NYTimes.com 2 Top Officials in Hong Kong Resign in Wake of Protests
July 17, 2003 By KEITH BRADSHER HONG KONG, July 16 - Two weeks of street protests here produced a government crisis tonight as two top officials announced their resignations and the territory's chief executive said he would fly to Beijing on Saturday to consult China's rulers about what to do next. The resignations of Regina Ip, the secretary of security, and Antony Leung, the financial secretary, represent a very public humiliation for Beijing because the two had the reputation of enjoying particularly close ties to top Communist officials. Mrs. Ip was widely seen as Beijing's enforcer, sending police and immigration officers to perform sometimes politically controversial raids. Mr. Leung is a former student radical who married China's Olympic diving gold medalist, Fu Mingxia, last summer. After Tung Chee-hwa, the chief executive, Mrs. Ip and Mr. Leung attracted the most vehement criticism at a march on July 1 that drew a half-million people, most of them to protest a stringent internal-security bill that Mrs. Ip had championed. The resignations tonight came despite Beijing's hardening stance toward the rallies here in Hong Kong, which has been a special administrative region of China since Britain handed it over six years ago. Gao Siren, the head of Beijing's liaison office here, called on Tuesday for Hong Kong residents to focus more on the economy than on politics. The Hong Kong edition of the official China Daily warned in an editorial on Monday that the march on July 1 and follow-up rallies on July 9 and last Sunday represented "a vehicle for subverting the political system" here. Richard Tsoi, one of the main organizers of the July 1 march, said that demonstrators wanted lasting protections for civil liberties and broad democratic reforms to the political system here much more than the resignations of ministers. "We still think we have a long way to go," he said. Near the front of the march was a three-headed effigy of Mrs. Ip standing at Mr. Tung's left side and waving a butcher's knife while Mr. Leung peeked out from behind Mr. Tung's right shoulder, a reference to Mr. Tung's shielding him in a tax scandal. Mrs. Ip said she was resigning for unspecified personal reasons. Mr. Leung, whose resignation came two hours later and seemed to catch the government by surprise, said he felt that he had completed budgetary and economic stimulus plans that he wanted. Mrs. Ip, who kept a sword from the People's Liberation Army at the front of her desk, has overseen the city's police, immigration, customs and other uniformed officers since July 1998. Her efforts to push through the proposed security legislation, demanded by Beijing but deeply unpopular here, became almost as controversial as the bill itself. She questioned last autumn the value of democracy in protecting civil liberties and suggested that Hitler gained power because of universal suffrage, a position that historians dispute because of Hitler's reliance also on political violence. Three days before the July 1 march, she declared that she would not feel any pressure no matter how many people showed up. Mrs. Ip and Mr. Tung said in separate statements this evening that she had actually submitted her resignation on June 25, and that Mr. Tung had tried to talk her out of it before finally accepting it. Resignations for top officials become effective 30 days after submission, so Mrs. Ip will leave office on July 25. The government's insistence that Mrs. Ip gave her resignation three weeks ago but that nobody found out about it until now struck political experts. "The government obviously doesn't want it to look like she's resigning under pressure from the demonstrations," said Michael Davis, a professor of law and public affairs at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Mr. Leung is the third-ranking official in the government, after Mr. Tung and Donald Tsang, the chief secretary. But he has kept a very low public profile since he saved himself $24,000 by buying a Lexus LS430 luxury sedan a month before he raised luxury car taxes steeply in March as part of an unpopular series of tax increases. The government's anticorruption agency finished an investigation of him this week but has not made the results public. Mr. Leung did not address the subject in announcing his resignation tonight. Mr. Leung said in a statement that his resignation was effective immediately; Mr. Tung waived the normal 30-day delay for the resignation of ministers. Mr. Tung did not announce successors for Mrs. Ip or Mr. Leung. As minister-level appointments, their successors must be approved first by Beijing. Mr. Tung announced on July 5 that he was removing three of the most controversial provisions from the bill, including one that would have allowed the government to ban any Hong Kong group linked to an organization banned on the mainland for national security reasons. But the march so rattled the city's business leaders that the chairman of the pro-business party resigned from Mr. Tung's cabinet the following night. That left Mr. Tung without the votes to push the bill through the legislature and forced him on July 7 to postpone further consideration of the bill. No new timetable has been set.
