Sandra Birch Lee

Sandra Birch Lee Suk-yee (born 9 March 1952) is a former Hong Kong civil servant who served as the permanent secretary of four different bureaus in the 2000s.

Education and civil service career Lee attended the University of Hong Kong, where she was classmates in the history department with Alan Lai and Denise Yue, both of whom would go on to become senior civil servants. After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1974, Lee joined the Hong Kong government as an executive officer in June of the same year. She became an administrative officer in 1979 and was successively promoted to Administrative Officer Staff Grade B1 in January 1997 and Administrative Officer Staff Grade A1 in July 2002.

During her career in the civil service, Lee variously served as the deputy head of the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in Washington, DC from 1985 to 1988 and from 1993 to 1995, as Deputy Director of Home Affairs from 1995 to 1996, as Deputy Secretary for the Civil Service from 1996 to 1999, and as Director General of the HKETO in London from 1999 to 2000.

Lee was elevated to the Executive Council in 2000 as Secretary for Economic Services in a reshuffle of Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa's first government. With the introduction of the Principal Officials Accountability System in 2002, the heads of government bureaux became political appointees, with the most senior civil servant in a bureau retitled as permanent secretaries, with no seat on the Executive Council. Lee continued to serve as the most senior civil servant overseeing the economic development portfolio as Permanent Secretary for Economic Development from 2002 to 2006, before being reassigned to the Health, Welfare, and Food Bureau in 2006 to become Permanent Secretary for Health, Welfare, and Food (Health and Welfare). She continued to oversee the health brief when the bureau was reorganised in 2007 to become the Food and Health Bureau until she retired from the civil service in 2011.

Post-retirement Lee was a core member of former Financial Secretary John Tsang's campaign team in the 2017 Chief Executive election. She was appointed as a lay member of the Medical Council of Hong Kong in 2018.