The Heung Yee Kuk, officially the Heung Yee Kuk N.T., is a statutory advisory body representing establishment interests in the New Territories, Hong Kong. The council is a powerful organisation comprising heads of rural committees which represent villages and market towns. From 1980 to 2015, it was chaired by Lau Wong-fat, a billionaire landowner and heavyweight political figure in the pro-Beijing camp, until he stepped down and was succeeded by his son Kenneth Lau. The organisation has its own functional constituency seat in the Hong Kong Legislative Council. Despite having less than 150 registered voters, it also controls 26 seats on the 1200-member committee which selects the chief executive of Hong Kong. Background In 1906, eight years after the lease of the New Territories from the Qing China began, the British colonial government of Hong Kong interceded in the land rights of indigenous male villagers by converting those rights to block crown leases (on which crown rent was payable) over village land, creating significant discontent among villagers. The growing antagonism between villagers and the administration was exacerbated when, in 1923, the government imposed restraints on building of village houses on land held by villagers under the leases, including imposing a tax (known as a premium) on permission to build if granted. Tensions, whipped up by the newly formed Communist Party of China, boiled over in 1925 and the major upheavals of the Canton-Hong Kong strike crippled Hong Kong. History It was in these circumstances that the Heung Yee Kuk was formed the next year from the New Territories Association of Agricultural, Industrial and Commercial Research, to "work and negotiate with the government to promote the welfare of the people of the New Territories". It was given formal status by the Heung Yee Kuk Ordinance (Chapter 1097), first enacted 11 December 1959 (originally as no. 45 of 1959) amid the construction of the first New Towns in the New Territories. The Kuk then consisted of 27 Rural Committees representing, in turn, 651 villages. All village representatives on the Rural Committees, generally appointed by village consensus but sometimes by election, had to be male heads of households. After just one such election was found to have been rigged in 1957, the government withdrew recognition of the Kuk entirely. The committees were, in any event, only representative of indigenous villagers, excluding large swathes of the New Territories population right from the Kuk's earliest