President of the 8th Legislative Assembly of the Macao SAR since 16 October 2025. Born in Beijing in 1966, he holds a Portuguese BA from Beijing Foreign Studies University and an LL.B. from the University of Macau, and built his career in Macao's legal-affairs system — Director of the Legal Affairs Bureau for 14 years (2000–2014), Commissioner Against Corruption for five (2014–2019), and Secretary for Administration and Justice for almost six (December 2019 – October 2025), concurrently spokesperson of the Executive Council, chair of the 2022 Gaming Concession Public Tender Committee, and Executive Deputy Director of the Hengqin Cooperation Zone Management Committee. Reassigned by State Council decree in September 2025 as a CE-appointed legislator, he was elected President of the Legislative Assembly with a unanimous 33-vote ballot on 16 October 2025 — the first sitting Macao Secretary in SAR history to cross from the cabinet to lead the legislature, and the first appointed (not directly or indirectly elected) member to chair the Assembly.

From the Real Estate Registry to the Legal Affairs Bureau, from the Commission Against Corruption to the Administration and Justice portfolio, and finally to the gavel of the Legislative Assembly — André Cheong Weng Chon has carved out the most unusual cross-branch trajectory in post-Handover Macao, and in October 2025 became the first sitting Macao Secretary ever moved sideways into the legislature's chair.

André Cheong Weng Chon is President of the 8th Legislative Assembly of the Macao SAR (since 16 October 2025). Born in Beijing, a Portuguese major from Beijing Foreign Studies University and an LL.B. from the University of Macau, his career spans three decades across the SAR's legal-affairs system: fourteen years as Director of the Legal Affairs Bureau, five as Commissioner Against Corruption, and almost six as Secretary for Administration and Justice — with concurrent roles as Executive Council spokesperson, Chair of the 2022 Gaming Concession Public Tender Committee, and Executive Deputy Director of the Hengqin Cooperation Zone Management Committee. Macao and international press (Macau Business, Sonny Lo, Macao News) treat his September 2025 reassignment as "the most unprecedented personnel reshuffle in post-Handover Macao" — Sam Hou Fai resetting the legal, administrative, and Hengqin spines of his cabinet mid-term, with Cheong moved from execution to the gavel.

Profile

  • Chinese Name: 張永春
  • English Name: André Cheong Weng Chon
  • Born: September 1966 (Beijing)
  • Domains: Politics · Legal
  • Industry: Law · Legislation · Public administration
  • Subject type: Official (President of the Legislative Assembly)
  • Languages: Mandarin, Cantonese, Portuguese, English
  • Education: Bachelor of Arts in Portuguese, Beijing Foreign Studies University; LL.B., University of Macau
  • Sworn in (current role): 16 October 2025

Background

Cheong was born in September 1966 in Beijing and read Portuguese at Beijing Foreign Studies University during the early reform-era expansion of mainland China's foreign-language and Lusophone-affairs training pipeline — making him part of the generation Beijing systematically cultivated for diplomatic and legal work with Portuguese-speaking jurisdictions, and later moved into the legal track. After graduation he moved south to Macao and earned an LL.B. from the University of Macau Faculty of Law — a rare combination of Beijing-trained Portuguese fluency and a locally-anchored Macao legal credential.

Before the Handover he served as a registrar at the Real Estate Registry and as Director of the Judicial Affairs Bureau, working on the localisation of Macao's notary, registry and judicial-support systems. Family information is not in the official biography or in mainstream coverage; the public record states only that he is a long-time Macao resident fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese, Portuguese and English — one of very few senior SAR officials who can brief Lusophone outlets such as Plataforma Media and Hoje Macau directly in Portuguese.

Note on the record. Earlier versions of this profile carried a claim of training at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. Cross-checking against the gov.mo official biography (both Chinese and English) and the English Wikipedia entry found no record of Coimbra study — his Portuguese training is wholly from Beijing Foreign Studies University. The "Coimbra" detail appears in some Chinese-language reference sites and aggregator pages, but is not supported by any Tier-0 primary source.

