Background
Heng was born in Takeo Province into a middle-peasant family of Sino Khmer descent.
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. 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.
Nol subsequently used a political crisis to remove Heng and take over the role himself early in 1972.
In 1973, after American pressure on Lon Nol to broaden political involvement, Heng was made Vice-Chairman of a "High Political Council" set up to govern the country. The Council"s influence was soon, however, sidelined, and Nol resumed personalist rule of the deteriorating Republic. Heng fled the country on April 1 for Paris, where he became associated with the group of exiles centred on Son Sann.
He died in 1996.
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 1961-1962. Heng returned to Cambodia after the United Nations-brokered 1991 political settlement (the Paris Peace Agreements) and had some further involvement in politics, founding the Republican Coalition Party which unsuccessfully took part in the 1993 elections.