Lee Sheung-yuen emigrated to the United Kingdom two years ago. Now a candidate for a council seat under the aegis of the Reform party, which advocates such radical policies as less immigration and more drilling for oil, Lee is a former director of the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in Jakarta and Bangkok (April 22, 2026, Hong Kong Free Press).
He is standing for an Ealing Council seat in London after having put in 24 years as a civil servant in Hong Kong. This span of service includes a few years on the job even after mainland China had imposed the freedom-killing National Security Law on Hong Kong. He left the Trade Office in November 2023.
Too busy to talk
A feature of Lee’s campaign needs explaining: “According to Ming Pao [a Chinese-language news site] and the South China Morning Post, Lee declined interview requests, citing his current focus on the local elections.”
A candidate too busy running for office to make himself better known to the public? International reporting on his ideas and plans could easily, of course, have found its way into local media and at least the candidate’s own campaign literature and press releases.
Maybe he’s shy, maybe he has something to hide, maybe something else.
One of the questions that insists on being asked about Lee pertains to the fact that “In October 2020, months after the China-imposed national security law came into effect, the Hong Kong government required newly appointed civil servants to declare their allegiance to the city. The requirement was extended to all civil servants in early 2021.
“As of June 2022, the government said around 180,000 serving civil servants had pledged allegiance, while 129 had been sacked or quit after failing to take the oath.”
Perhaps concerned about unduly provoking the attention of the Chinese Communist Party by saying too much, the Hong Kong Free Press ends its story on that detail, not asking the obvious question whether Lee Sheung-yuen also took that pledge of allegiance to what was by then a fully CCP-subjugated special administration region.
Loyalty to what?
If by June 2022 most civil servants had vowed loyalty and 129 had been fired for refusing to do so, and Lee’s work for the city ended in November 2023, it seems that he may well have taken the oath. Did he take it and repent taking it? Or what? Such questions might have come up in one of those interviews he hasn’t given.
The circumstantial evidence against Lee is nontrivial. But there’s also this, from The Times (UK):
A Reform council candidate in Ealing who formerly ran a Hong Kong trade office publicly praised the country’s brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, The Times can reveal.
Lee Sheung-yuen, who worked as the director of the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office (HKETO) in Bangkok and Jakarta before moving to the UK in 2024, spoke in support of a national security law that made many forms of peaceful protest punishable by up to life in prison in a speech in June 2022 in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
In the speech, the former government official supported Hong Kong’s “improved electoral system”, and said that since the enactment of the law in 2020, and due to the “patriots governing Hong Kong”, the territory had returned to the correct track of “one country, two systems”, The Cambodia China Times reported.
In the remarks to the Cambodia Hong Kong and Macao Business Association to mark the 25th anniversary of the country’s return to Chinese control, Lee said: “Hong Kong’s development is inseparable from the nation’s, and with the nation’s full support, the Hong Kong special administrative region has achieved remarkable success over the past 25 years.”
He is standing in the Southall Broadway ward of Ealing at the local elections on May 7.
To top it all off, there’s this cryptic remark from a Reform UK spokesman:
“Mr Lee spoke in a professional capacity at the time, reflecting the responsibilities of his role rather than his personal opinion. He no longer holds that position and is standing in this election to focus on local issues affecting residents in Southall Broadway.”
The good old it-was-my-job-to-be-a-scumbag excuse. Asserted by somebody else, though, not by the circumspect Mr. Lee; for, as The Times adds, “Lee declined to comment.”
Some worry that the Reform party might not have adequately vetted all of its candidates.
