Chinese Communist Party names new provincial chiefs as coronavirus wanes
- Promotions appear to be part of reactivated renewal plans, analyst says
- Aerospace engineer Xu Dazhe takes top job in Hunan as country aims for greater technological development
According to state media, the governors of Jilin, Hunan, Guizhou and Yunnan provinces were promoted to the top party post in their jurisdictions, taking over as their predecessors retired.
In the northern province of Jilin, Jing Junhai, 60, replaced Bayanqolu, 65, as the new chief of the provincial party committee.
Jing has a degree in physics and spent most of his political career in Shaanxi province, in the country’s northwest. He was promoted to be the deputy head of the party’s propaganda department in 2015 before becoming deputy chief of the Beijing municipal party committee. He was appointed governor of Jilin in January 2018.
In central Hunan province, Xu Dazhe, 64, has been named as the successor to Du Jiahao, the 65-year-old provincial party chief.
Xu is an aerospace engineer who headed the China National Space Administration before being transferred to his home province of Hunan in September 2016 to become governor.
In southwestern Yunnan province, Ruan Chengfa, 63, has taken over from Chen Hao, 66.
Ruan earned his nickname “Man Cheng Wa”, meaning “digs all over town”, during his term in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, for his bulldozer-style infrastructure drive.
At the peak of the construction push in 2011, more than 5,000 projects collectively valued at 70 billion yuan (US$10.6 billion) were under way, financed by loans from state-run banks.
Meanwhile in neighbouring Guizhou province, Shen Yiqin, 60 has succeeded Sun Zhigang, 66, becoming the only woman in the country to now hold a top provincial party position.
A member of the Bai ethnic minority, Shen spent her entire political career in Guizhou, taking on various leadership roles including in propaganda and law enforcement. She became Guizhou’s first woman governor in 2017.
Gu Su, a professor of philosophy and law at Nanjing University, said the promotions showed the party’s leadership was confident that the coronavirus was under control in China and “the veterans who stayed back to fight the pandemic can now finally retire”.
China sets out road map for the future as policy meeting ends
Gu said there were clear signs that the party was reactivating the “overdue” succession plans for key party and government positions at the end of a key party meeting in Beijing late last month.
On 20 October, senior party propagandist Tuo Zhen was promoted to head party mouthpiece People’s Daily while another propagandist, He Ping, was named as the new head of state news agency Xinhua respectively.
Jiang Jinquan, deputy director of the Central Policy Research Office – the party’s top think tank – also moved one step up at the end of October to take over the top job in the organisation from ideological tsar Wang Huning.
