When Tung Chee-hwa died, the obituaries predictably described a Hong Kong shipping mogul who became the city\u2019s first postcolonial chief executive. How his government navigated the Asian financial crisis and severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) epidemic and its retreat from Article 23 were highlighted. There was less attention paid to the political hybrid he embodied.<\/p>\n
Tung sat as vice-chairman of China\u2019s top political advisory body, the Chinese People\u2019s Political Consultative Conference, until 2023 \u2013 state-leader rank, no diplomatic portfolio. His working instrument was the China-United States Exchange Foundation<\/a>, which he established in Hong Kong in 2008, the year marking the 30th anniversary of Sino-US relations, to keep senior Americans and Chinese talking when their governments would not.Standing without a mandate, exercised through a private vehicle: that is Track 1.5, and Tung was very good at it<\/a>.At the recent China-US Track 1.5 Dialogue in Beijing, Liu Haixing, head of the Communist Party\u2019s International Department, said<\/a> both countries should expand the \u201cpie\u201d of shared interests and reject zero-sum games to reach \u201cnormal stability with controllable disagreements\u201d. This is not the stuff of summit headlines but of realistic ambition: neither a friendship nor a divorce, but a managed rivalry where shared interests can grow and the rest is fenced off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Tung Chee-hwa died, the obituaries predictably described a Hong Kong shipping mogul who became the city\u2019s first…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":856168,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,966,3995,105892,144,361461,230455,5425,256709,23047,111875,3,243472,13563,361462,361460,111104,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-856167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-article","tag-asia","tag-asian-financial-crisis","tag-china","tag-china-united-states-exchange-foundation","tag-chinese-peoples-political-consultative-conference","tag-hong-kong","tag-hsbc-global-investment-summit","tag-john-lee-ka-chiu","tag-liu-haixing","tag-news","tag-sars","tag-shenzhen","tag-sino-us-relations","tag-tung-chee-hwa","tag-unicef","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=856167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856167\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/856168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=856167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=856167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=856167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}