CLD elect Jerry Cheung and Dr YeeWah Foo as joint Chairs

At the recent Annual General Meeting of the Chinese Liberal Democrats held on 15 November, members elected Vice-Chair, Jerry Cheung and new Liberal Democrat member, Dr Yee Wah Foo to be Co-Chairs.

They have issued the following joint statement:

"As newly elected co-Chairs we shall continue with the important and excellent work that the Chinese Liberal Democrats have done and achieved these past nine years under the strong leadership of Linda Chung, and Merlene Emerson.

Our purpose will be to give practical support and a helping hand to members of the British-Chinese community who want to get involved in local or national politics, and through CLDs we hope to promote awareness within the Chinese community that integration and understanding of the British political system are two very key issues if the Chinese community ever wants to have a voice in British society."

Editor: Congratulations to Yee Wah and Jerry!

Biographies:

Jerry Cheung

Jerry came to Sheffield in 1975, a sponsored Graduate in Mechanical Engineering; prior to becoming an entrepreneur in the restaurant and property sector (which has now expanded into retail/wholesale cash & carry, property development and international trading), he worked for British Steel Corporation between 1982 and 1988 as a Mechanical Engineer. He was awarded MBA in International Marketing Management in 1999 from The University of Sheffield.

Jerry strongly believes that a more harmonious society is a better place to live and is hence passionate about promoting community cohesion. This is exemplified by the Sheffield Chinese New Year Celebration he organizes annually, which not only unites all the Chinese in Sheffield together but also provides an opportunity for the Chinese community to interact and celebrate with other groups in the society.

With his English/Chinese background, he is well equipped to promote integration of Chinese into UK society as well as co-ordinating partnership working between local government and the Chinese Community. As an enthusiastic promoter of link between China and UK, Jerry travels regularly to China mostly by the invitation of the Chinese government.

Jerry is currently pursuing his long time dream of building a China town in Sheffield which will have a China Trade Centre that potentially can bring inward investments to the City as well as attracting China enterprises to choose Sheffield as an entry point to UK or Europe.

Dr Yee Wah Foo

Born in London of Anglo-Chinese parentage, Yee-Wah Foo is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Lincoln. Highlights in Yee Wah's career include the setting up (in partnership with the University of Bristol) of 'Historical Photographs of China' - a free, open-access website that locates, archives and disseminates rare photographs of modern China, and a 2012 BBC Radio 4 documentary about the project called 'The Search for Photos of China's Past'. In June, Yee-Wah was awarded €80,000 by the Chiang Chingkuo Foundation to continue her work on digitizing and disseminating rare Chinese historical records. Yee-Wah has links with a number of universities and academic organizations in China, including the Presidential Palace Museum in Nanjing, and the Second Historical Archives in Nanjing. Her book, entitled 'Chiang Kaishek's Last Ambassador to Moscow', was published in 2011 by Palgrave Macmillan, and is based upon her grandfather's wartime diaries.

Last year Yee-Wah decided that, having taught politics for well over a decade, it was about time that she actually started 'doing politics'. She joined the Liberal Democrats in January 2015, and became an active member of the party's Chinese Lib Dem group, contributing as a policy researcher and as editor of the newsletter. Why the Liberal Democrats? Yee-Wah explains that core liberal values have run in her family for generations. Her great-grandfather, Sir Ho Kai 何啟, was educated in Britain and married an English woman - the first recorded Anglo-Chinese marriage. Ho Kai was Sun Yatsen's teacher and mentor at Hong Kong College of Medicine, and it was he who drafted the moral and social democratic aims of Sun's 'Revive China' Association. As the newly elected co-Chair, Yee-Wah's ambition for Chinese Liberal Democrats is to promote and bring to the fore important and vital issues affecting the Chinese community in Britain - mental health, care for the elderly, the economy, poverty - all these things are up for discussion, she says, and the key for Chinese Lib Dems moving ahead is to promote, support and bring forward the British-Chinese voice.