Career

I. Director of the Legal Affairs Bureau (November 2000 – December 2014)

After the SAR was established in 1999, Cheong was appointed Director of the Legal Affairs Bureau (DSAJ) in November 2000, a post he held for fourteen years — among the longest single bureau-director tenures of the post-Handover era. The DSAJ portfolio covers legal drafting, notary, registry, judicial-support, legal aid and mediation. He worked on first-generation Basic Law implementing legislation and built an industry reputation as "meticulous, technical, Portuguese-fluent", concurrently serving on the Legal Reform Consultation Committee and the Public Administration Reform Consultation Committee, and chairing the Legal Aid Commission.

II. Commissioner Against Corruption (December 2014 – December 2019)

In December 2014 Chief Executive Chui Sai On appointed him Commissioner Against Corruption (CCAC), succeeding Ho Chio Meng (later sentenced to 21 years by Sam Hou Fai's court in 2017). Over five years Cheong led the SAR's combined anti-corruption and administrative-complaints work, including the post-Typhoon-Hato CCAC investigation that found malpractice inside the Meteorological Bureau and prompted the bureau director's resignation. The five-year CCAC tenure markedly raised his standing in the "next-Secretary" pool and set the political and institutional credit for his 2019 elevation to Administration and Justice.

III. Secretary for Administration and Justice (19 December 2019 – 16 October 2025)

On 19 December 2019 Cheong was sworn in as Secretary for Administration and Justice in Ho Iat Seng's first cabinet, becoming the first male to hold the portfolio — which covers legal reform, the civil service, administrative affairs, elections, legal aid, and judicial support. Ex officio under the Basic Law he became a member and spokesperson of the Executive Council (5th and 6th terms), and subsequently served as Executive Deputy Director of the Guangdong-Macao Hengqin Cooperation Zone Management Committee (from September 2021), Chair of the 2022 Gaming Concession Public Tender Committee (July 2022 to February 2023), and Director of the Hengqin Executive Committee (from January 2025). Three policy spines defined the tenure: legal reform and rule-of-law institutionalisation (the Civil Protection Law, Law no. 11/2020; the administrative coordination for the 2023 National Security Law amendments; revisions to the Press Code); gaming concession reset (the 2022 award of six new ten-year concessions); and Hengqin integration (the dual-track Management Committee and Executive Committee build-out). When Sam Hou Fai's 6th-term cabinet took office in 2024, he and Wong Sio Chak were the only two principal officials retained from Ho Iat Seng's cabinet, a "continuity-and-expertise" signal.

IV. President of the Legislative Assembly (16 October 2025–present)

On 28 September 2025 the State Council, acting on Sam Hou Fai's nomination, announced a mid-term reshuffle: Cheong was reassigned from Secretary for Administration and Justice to a Chief-Executive-appointed seat in the Legislative Assembly; Wong Sio Chak succeeded him at Administration and Justice; and former Prosecutor-General Chan Tsz King succeeded Wong at Security. Cheong was sworn into the 8th Legislative Assembly on 15 October 2025 and on 16 October was elected its President by a unanimous 33-vote ballot, succeeding Kou Hoi In, who had chaired the Assembly for six years. Three "firsts" stand together in a single decree: first sitting Macao Secretary ever moved sideways into the legislature's chair; first appointed (rather than directly or indirectly elected) legislator to chair the Assembly; first former government official to preside over the legislature. In his inaugural address Cheong framed the new term around "consolidation, elevation, reform" and pledged to "strengthen the positive interaction between the executive and the legislature" and to ensure that bills "better meet the needs, desires, and expectations of Macao's civil society". The same day he formally stepped down as Director of the Hengqin Executive Committee, a role Wong Sio Chak took over on 17 November.

