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Hu Chunhua named new Guangdong party chief

China announced on Tuesday the appointment of rising star Hu Chunhua as Communist Party boss for the Guangdong, the country’s richest and most liberal province.

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Hu Chunhua, former party chief of Inner Mongolia. Photo: Simon Song

China announced on Tuesday the appointment of rising star Hu Chunhua as Communist Party boss for the Guangdong province, the country’s richest and most liberal province.

Hu will take over from reform-minded politician Wang Yang, who undertook restructuring the economy away from an export-driven model and grappled with rising social tensions among migrant workers.

Hu’s appointment was announced in a brief statement carried by the official Xinhua news agency. It said Wang Jun will replace Hu as party chief in Inner Mongolia. But the article did not say where Wang Yang, seen by many in the West as a beacon of political reform, will be moved to.

Reuters reported last month that Hu, the former Inner Mongolia party chief, was tipped to take over as party chief in Guangdong.

Hu, 49, is part of the so-called “sixth generation” of potential national leaders born in the 1960s, after the generations headed by Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping.

Hu Chunhua spent two decades in restive and remote Tibet, where he learned to speak Tibetan, rare for a Han Chinese official. While there, he came under the wing of Hu Jintao, the outgoing president.

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