Kurt W. Tong assumed duties as consul general representing the U.S. to Hong Kong and Macau on Aug. 27, 2016. As chief of mission, Tong leads a large interagency team that cooperates with the governments of Hong Kong and Macau in a variety of areas. Prior to his service in Hong Kong, Tong was the principal deputy assistant secretary for the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs at the Department of State. Before that, Tong served as the deputy chief of mission and chargé d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. Earlier, he was the U.S. ambassador for Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation while concurrently serving as economic coordinator for the department’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Tong has been a diplomat for the State Department since 1990, including service as director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council and as economic minister-counselor in Seoul. Prior to that, he served as counselor for environment, science and health at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, deputy treasury attaché in Tokyo, and economic officer in Manila. Tong was also a visiting scholar at the Tokyo University Faculty of Economics. Before joining the Foreign Service, he was an associate with the Boston Consulting Group in Tokyo. Tong holds a bachelor’s degree from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, and he studied economics at the U.S. Foreign Service Institute. He has also studied at the Beijing Institute of Education; the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies in Taipei, Taiwan; the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Tokyo; and the International Christian University in Tokyo.