Defining Moments

1. The Civil Protection Law of 2020 — designer of the "rumour" offence (in force 15 September 2020)

The Civil Protection Law (Law no. 11/2020), co-tabled by Cheong (Administration and Justice) and Wong Sio Chak (Security), criminalised the spreading of false information during civil-protection emergencies with up to three years' imprisonment — the SAR's first speech offence outside the Penal Code targeting emergency-period information flow. The Macau Journalists Association and pan-democrat lawmaker Antonio Ng Kuok Cheong objected that "rumour" was left undefined and that the framework folded media into the chain of command. As legal-technical owner of the cross-portfolio bill, Cheong defended Article 25 as an operational rather than expressive harm, arguing the Penal Code's existing tools were too slow and refusing to carve out exceptions. Macau Business, JTM and AAMacau document the resulting framework; the first conviction in August 2021 — a man sentenced to six months for falsely posting that there were five COVID-positive cases in Macao — operationalised it.

2. "Relative static management" — the legal voice of the 2022 lockdown (9 July 2022)

On 9 July 2022, during Macao's worst Omicron wave (1,374 cases by 8 July), Cheong fronted the press conference with Ho Iat Seng and Secretary for Social Affairs and Culture Ao Ieong U announcing a seven-day "relative static management" beginning 11 July: all casinos closed, all non-essential business suspended, residents confined to home except for groceries, hospital visits and NAT testing. Cheong was the legal voice of the order — "This is not an urge. This is an official order with legal consequences. Anyone breaching this dispatch is subject to a prison sentence of two years and fines" — while simultaneously defending the semantic choice: "This is not a lockdown. They can still go out every day to shop for groceries, go to hospitals, undertake Covid-19 tests". On 17 July he extended the order into a "COVID consolidation period" without committing to a casino reopening date. Macau Business and ASGAM noted at the time that his language strategy laid down the SAR's "legally enforced but not nominally locked down" doctrine for the rest of the pandemic; the UN Human Rights Committee subsequently questioned the proportionality of the measures, to which Cheong responded by characterising the SAR's response as "effective" and "scientific".

3. "Criticism has two types" — the post-DQ rhetoric of 2021 (15 July 2021)

Before the 2021 Legislative Assembly election the Electoral Affairs Commission disqualified twenty pro-democracy candidates for failing to "support the Basic Law and pledge allegiance to the SAR". On 15 July 2021 Cheong defended the move in plenary with what became his rhetorical signature: "Criticism has two types — one is well-intentioned, the other aims to incite something and discredit [the government], with the hope of overthrowing the fundamental system. The two types are different, and I believe that ordinary residents are able to understand the difference." He gave a benign example — complaints about sewerage and stray dogs — to illustrate what was "no problem". Macau Post Daily recorded the verbatim; AAMacau and other independent outlets read it as the discursive scaffolding that rendered the elimination of the legal opposition "understandable". The same architecture reappears in his 2022 response to the UN Human Rights Committee and in his October 2025 LegCo inaugural pledge to "strengthen positive interaction".

4. The September 2025 mid-term reshuffle — "the most unprecedented personnel reshuffle in post-Handover Macao" (28 September 2025)

Nine months into Sam Hou Fai's cabinet, the State Council announced on 28 September 2025 that Cheong would step down as Secretary for Administration and Justice and become a CE-appointed legislator; Wong Sio Chak would take his portfolio; and former Prosecutor-General Chan Tsz King would take Wong's. University of Macau sociologist Chan Kin Sun told Macau Daily Times that the move "reflects the burden of dual roles" and that "principal-official rotations are a normal occurrence". The far sharper reading came from political scientist Sonny Lo, who in Macau Business ("Shuffle Up and Deal", 11 October 2025) called the reshuffle "a personnel arrangement unprecedented in Macao's political history" — only the second mid-term State Council exoneration since Ao Man Long in 2006, and the first ever to move a sitting Secretary sideways into the legislature. Lo's diagnosis: "Sam is under pressure to report to Beijing by December on his progress in Hengqin, legal reform and civil-service reform. These three areas of reform went slowly under Cheong, and the swap is the time-buying answer." On 16 October Cheong was elected President of the Legislative Assembly by 33 votes out of 33, and he stepped down from the Hengqin Executive Committee — Wong took that seat on 17 November.

Public Character

Macao and Portuguese-language press characterise Cheong consistently as a lawyer-technocrat, the cabinet's number-two, the bilingual Beijing-trained Lusophone official. Hoje Macau summarises the consensus as "learned in legislative matters, experienced in justice"; Macau Business and Macao News recur the descriptors procedurally meticulous, institutionally loyal — the deliberate counter-image to Wong Sio Chak's iron-fist enforcement framing.

