CityU alumni in politics and public service

For the full overview of notable alumni, see ./notable-alumni.md; for the School of Law's academic profile, see 01-academics/school-of-law.md.

In one sentence: The City University of Hong Kong (CityU) School of Law (founded as a department in 1987, elevated to a school in 1993) has produced at least a dozen verifiable alumni who have gone on to prominent roles in Hong Kong politics and the legal profession — including a Secretary for Justice, a Deputy Secretary for Justice, a Deputy Secretary for the Environment, multiple Legislative Council (LegCo) members, several Senior Counsel and multiple District Court judges. It is a significant but under-appreciated dimension of the University's talent output; in 2026, the School's disciplinary reputation also received its first international ranking recognition.

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# How CityU's law school became a "talent pool" for public service

The history of the CityU School of Law traces back to the Department of Law established in 1987^※, making it the second institution in Hong Kong to offer undergraduate legal education. A Department of Professional Legal Education (PCLL) was added in 1992, and the two departments merged to form the School of Law in 1993^※. From the outset the School specialised in Chinese law and comparative law, and early on attracted large numbers of students intent on entering the public sector and the legal profession after Hong Kong's return to Chinese sovereignty.

CityU's applied-education orientation kept the School of Law closely tied to professional practice: both the four-year undergraduate LLB and the PCLL (Postgraduate Certificate in Laws) are oriented around local case law and practice. Over the following three decades, this emphasis delivered a substantial stream of public-service talent to Hong Kong politics and the legal world.

In recent years, this "talent pool" positioning has won positive confirmation from subject rankings: in the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2026, CityU's "Law and Legal Studies" subject jumped 15 places year-on-year to break into the global top 50 for the first time (41st)^※, one of five CityU subjects to make the top 50 that year. For an institution that only gained full university status in 1994, the rise offers external validation of the practice-oriented path along which the law school has for decades produced political and judicial talent — see ../01-academics/school-of-law.md.

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# Who holds the highest government office among CityU alumni?

The highest government positions currently on record are held jointly by two CityU law alumni from different eras:

Rimsky Yuen Kwok-keung is by far the best-known CityU law alumnus. He read law at the University of Hong Kong for his first degree, then completed an LLM in Chinese and Comparative Law at CityU in 1997^※, studying under Professors Wang Guiguo and Priscilla Leung Mei-fun. He was called to the Bar in 1987, took silk as Senior Counsel in 2003^※, and served as Chairman of the Hong Kong Bar Association from 2007 to 2009^※. In 2012 he was appointed — as a legal professional — to serve as Secretary for Justice, a post he held until 2018^※, making him the third Secretary for Justice in the history of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR). In 2021, CityU further conferred on him an honorary doctorate^※ in recognition of his contributions to legal education and the rule of law (for background on CityU honorary doctorates, see ./honorary-degrees-and-fellows.md). Since stepping down, Yuen has not retreated from public legal affairs: he returned to practice at Temple Chambers and now chairs the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre (HKIAC) as co-chair, alongside serving as President of the Hong Kong Mediation Council^※; he is also a member of the Expert Committee of the International Commercial Court of the Supreme People's Court of China (since August 2018)^※, and sits on the panels of several arbitral institutions (including HKIAC, CIETAC, the Beijing Arbitration Commission and the Shenzhen Court of International Arbitration). This trajectory — from top government legal officer to cross-border commercial dispute-resolution specialist — is the most emblematic extension of the public-service endorsement that CityU's LLM programme has produced.

Horace Cheung Kwok-kwan, by contrast, is a "purer" CityU product, holding its law degrees as an undergraduate (a caution: elsewhere in this article a securities-sector figure shares the same Chinese given name "华峰", and the distinction is explained in the "Scope and terminology" note below — they are not the same person). Cheung earned both his LLB and LLM from CityU^※, then practised as a solicitor before entering politics. He served as a Legislative Councillor (Hong Kong Island constituency, 2016–2021; Election Committee constituency, early 2022)^※ and as a Non-Official Member of the Executive Council (2017–2022)^※. On 1 July 2022, he resigned his LegCo seat to become Deputy Secretary for Justice^※ — the first time the post had ever existed in the HKSAR. As of 2026 he remains in office^※, making him its longest-serving incumbent. CityU's official alumni spotlight confirms his "LLB, PCLL" qualifications as originating from the University, making him a concrete instance of a CityU graduate holding one of the most senior politically appointed offices in the Hong Kong government.

