The mayor of Beijing, Chen Jining, has been appointed this Friday as the new head of the Chinese Communist Party in the municipality of Shanghai, one more in the wave of reshuffles announced by Chinese President Xi Jinping, after his absolute consolidation as leader of the party in the great congress of the formation that ended last weekend.
Chen, 58, was educated at Tsinghua University, the Chinese president’s alma mater, before specializing in environmental sciences at Imperial College London. A year after taking office in 2017 as mayor of the capital, he pushed through a new plan to improve air quality in the polluted metropolis and his big achievement so far has been the replacement of coal with natural gas in much of the city’s domestic heating.
His nomination, announced by the official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, in a brief statement, complies with the trend imposed by Xi at the congress of selecting members of his circle of allies to key positions within the organization’s and local governments’ leadership, as well as specifically choosing experts in science and technology for these positions -six of the 13 new members of the party’s Politburo meet this requirement-.
It is also expected that in the next few hours the appointment of Huang Kunming, until now head of the Communist Party’s Publicity Department (its propaganda section) as the new head of the party in the southern province of Canton, will be made official. His predecessor, Li Xi, was promoted last weekend to the Standing Committee and head of the party’s anti-corruption department.
Huang, 65, will be in charge of the world’s most populous municipality with more than 46 million inhabitants and is considered the country’s main emerging economic hub. His previous post, multiple sources confirm to the ‘South China Morning Post’, will be filled by Li Shulei, his former deputy.
All these new appointments will accompany the Chinese president in what he described this Sunday to the media as «an internal revolution in the expedition towards the future» of the country with the purpose of «standing firm in the deepening» of the reform plan initiated by Xi since his arrival to power.
The delegates supported the inclusion of several theoretical concepts in the constitution of the formation, among them the so-called «Two Establishments», which cement the figure of Xi as the core and guide of the Party through his ideas «for socialism in the Chinese style», with a strong capitalist and anti-corruption component «in a new era» for the country.
