District councillor Wong Chun-ping of the Sau Mau Ping North constituency in Kwun Tong, who was a former top official of the China Liaison Office, is seeking re-election as an independent candidate. As of Wednesday, he is uncontested in the constituency.
Wong, who now goes by the name Jackson Wong, was elected in the district council election as an independent candidate in November 2011. He received 2,934 votes and beat Democratic Party candidate Kai Ming-wah by 816 votes. Wong’s election campaign promoted livelihood issues in the district.
However, after he was elected, Apple Daily reported that he had changed his name, having been formerly known as Huang Chun Ping (Huang being the Mandarin form of Wong), Deputy Division Chief of Publicity and Education Division of the China Liaison Office, as revealed on a 2001 name card.
Changing names
According to property records checked by Apple Daily, under the surname Huang, he bought a flat in Laguna City Phase 4 in 2004 as a permanent resident in Hong Kong.
By 2005, when he became a deputy of the pro-Beijing Kwun Tong Resident Association, he was already using the name Jackson Wong.
As Huang, he had been working in the Chinese state run Xinhua News Agency in Hong Kong since the 1990s, which then became the China Liaison Office until around 2001.
He joined several pro-Beijing organisations after that, including the Kowloon Federation of Associations where he was a deputy in 2003 and the Kwun Tong Community Builders Alliance where he was president in 2008.
“Not a Chinese Communist Party member”
When Wong attended the first district council meeting in January 2012 after being elected, he told reporters he was not a Chinese Communist Party member. He said he “obtained permanent residency legally in Hong Kong through the Immigration Department.”
He did confess to having worked at the China Liaison Office ten years prior, but said he did not know he needed to declare this and therefore had not been hiding his identity.
He left the meeting through a back door soon after, despite having said he would meet reporters after.
“The China Liaison Office has never been involved in elections in Hong Kong,” said Hao Tie Chuan, Director of Department of Publicity, Cultural and Sports Affairs of the China Liaison Office, after Wong was elected.
Uncontested seats
As of Tuesday, there were 139 uncontested constituencies out of the total 431 constituencies.
There were 70 uncontested candidates from the two major pro-Beijing parties, including lawmaker Starry Lee Wai-king of the DAB Party – a “super district councillor” – and lawmakers Kwok Wai-keung, Alice Mak Mei-kuen and Tang Ka-piu of the Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions.
The candidates will be automatically elected if they are still uncontested when the nomination period ends on Thursday.
The district council election will take place on November 22.