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# Who else from CityU sits in the government's decision-making layer?

Beyond the two senior justice posts above, CityU alumni have served in various policy bureaux of the HKSAR government:

Christine Loh has the most varied resumé of the three. She read law at the University of Hull in the UK, then completed an LLM in Chinese and Comparative Law at CityU^※. Before entering politics she founded Civic Exchange, an independent policy think tank. She entered LegCo three times — appointed in 1992, then elected twice, in 1995 and 1998^※ — representing Hong Kong Island. In 2012 she moved into the executive branch, serving as Under Secretary for the Environment until 2017, when she left with the end of Leung Chun-ying's term^※, with responsibility for air quality, energy and climate-change policy. It is a classic arc from civil society into the policy-implementation layer. Since leaving government, her public role has not been confined to the environment: she served as Special Adviser to the Chief Executive on mainland China's ecological-civilisation policies (2019–2020)^※, then moved into academia and international think tanks, now holding the role of Chief Development Strategist at the HKUST Division of Environment and Sustainability^※ alongside advisory posts such as the Hong Kong Green Finance Association and the HSBC Climate Advisory Board. Her path — legislator, think-tank founder, politically appointed official, cross-border climate-policy adviser — is the widest span of public roles of any CityU LLM alumnus.

David Chung Wai-keung followed a different route: he is an engineer by training, with a first degree from Imperial College London, and after completing a DEng in engineering management at CityU^※ served as Chief Technology Officer of Cyberport (2011–2016). In 2016 he was appointed the first Under Secretary for Innovation and Technology^※, a post he held until July 2022, driving Hong Kong's smart-city and technology-industry policies during his tenure — the longest of the three under-secretary alumni.

What unites these three is that all entered the politically appointed team on the strength of professional backgrounds (law, policy research, engineering management) rather than traditional party careers — a different route into the establishment from that of LegCo alumni, who mostly arrived via party tickets or functional constituencies. This constitutes a second channel of CityU's public-service talent output.

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# Who from CityU has sat in the Legislative Council?

At LegCo level, CityU alumni have straddled both the pro-establishment and pro-democracy camps, across functional constituencies and geographical direct elections. The following LegCo members have verifiable CityU qualifications:

Scope note: everyone in the table above has a CityU qualification verifiable through their individual Wikipedia entry or official CityU alumni materials. For three members — Christopher Cheung (the securities dealer), Kwok Wai-keung and Kam Nai-wai — the individual Wikipedia entries confirm they attended CityU, but the specific faculty or degree could not be verified in public sources; this archive accordingly records them simply as "CityU alumni" without overstating the details of their qualifications.

Among the LegCo alumni, Eunice Yung merits her own paragraph. She read computer science at the University of British Columbia in Canada as an undergraduate, then switched to law at CityU, being called to the Bar in 2008^※. As Vice-Chairman of the New People's Party, she was elected to LegCo for New Territories East in 2016 with 36,183 votes^※, and was re-elected in 2022 via the Election Committee constituency, serving until 2025 when she did not stand again. She has also served on the Basic Law Committee — the most sustained political engagement of any CityU law alumnus. In the December 2025 election for the eighth LegCo, Yung did not seek re-election^※, bringing her legislative career to an end; she has since returned to practice as a barrister.

An unusual case is Ted Hui: he graduated from the CityU School of Law in 2006 with an LLB with First Class Honours^※, later becoming a district councillor and then a LegCo member for Hong Kong Island (2016–2020). In late 2020 he "absconded", as he put it, declaring himself in exile abroad, and has since lived in South Australia. His case is at once proof of CityU's law education channelling talent into civil society, and a reflection of the upheaval in Hong Kong politics after 2019. This archive records it faithfully as a matter of public record, without political commentary.

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# The bench and the Bar: how CityU trained "silks" and recorders

The School of Law has left equally clear footprints in legal practice and the judiciary. Among alumni who started with an LLB or PCLL, two stand out:

Richard Khaw Wei-kiang is the second graduate in the School of Law's history to be elevated to Senior Counsel. He took his LLB at CityU in 1992 and completed the PCLL in 1993^※, then read for an LLM at the University of Cambridge. He was called to the Hong Kong Bar in 1993^※, and took silk as Senior Counsel in 2016^※. Between 2018 and 2020 he was repeatedly appointed a Deputy Judge of the Court of First Instance of the High Court, and from 2021 has served as a Recorder of the Court of First Instance^※, specialising in civil and commercial litigation. He also sits on the School of Law's PCLL Academic Committee, maintaining his academic ties with his alma mater.

