Former chairman of the Macau Supreme Court of Appeal Cen Haohui was elected as the new head of the administration of the Macau Special Administrative Region of China, the administration’s website reported on Sunday.
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“Mr. Cen Haohui has been elected Chief Executive of the Macau Special Administrative Region,” the statement said.
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It is noted that he won the elections with 394 votes, which is 98.99% of the total votes of members of the election commission. The elections took place on Sunday and took just over an hour and a half.
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The current head of the Macau administration, He Yicheng, previously announced that he would not be re-elected for a second term due to health problems.
Cen Haohui will officially take office on December 20 and will become the first Macau chief executive to be born in mainland China, as well as the first to be fluent in Portuguese, one of Macau’s two official languages.
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Cen Haohui was born in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong in 1962, graduated from the Faculty of Law of Peking University, studied at the University of Coimbra, and moved to Macau in 1986. In 1995, he began working at the Macau Prosecutor’s Office, and already in 1999 he was appointed to the position of President of the Supreme Court of Appeal, which he held until August 2024.
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The term of office of the Chief Executive of Macau is five years, and the same person cannot hold this position for more than two consecutive terms.
The former Portuguese colony of Macau was returned to Chinese rule in 1999 under the “one country, two systems” system. The region has become a special administrative region of China, which, like Hong Kong, enjoys significant autonomy.
