Cheng Heng
| Cheng Heng | |
|---|---|
| President of the Khmer Republic | |
|
In office March 21, 1970 – March 9, 1972 Acting: March 21, 1970 – October 9, 1970 |
|
| Preceded by |
Norodom Sihanouk as Head of State of Cambodia |
| Succeeded by | Lon Nol |
| President of the National Assembly | |
|
In office 1969–1970 |
|
| Prime Minister | Lon Nol |
| Succeeded by | In Tam |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 1910 Takéo, Cambodia |
| Died | 1996 (aged 85–86) |
Cheng Heng (1910–1996) was a Cambodian politician, who acted as the country's Head of State from 1970–1971, and was a relatively prominent political figure during the Khmer Republic period (1970–1975).
Heng was born in Takeo Province into a middle-peasant family of Sino Khmer descent. He went on to become a prosperous businessman and landowner. He served in the civil service of colonial Cambodia, eventually reaching the grade of Oudom-Montrey (senior grade mandarin) by the mid-1950s.
His early political career, during the period when Prince Norodom Sihanouk's Sangkum party controlled the country, is relatively obscure: he entered politics in 1958, and served as Secretary of State for Agriculture in 1961-2. He was elected as the Sangkum deputy for Takhmau in 1962, but lost in the 1966 elections to a rival candidate, a young Sihanoukist doctor called Keo Sann. Heng subsequently returned via a 1967 by-election in Phnom Penh, and by 1970 was serving as President of Cambodia's National Assembly. Heng's levels of political support appear to have been limited up until 1970; aside from being President of the Assembly, he had previously been director of the main Phnom Penh prison.
Immediately subsequent to the Cambodian coup of 1970, in which the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, General Lon Nol and Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak, engineered Sihanouk's removal, Heng was made Head of State until elections could be arranged. This was a largely ceremonial role, as Lon Nol had assumed most of the Head of State's political powers on an emergency basis: Sihanouk, from exile, was to dismiss Heng as an "insignificant puppet". Apart from giving press conferences, Cheng Heng was also called on to receive visiting foreign politicians: William Shawcross relates an incident during Spiro Agnew's July 1970 visit to Phnom Penh, in which the Acting Head of State was forced to contend with United States Secret Service personnel training their guns on him while he was attempting to welcome Agnew to the Royal Palace.
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