Emily Lau

Lau was born on 21 January 1952 in Hong Kong. In 1948, Lau's parents moved from Guangdong to Hong Kong during the Chinese Civil War. In 1962, attended the new English-language Maryknoll Sisters' School in Happy Valley, where she studied until 1972. When she was in primary school, she was given the English name Emily by her aunt. == Education ==

In 1976, Lau earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Broadcast Journalism from University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California. She later cited the Watergate scandal and investigative journalism having had a major formative effect on her views on the role and potential of the free press. ==Journalism career==

. After returning to Hong Kong, Lau worked between 1976 and 1978 as a reporter for the South China Morning Post, the major English-language newspaper in Hong Kong. She then started doing television journalism when she joined the Television Broadcasts (TVB) and was promoted to senior producer in 1981. She continued her studies in the early 1980s at the London School of Economics and completed an MSc in International Relations in 1982. She held a position as assistant producer at the BBC between 1982 and 1984, while concurrently working as the London correspondent of Hong Kong TVB News. Lau was also involved with the Hong Kong Journalists Association during this period, serving first as an executive committee member, then vice-chair and finally chairperson from 1989 to 1991. ==Legislative Councillor==

Last years of the colonial period When the direct elections for the Legislative Council of Hong Kong (LegCo) were first introduced in the 1991 elections, Lau resigned from her posts and ran for office in the New Territories East geographical constituency (GC). She campaigned for five months portraying herself as a new breed of politician in Hong Kong, appealing to a broad section of the Hong Kong population. The elections saw a liberal landslide victory and she became the first woman elected in direct elections, together with her fellow pro-democracy politicians of the United Democrats of Hong Kong (UDHK). Their success was in part due to the fear of Communist China by the Hong Kong population after the Tiananmen massacre of early June 1989. In October 1994, Lau led legislators in urging Britain to grant full citizenship to 3.5 million native Hong Kong British Dependent Territories Citizens (BDTC). As part of this action, she led a cross-party delegation of Hong Kong legislators to Britain to lobby government and opposition politicians ahead of the LegCo debate. The five councillors met the British Foreign Secretary and other senior officials, but achieved little. She was therefore arrested with 29 other pro-democracy activists. Over the months leading up to the July 1997 handover, Lau urged the Chief executive-designate Tung Chee-hwa to stand up against Beijing, since his "unreserved support" for the Beijing-hand-picked Provisional Legislative Council resulted in the abolishment or modification of important Hong Kong laws covering human rights and civil liberties. In March of the same year Lau called for the boycott of Hong Kong's future first election under PRC rule, condemning the voting system as unfair and the proportional representation as highly favouring pro-Beijing candidates. The pro-democracy camp ended up winning 63 per cent of the popular vote and Lau was returned again to the Legislative Council where she remained until her retirement. On international issues, Lau is supportive of self-determination for Taiwan. In 2003, she and another legislator, James To of the Democratic Party, attended a seminar entitled "Hong Kong Under One Country, Two Systems" organised by a pro-Taiwan independence group headed by former ROC President Lee Teng-hui. Lau stated that "Taiwan's future should be determined by the Taiwan people themselves". Her subsequent refusal to explicitly recognise Taiwan as a part of the PRC during an interview again drew criticism from more conservative sectors of the Hong Kong society, including attacks from pro-Beijing politician Leung Chun-ying, who became Chief executive in 2012. Beside her legal problems, Lau has been the victim of several criminal nuisance cases, including telephone nuisance to her office in January and October 2003, and two occasions when food and/or faeces were splashed outside her office in Shatin, in July and September 2003. A woman and an old man were arrested and fined in connection with some of these cases. Most notably, an arson attack against Lau's office took place on 21 June 2004. Posters outside her office, about an upcoming rally, were burned. Words were left saying "All Chinese traitors must die." She fiercely opposed the controversial national security bill in 2002 and 2003, as it was clashing with requirements of the Hong Kong Basic Law Article 23. After the 2003 July 1 march in 2003, she was the second candidate listed on the joint list with other