Tung Chee-hwa, the first chief executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and later a vice chairman of the national political advisory body, died at a Hong Kong hospital shortly after 10 p.m. on the 8th at the age of 89. His office said family members were present.

In a statement, his office remembered him as upright in character and devoted to both country and family. Messages of condolence from across Hong Kong followed through the night.

From Shanghai to Liverpool, and back to Hong Kong

He was born in Shanghai in 1937. His father, Tung Chao-yung, was among the defining figures of mid-century Asian shipping and the founder of what became Orient Overseas. Tung Chee-hwa completed secondary school in Hong Kong and read marine engineering at the University of Liverpool.

Liverpool was then one of the long-standing centres of world shipping, and his route from Shanghai to Hong Kong and on to Britain was typical of the mid-century Chinese merchant families. He gained working experience in the United States before joining the family firm.

When the family business ran into severe difficulty in the early 1980s, he led its restructuring. That episode is often cited in accounts of his later administrative style, with the record of crisis management read as grounds for political trust.

1997, the first chief executive

He was selected as the territory's first chief executive in December 1996 and took office on 1 July 1997, at the moment of the handover. The Asian financial crisis struck almost immediately, followed by avian influenza, a sharp property downturn and the 2003 SARS epidemic.

His signature policies included a plan to build 85,000 housing units a year and proposals to develop Chinese medicine and port and logistics hubs. The housing plan coincided with the property slump and became a focus of argument before being effectively shelved.

In 2003, a push to legislate under Article 23 of the Basic Law drew large demonstrations and the bill was withdrawn. That episode remains inseparable from any account of his term. In March 2005 he cited his health in resigning and left office.

After office, a place for unofficial exchange

He went on to serve as a vice chairman of the national political advisory body and founded a foundation for US-China exchange, running an unofficial channel linking academics, business figures and journalists. As contact between Washington and Beijing narrowed, his name appeared often on the roster of such track-two conversations.

In Hong Kong and among overseas Chinese communities, political assessments aside, his career itself — Shanghai, Hong Kong, Britain, the United States — was taken to represent a generation. Dispersal and settlement, return and resettlement all sat within a single curriculum vitae.

A third view: how to read a life

This paper is wary of reducing Tung's life to any single episode. His term coincided with two external shocks, the Asian financial crisis and SARS, and with the institutional blank of operating an entirely new constitutional order for the first time. The achievements and the controversies arose from the same conditions.

For Chinese readers everywhere, including those in Korea, the meaning of his death is broader than approval or disapproval of any one policy. A life that began in Shanghai, passed through schools in Hong Kong and a university in Britain, took over a family firm and returned to Hong Kong is close to a compressed history of the twentieth-century Chinese family.

Two things are worth watching. First, what form of memorial the Hong Kong authorities arrange. Second, how the exchange body he founded operates in his absence. The second question reaches beyond an obituary and may serve as a practical gauge of the contact still available.