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
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Russian hackers last year targeted a Dutch public facility in the first such an attack on the lowlands country’s infrastructure, its military intelligence services said on Monday. The Netherlands remained an “interesting target country” for Moscow due to its ongoing support for Ukraine, its Hague-based international organizations, high-tech industries and harbors such as Rotterdam, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) said in its yearly report. Last year, the MIVD “saw a Russian hacker group carry out a cyberattack against the digital control system of a public facility in the Netherlands,” MIVD Director Vice Admiral Peter Reesink said in the 52-page
RSS