 5 October 2013 at the Wayback Machine, The Standard, 17 December 2012
- ^ "Hong Kong's main democracy protest camp falls with leading protest figures arrested". Time. 11 December 2014.
- ^ Ng, Joyce (15 December 2014). "Re-elected Democratic Party head Emily Lau calls for party to focus on younger Hong Kong generation". South China Morning Post.
- ^ Lam, Jeffie (1 January 2016). "Emily Lau reflects on 'glorious days' in Hong Kong legislature, but rules out standing for chief executive in a 'fake election'". South China Morning Post.
- ^ Halpern, Diane F.; Cheung, Fanny M. (2011). Women at the Top: Powerful Leaders Tell Us How to Combine Work and Family. John Wiley & Sons.
- ^ McMillen, Donald H. (1994). The Other Hong Kong Report 1994. Chinese University Press. pp. 120–1.
- ^ Patten, Chris (2012). East and West. Pan Macmillan. p. 104.
- ^ "Occupy taxi claim splits Lau brother and sister". The Standard. 19 November 2014. Archived from the original on 26 May 2015.
External links
- 2012 Election Blog of Emily Lau
- Home Page of Emily Lau
- Emily Lau's Letter to former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook (In the letter she urged the UK to grant British citizenship for all BN(O)s)
- Emily Lau biography in German and interview in English in cosmopolis.ch