Until three years ago, Leung Chun-ying was mostly known as a tight-lipped pro-establishment politician, his public appearances largely confined to meetings of the Executive Council and government-hosted cocktail receptions.
The long-time Executive Council convenor toed the government's line on policy issues and shied away from journalists. Reaching out to the grass roots in populist style? That was the last thing anyone expected of him.
But Leung raised eyebrows when he started to adopt a higher profile and began to drift from government positions. In April 2008, he assailed the wage protection movement that Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen had introduced in 2006, and called for a minimum wage for cleaners and security guards. After that, Leung championed the poor as if he were a directly elected politician. In May of the same year he pledged to help Ah Ying, a toilet cleaner employed by contractors hired by the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department whose hourly wage had been cut to HK$20 from HK$23.50 when her job title was changed to 'washroom attendant'.
For the past few years, Leung, chairman of property consultancy DTZ Asia-Pacific, has used his column in a Chinese-language newspaper to press the government to tackle poverty and housing problems. Bit by bit, he ventured onto a de facto campaign trail, while coyly denying he was eyeing the top job. Although it has seemed a stretch to watch Leung connect with Hong Kong's have-nots, his background is not so different from theirs. Unlike his major rival in the upcoming chief executive race, Henry Tang Ying-yen, Leung comes from modest circumstances.
Born in 1954 to a policeman father, the family lived in a crowded flat in the Police Married Quarters in Hollywood Road, Central. A few years before his father's retirement in 1969 as a police constable, he and his siblings went to work assembling artificial flowers to save money to buy their own flat.
He attended Hollywood Road Police Primary School and King's College. In 1971 he enrolled at the Hong Kong Polytechnic (now Polytechnic University) to study surveying. From 1974 to 1977, he studied estate management at Bristol Polytechnic in Britain, working at a Chinese takeaway to cover expenses.
