Do we like them?Do we like John Lee Ka-chiu?
Our score: 2 out of 10. A long run of harmful words and acts of his own, with one court-driven good deed for same-sex couples to set against it.
John Lee is a cop turned politician. He ran Hong Kong's Security Bureau from September 2017, was promoted to chief secretary in June 2021, and chaired the committee that vetted election candidates. In May 2022 he was the sole candidate for chief executive, after collecting 786 nominations, making him the first former police officer from the security branch to run the city.
His name was made in 2019, when he pushed the extradition bill and said the system had loopholes to be plugged. After mass protests he apologised on 29 June 2019 and pledged to “listen to opinions broadly”. In the same breath he said the police uniform had no space for officer numbers and urged people not to “vent” their discontent on the force.
The press story is next. As security chief he froze HK$18 million in Apple Daily assets and told journalists to “keep their distance” from the paper. On 9 February 2026, after publisher Jimmy Lai got 20 years under the national security law, Lee said the “rule of law is upheld and justice is done”. He accused Lai of urging foreign sanctions on China and Hong Kong. Whether you read that as law and order or as jailing a publisher is where people split.
On the harm check, the record is mixed but heavy. In January 2019 he told legislators Hong Kong could learn from Xinjiang's counter-terrorism approach. He backed the national security law, which he said kept the city's “chaos under control”. The US sanctioned him in August 2020, and he called Washington a “hypocrite”. The pages we read said nothing on climate or the company he keeps, so that part is a gap.
The real good stuff is narrow but real. In 2025 he backed a bill to register same-sex partnerships and warned that ignoring the top court's ruling “will bring serious consequences”. DAB, FTU, BPA and Liberal Party lawmakers were expected to vote against it, and only the six-seat New People's Party had said it would support it. It was a response to a court order and stopped short of marriage, and the government denied it paved the way for same-sex marriage.
Nothing fresh beyond the Jimmy Lai sentence turned up in the reporting we could open, so there is no big recent blow-up to add. The partnership bill shows he will back a court ruling even when much of his own camp resists. But his track record on dissent, the press and Xinjiang is a pattern of his own words and acts, and one bill doesn't wipe that out.