'Peacemaker' Tung Chee-hwa urged to speak to Beijing on Hong Kong's behalf
Former adviser to White House says first chief executive has connections to convey city's needs
The city's "best peacemaker" Tung Chee-hwa should talk to Beijing on Hong Kong's behalf, according to a local eye doctor who was an arts adviser to the administration of former US president George Bush senior.
Ophthalmologist, artist, inventor, entrepreneur and philanthropist Dominic Lam Man-kit, 67, was a member of the Committee on the Arts and Humanities appointed by Bush in 1989.
He told the South China Morning Post that 77-year-old Tung, Hong Kong's first chief executive, had the seniority and connections that made him the best candidate to address the city's needs to leaders in Beijing.
"Tung, as a vice-chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, is the only state leader in Hong Kong. He is in good health and has been quite vocal lately," Lam said. "Instead of speaking to us, I think he should speak for us to the central leaders as a mediator seeking the common good for all parties concerned."
He said the forthcoming annual session of the top advisory body in Beijing would be a good occasion for the message.
Lam, who founded the World Eye Organisation after returning to Hong Kong from the US in 1999, has enjoyed close ties with China's top leadership through the charity Project Orbis, which operates a "flying eye hospital". Lam was instrumental in bringing the DC-10, loaded with ophthalmic equipment and eye specialists, to China in 1982. Late leader Deng Xiaoping boarded the hospital plane and the late vice-president Wang Zhen donated his corneas to Orbis posthumously.
Lam, a Jilin CPPCC member from 1998 to 2007, added that Tung's father, the late shipping magnate Tung Chao-yung, was on good terms with the older generation of the Communist leaders, including the late Xi Zhongxun , father of President Xi Jinping . That history makes Tung especially qualified for the peacemaker task, Lam said.