The Chief Executive tells power why a free press is imperative for Hong Kong

If it troubles Donald Tsang Yam-kuen to serve two masters, he doesn’t show it. The Chief Executive’s signature bow tie never seems off kilter. He speaks with the confident, lilting cadences of an extinct Imperial British bureaucracy. When he wants to emphasize a point, he doesn’t raise his voice, he whispers. But while Tsang was technically elected to office, he serves at the pleasure of Beijing. That puts him right at the fault line of the Chinese conundrum: how to marry the unpredictable dynamics of a super-charged economy without ceding state control. Tsang steered Hong Kong through the 1998 Asian financial meltdown as financial secretary. And he’s seen what can happen if you run afoul of the populace. As the number two in the Hong Kong government, he had a front row view of the downfall of his predecessor, Tung Chee-hwa. A recent bout of tough headlines over the lack of transparency in political appointments has shrunk Tsang’s approval ratings to an all-time low. But meeting power, Tsang didn’t seem rattled in the least, sitting in the old British governor’s mansion after returning from the Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing. In fact, he was unusually effervescent. Tsang, who accepted a knighthood from Prince Charles hours before the 1997 handover, was quick to throw a jab at his former colonial overlords, who will host the Olympics in 2012, but probably not as spectacularly or significantly as Beijing. “It’s a very hard act to follow.”

How so?
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