pro-democrats parties in the New Territories East constituency and was elected again in the 2004 Legislative Council elections. She was also nominated chairwoman of the Legislative Council Finance Committee, position that she covered on and off until 2012. In the Chief executive election held in 2005 after unpopular Tung Chee-hwa stepped down, Lau announced her interest in running for the post, to foster discussions over Hong Kong's democratic development. Due to the opposition from secretary-general Andrew To and from other members of The Frontier, Lau ultimately did not run in the election. Democratic Party chairman Lee Wing-tat remained the sole pro-democratic candidate in this election, but he did not manage to secure the threshold of 100 nominations necessary for the job. Joining the Democratic Party and 2012 reform package At the time of her election to LegCo in 1991, Lau was generally considered to be the most radical legislator in Hong Kong. However over time her radical image was overshadowed by activist Leung Kwok-hung and other radicals and her popular votes continuously declined. In September 2008 LegCo elections Emily Lau was barely re-elected in the New Territories East constituency, obtaining much fewer votes than in past elections. After reviewing the election results, in November 2008 The Frontier decided to merge with the more mainstream Democratic Party and Lau became one of its two vice-chairpersons. After this, her earlier strident stance toward the Beijing government and her fierce opposition to pro-Beijing supporters mellowed somewhat: this was perceived by some in a very negative way. On 24 May 2010, Emily Lau and Democratic Party chairman Albert Ho, together with veteran Cheung Man-kwong met with Beijing representatives headed by Li Gang, the deputy director of the Liaison Office of the Central People's Government in Hong Kong, for negotiations over the 2012 constitutional reform package. This was the first meeting between Democratic Party leaders and senior officials from the Chinese central government since the Tiananmen protests of 1989. In June 2010, as vice-chairperson of the Democratic Party, she voted with her party in favour of the government's reform package, which included the party's late amendment – accepted by Beijing – to hold a popular vote for five new District Council (second) functional constituencies. Lau's less radical behaviour in this period, when compared to more radical populist figures Leung Kwok-hung and Wong Yuk-man, led her to become the main target for attacks by Wong and People Power. Emily Lau and other Democratic Party members supported the 2014 Hong Kong protests. On 11 December 2014, Lau was arrested by the police with a group of about a hundred demonstrators staging a final sit-in, after a 75-day street occupation. Among these were other prominent democratic legislators including Martin Lee and Alan Leong. On 14 December 2014, she was re-elected chairperson in the party leadership election, beating three rivals in the party's 20-year history. On 1 January 2016, Emily Lau announced that she would not seek to be elected for an eighth term in the September election, therefore ending her legislator activity after serving for 25 years in the Legislative Council party primary. She participated to the election in the list of her younger colleague Lam Cheuk-ting and helped him get elected with nearly 40,000 votes. Lau announced her resignation from the party chair post in December 2016 and was succeeded by legislator Wu Chi-wai. She also relinquished all of her party positions in the coming months. After her retirement from the LedCo, she kept working as a television journalist, interviewing several political heavyweights in her shows. ==Reputation==

Lau is considered a politician with strong convictions on the promotion of democratic human rights and equal opportunities in Hong Kong. She was labelled by the Hong Kong government as "radical", "outside mainstream public opinion" and a "solitary exception". She was among the most popular legislators throughout the 1990s. The last British Governor Chris Patten regarded Lau as a "professional politician, handsome, well informed and dashingly eloquent, who would have got to the top in any Western political system" and an "exponent of the incisive soundbite." Since she joined the Democratic Party, her earlier strident stance toward the Beijing government mellowed somewhat. After she met with the mainland officials for negotiations over the 2010 Hong Kong electoral reform and voted with her party in favour of the reforms, she received ferocious attacks from radical democrats for her compromise. == Personal life ==

In 1983, Lau married John Ball, a British journalist from the Sunday Times. The marriage lasted two years. In 1989, Lau remarried to a Hong Kong lawyer, Winston Poon, QC. They met in London during her visit to discuss the Hong Kong Basic Law with the members of Parliament of the United Kingdom. ==See also==