China has named former SARS firefighter Yin Li (尹力) the new Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader of Beijing, as President Xi Jinping (習近平) begins recalibrating the “zero COVID” policy that has slowed the world’s second largest economy.
Yin, 60, replaces Cai Qi (蔡奇) as party secretary of the capital city of about 21 million people, Xinhua news agency reported on Sunday.
Cai, 66, became first Secretary of the CCP Secretariat overseeing ideology and day-to-day party affairs, after a twice-a-decade leadership reshuffle last month that the Chinese president used to consolidate power.
Photo: Bloomberg
Since 2020, Yin has been party chief of Fujian Province, China’s closest province to Taiwan. Fujian is also regarded as a power base of Xi, who worked there from 1985 to 2002.
However, Yin is better known for his career in public health. He studied health management at the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences in Moscow from 1988 to 1993, and subsequently became a visiting fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health from 2002 to 2003, giving him experience in two nations now central to Xi’s foreign policy priorities.
Yin returned to China in 2003 as the SARS epidemic gripped the nation, helping shape the nation’s response as deputy director of the general office at the Chinese Ministry of Health, and attending meetings with then-Chinese premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) on the crisis.
He has also held leading roles at the WHO and China’s Food and Drug Administration (now the National Medical Products Administration).
Yin’s expertise could be a boon for Beijing, which logged 404 new COVID-19 cases for Sunday, the highest in more than a year. That surge could test China’s order last week to ease some of its strictest disease prevention controls, which have isolated the world’s second-largest economy, stoked public angst and weighed on growth.
The appointment of a public health technocrat into one of the party’s most prominent regional roles could also signal that Xi sees COVID-19 as a longer-term struggle.
While China loosened some rules on Friday, it remains unclear how the nation will emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic without experiencing an exit wave of infections that could threaten its hospital system and relatively low death toll.
The CCP has touted China’s 5,226 recorded COVID-19 deaths as a measure of its superior political system to the US, where more than 1 million have died from the virus.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘POINT OF NO RETURN’: The Caribbean nation needs increased international funding and support for a multinational force to help police tackle expanding gang violence The top UN official in Haiti on Monday sounded an alarm to the UN Security Council that escalating gang violence is liable to lead the Caribbean nation to “a point of no return.” Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Haiti Maria Isabel Salvador said that “Haiti could face total chaos” without increased funding and support for the operation of the Kenya-led multinational force helping Haiti’s police to tackle the gangs’ expanding violence into areas beyond the capital, Port-Au-Prince. Most recently, gangs seized the city of Mirebalais in central Haiti, and during the attack more than 500 prisoners were freed, she said.
RSS