"If you look at the three Chief Executives we’ve had, Tung is a nice man but he doesn’t know government. Then Donald Tsang, he knows the government but he has no votes. He’s a civil servant. So now CY is there. Even after 15 years in Exco, he has absolutely no knowledge about how government should run, so he runs it his way and he is bumping heads with the legislature always.”

Allen Lee

Allen Lee Peng-fei has had a very varied political background, and has often appeared to shift position. Now he’s widely seen, through his appearances as a host of RTHK’s Chinese-language “Legco Review”, as a strong proponent of democracy and universal suffrage, but it was not always the case. He has adopted so many political stances that one writer described him as a “weather vane”.

In Conversation’s executive producer Gary Pollard says that Lee sees things differently. “For Allen, it’s more of an awareness that political circumstances change, that as German statesman Otto von Bismarck said: “Politics is the art of the possible”. Times change. New political realisations and circumstances come to light.”

Lee was born in 1940 in Shandong. His father left for America when he was young, but at the age of 14, Allen was already a leader of the Communist Youth League, organising marches denouncing US involvement in the Korean War. In May 1954, his mother arranged for him to be smuggled to Hong Kong. Lee was a founding member and first leader of the Liberal Party. He was also a senior member of the Legislative Council, before seats were opened to elections. In late 1997, He was elected a deputy to the National People's Congress. On 19 February 2004, he announced he was resigning from his seat in the National People's Congress and his job as a radio host, saying that he had been pressured not to speak freely.

Today, Lee firmly believes that Hong Kong needs party politics, and that Beijing needs to learn to tolerate differences of opinion.

He also has few kind words for the current Chief Executive: “After 15 years in the Executive Council, and 13 years as convenor, CY Leung has no idea of how government was run before. All he knows is he was in Exco, he spoke on very few policies in Exco, so right now, he appoints people who also don’t know what the hell is going on. And that’s the major problem in the political system.”