Like many here, he watched with fascination and then horror as the democracy protests unfolded in Beijing in the spring of 1989. The killings of protesters in and around Tiananmen Square was a turning point in his life, he said, motivating him to spend the next seven years traveling to mainland seminaries to teach.
"This force supported me from 1989 to 1996 to spend half of my life in China nurturing people who can work for the church and become shepherds of the church in China," he said in his speech on June 4 this year.
Zen kept fairly quiet about his own political views during those years, as he developed close friendships in Beijing, Shanghai and elsewhere with many priests and bishops in both the government-supervised churches and the "underground." The underground churches are closely watched by the police and face levels of persecution that vary widely among provinces.
It was after Zen became Hong Kong's junior bishop, in 1996, that he began to develop a reputation for strong comments about civil liberties. But he became much more outspoken after September 2002, when he took over the Hong Kong diocese. He soon emerged as a leader in the successful campaign to block the imposition of stringent internal security regulations here, an effort that brought 500,000 people into the streets on July 1, 2003.
Zen is frequently criticized for campaigning for greater democracy in Hong Kong but opposing elections for church leaders. He denies that this poses a contradiction.
"The faith community is a free community, so you may join and you may not join," he said. "You must be a member of a state, a nation, and then, there, you must have your rights to be one of the community, and to defend your own rights -- you must have a voice."
There has been speculation that Zen might be summoned to Rome, but the cardinal has a longer-term ambition: to return to the city of his youth as a teacher of priests, ideally living at a seminary that has a view of the shrine he used to visit as a boy.
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