China’s new vice-premiers to lead battles against poverty, pollution and economic risks

China is most likely to have four new vice-premiers after this month’s annual meeting of the National People’s Congress (NPC), with three of them expected to be put in charge of three of President Xi Jinping’s top priorities: poverty relief, environmental protection and the control of economic risks.

Former Guangdong party boss Hu Chunhua, the youngest member of the party’s 25-strong decision-making Politburo, rose from poverty-stricken backwater.

Han Zheng, a member of the Communist Party’s innermost Politburo Standing Committee, burnished his pollution control credentials in his previous post as party boss of Shanghai.

Xi’s top economic adviser, Liu He, and former United Front Work Department head Sun Chunlan, both Politburo members, will round out the quartet.

The party’s 200-member Central Committee met this week to finalise the appointments of senior state officials, which will be endorsed at the end of the national legislature’s full session that opens on Monday. Unless there are last-minute surprises during the NPC’s fortnight of closed-door deliberations, the four vice-premiers are expected to take key roles in navigating the road map laid out by Xi at the party’s national congress in October to realise the so-called Chinese dream. 

That envisions China becoming a “moderately well-off society” by 2020 and then a fully developed nation in economic, technological and military terms by 2050, completing the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” that is the party’s top priority under Xi.