Favourable assessments stress the structural completeness of his record: the only senior official in the SAR with a clean career-bureaucrat → integrity-chief → policy-secretary arc; his Hengqin Executive Committee work has been credited by Va Kio and pro-establishment legislators with advancing the Macao-Hengqin integration agenda. Reserved or neutral takes come from academia — UM's Chan Kin Sun explicitly framed the September 2025 move as "burden of dual roles", and Sonny Lo wrote that "time will tell whether Cheong's appointment to the Legislative Assembly was really a strategic move, or whether a rotational move that became just a kind of personnel arrangement".

Criticism concentrates in civic, civil-liberty and press-freedom terrain. AAMacau / 論盡媒體 maintains a dedicated 張永春 tag archive, with critical coverage of his 2021 "criticism has two types" framing, his 2020 design of the rumour offence, and his role in the administrative coordination behind the 2023 NSL revisions. Plataforma Media and SCMP have similarly recorded reservations about the 2022 "legally-enforced-but-not-a-lockdown" formulation. His 2022 reply to the UN Human Rights Committee — that Macao "does not engage in politicised discussion, only addresses biased and inaccurate conclusions" — has been quoted by multiple international outlets as the SAR's template response.

At the central level, Xi Jinping has not publicly singled Cheong out by name; but after HKMAO Director Xia Baolong's May 2025 meeting on Macao's patriotic-association work, Cheong was the official deputed to convey Xia's "high praise" for Macao's national-security efforts to the press (gov.mo/en/news/358430). Xinhua and People's Daily Online both reported his October 2025 election as President with the unanimous-vote headline and no further commentary — read in industry circles as the central press's silence-as-endorsement of Sam Hou Fai's mid-term reshuffle.

Key Achievements

  • President of the 8th Legislative Assembly of the Macao SAR (from 16 October 2025), elected unanimously with 33 of 33 votes — the first sitting Macao Secretary ever moved sideways into the legislature's chair, and the first appointed legislator (rather than directly or indirectly elected member) to chair the Assembly
  • Secretary for Administration and Justice (19 December 2019 – 16 October 2025), retained by Sam Hou Fai's 6th-term cabinet — one of only two principal officials kept on from the Ho Iat Seng era
  • Director of the Legal Affairs Bureau (November 2000 – December 2014), serving 14 years and contributing to first-generation Basic Law implementing legislation
  • Commissioner Against Corruption (December 2014 – December 2019), succeeding Ho Chio Meng and handling the post-Hato Meteorological Bureau investigation
  • Legal-technical owner of the Civil Protection Law (Law no. 11/2020), including the design and legislative defence of Article 25 — the "rumour" offence
  • Chair of the 2022 Gaming Concession Public Tender Committee (July 2022 – February 2023), overseeing the competitive process that resulted in six ten-year gaming concessions
  • Executive Deputy Director of the Guangdong-Macao Hengqin Cooperation Zone Management Committee (September 2021 – October 2025) and Director of the Hengqin Executive Committee (January 2025 – October 2025) — one of the core institutional builders of the cross-border development zone in the post-Handover era

Information compiled from gov.mo, the Government Information Bureau (gcs.gov.mo), Xinhua, the Legislative Assembly (al.gov.mo), Macau Business / Sonny Lo, Macau Daily Times, Macau Post Daily, Macao News, Plataforma Media, Hoje Macau, Va Kio, GGRAsia, ASGAM, and the UN Human Rights Committee NGO record, among other publicly available sources. Note on the record: earlier versions of this profile carried a claim of training at the University of Coimbra in Portugal; cross-checking against the gov.mo official biography (Chinese and English) and the English Wikipedia entry found no Coimbra record — corrected here to BFSU Portuguese BA and University of Macau LL.B. Cross-check methodology: see docs/PROFILE_RESEARCH_STANDARD.md. If anything is inaccurate or needs updating, please contact us — we aim to respond within 48 hours.