Meng Fanli, the Communist Party chief of Shenzhen, has been promoted to party chief of Guangdong’s government, a job that effectively makes him the governor-in-waiting of China’s biggest provincial economy.
Meng, 60, was moved to Guangdong in 2022, when he was assigned to be the party chief of Shenzhen, according to the social media account of Nanfang Daily, the province’s official news outlet.
The title of party chief of the provincial government doubles with the position of governor, and Meng’s appointment to that role is expected to be confirmed by the provincial legislature soon.
Meng is filling the vacancy left by governor Wang Weizhong, who was promoted to party chief of Inner Mongolia on Tuesday.
Wang, 63, was appointed to the Guangdong governorship in 2021, after four years as the party chief of Shenzhen.
Tuesday’s announcements came a day after President Xi Jinping chaired the monthly Politburo meeting, a gathering that is often a window on personnel changes at the provincial level and above.
Shenzhen’s economy faced both internal and external challenges at the start of Meng’s term, with the city’s economic growth slowing to 3.3 per cent in 2022, hit by the triple whammy of the Covid-19 pandemic, a property downturn and the painful adjustments of the China-US trade war.
Despite the slower growth, Shenzhen – which has nurtured the likes of Huawei Technologies, Tencent and BYD – unseated Shanghai as China’s biggest manufacturing city that year.
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