In Memory of Mr C. H. Tung
News of Mr C. H. Tung's passing reached me between meetings, the way such news often does, and I found myself sitting with it longer than the day's schedule allowed. On behalf of New College, I want to offer our condolences to his family and to the many people who worked alongside him over the decades.
For us, his name is bound up with the College itself. New College carries its name in recognition of the generosity of The Tung Foundation, founded by his father, Mr C. Y. Tung. Students sometimes ask about this history in passing, usually while filling in a form or reading an orientation booklet, and I suspect few linger on it. But it is worth pausing over. A family chose, across two generations, to put resources into higher education in Hong Kong, trusting that something good would eventually come of it, long after the cheque was written.
I was an undergraduate when Mr Tung became the first Chief Executive after the Handover. I remember the mood of that period more clearly than I remember the policy details: a city working out what it now was, against a backdrop of the Asian financial crisis, then SARS, then arguments about housing, about identity, about almost everything. Lecture halls emptied out during SARS in a way I still recall vividly. Whatever one makes of the politics of that era, it was not an easy time to govern, and it was not an easy time to be twenty either.
Looking back, some of what his government tried to build only really took shape years later. The push toward closer economic ties with the mainland eventually became CEPA and, further down the line, deeper regional integration. The early bets on innovation and technology gave us Cyberport and the Science Park, institutions that took a long time to find their footing. The Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macao Bridge, planned in his time, opened long after he had left office. Even the housing ambitions of those years, contested as they were, anticipated debates Hong Kong is still having now.
None of this is to say every decision aged well. Some plainly did not, and people are entitled to disagree about the record. But there is a particular kind of unfairness in judging a period of governance only by what was visible at the time, without asking what grew from it later.
At New College, we remember Mr Tung with respect, and we remember too the quieter act of generosity that gave this College its name. If our students take one thing from this, I hope it is a sense that contribution rarely announces itself immediately. It tends to arrive late, and often for people who were not yet born when the decision was made.