Derek Chan SC is another silk who came through the CityU PCLL. After completing the PCLL at CityU he was called to the Bar in 2004^※, and took silk as Senior Counsel in 2018 at the age of 39^※. He concentrates on commercial crime, corruption and criminal cases, and has appeared in a number of high-profile criminal trials. In CityU's official alumni feature he remarks that the PCLL was "extremely practical in content, based mainly on local Hong Kong cases, and gave me a deep understanding of how the local legal system actually works" — a direct gloss on the practice-oriented nature of CityU's legal education.

A third CityU alumnus to take silk along this route is Anson Pun SC. He has practised as a barrister since 1998, specialising in human-rights, constitutional and administrative litigation^※, and was later appointed Senior Counsel — the School's representative "silk" in constitutional and administrative litigation. Together with Richard Khaw's commercial-civil path and Derek Chan's criminal path, they sketch a three-way distribution of CityU law alumni across the specialist branches of the Bar.

Among the wider body of CityU law alumni, contributions to the judiciary often go quieter, yet the verifiable record is substantial. According to the School of Law's Chinese Wikipedia entry^※, a number of District Court judges are CityU law alumni:

In addition, among Permanent Magistrates appointed between 2002 and 2012, several held CityU qualifications from 1992–2006^※. This cohort is large but individually little known — the "still waters run deep" of CityU legal education within Hong Kong's judicial system. Beside the headline moments of the Secretary and Deputy Secretary for Justice, it is this far larger body of District Court judges and Permanent Magistrates that constitutes the School of Law's most durable and foundational contribution to the Hong Kong judiciary.

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# What are the overall contours of CityU alumni in public service?

Stepping back from the individual portraits, several patterns emerge:

The School of Law is the hub. The overwhelming majority of CityU alumni in politics and the legal world are directly tied to the School of Law (or its predecessor department) — either starting with an LLB/LLM/PCLL, or entering politics after building a practice. CityU's graduate law programmes (LLM), distinctive for their focus on Chinese and comparative law, have mattered most at the government-decision layer: both Rimsky Yuen and Christine Loh used CityU qualifications at this level to strengthen their China-Hong Kong legal expertise.

Cross-boundary mobility is pronounced. Many alumni shifted repeatedly among legal practice, political parties and government: Horace Cheung moved from law-firm partner into the DAB, then via LegCo to the Deputy Secretaryship; Christine Loh went from legislator to policy think tank to the executive branch, then on to academia and international climate think tanks after leaving office. A CityU education supplied the legal and managerial foundations such transitions require.

The political spectrum is broad. CityU's LegCo alumni span the pro-establishment camp (Eunice Yung, Christopher Cheung, Kwok Wai-keung) and the pro-democracy camp (Kam Nai-wai, Ted Hui, Andrew Wan). This reflects CityU's character as a local, mass-access university — not an elite-selective institution — and the natural political differentiation of its alumni across Hong Kong's plural years.

Incumbents and retirees in parallel. As of July 2026, CityU alumni still serving in politically appointed office or the judiciary include Horace Cheung (Deputy Secretary for Justice) and several District Court judges. Among those who have stepped down, Rimsky Yuen and Christine Loh continue to exert influence in international arbitration and climate policy respectively, while Eunice Yung has returned to practice as a barrister after the 2025 LegCo election. This succession — incumbent, retiree, reinvented — shows that CityU law alumni's contribution to public service is no one-off phenomenon confined to a single term, but a chain of talent output spanning more than three decades and still running.

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# Editorial standards

This article concerns living public figures and follows this archive's rules:

• Neutral, positive facts only — records of academic affiliation and public office.
• No private lives, no political commentary; for figures who have gone into exile or are otherwise politically sensitive (e.g. Ted Hui), only publicly established facts from reliable sources are stated.
• Every named alumnus has at least one verifiable source; those whose CityU qualifications could not be confirmed have been excluded.
• Name verification takes priority over inherited usage: an earlier version of this article mistakenly identified Deputy Secretary for Justice Horace Cheung Kwok-kwan as 「张华峰」, conflating him with Christopher Cheung (whose Chinese name is indeed 张华峰), a different alumnus from the securities sector. The revision of 10 July 2026 corrected this to 「張國鈞」 on the basis of Wikipedia and CityU's official alumni materials, and added an in-text note to distinguish the two.
• This article does not modify entities.json; the entities are already registered in the frontmatter entities field.

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