Sino-NK

In a recent post, Sino-NK covered churn as part of the anti-corruption campaign in Liaoning’s customs bureaus. This instalment reports on the career trajectories of two recently promoted Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cadres who stand near the forefront of the Party’s purifying mission in Liaoning province on the border with the DPRK.  

In late September, the CCP Central Committee appointed Xu Kunlin (许昆林), formerly Party secretary of the city of Suzhou in Jiangsu province, as new provincial Party head in Liaoning. His promotion follows that of Song Cheng (宋诚) as the new Party chief in Dandong last year.

The CCP Party Committee for Liaoning Province, now led by Xu, is headquartered in Shenyang, and its chairmanship is significant at the national and international level. The province still provides an important industrial backbone for the PRC, and is strategic in the extreme, bordering the Korean peninsula and with the Liaodong peninsula jutting out into the Yellow Sea, at Dalian.

Looking at the past five party secretaries to hold the position, we can see a pattern of roughly three ‘exit ramps’ out of the job: Some move up into the Central Committee and Politburo, others are elevated into an honorary position in Beijing, while a disgraced minority are charged with corruption and serve a life term in prison.

Liaoning province’s most recent party secretary, Hao Peng (郝鹏), was untainted by corruption accusations, and it was announced in mid-October that Hao had been moved into the vice-chairmanship of the National People’s Congress financial and economic committee. This is essentially an honorary post in Beijing.

Hao’s replacement, Xu, made four references to “security” in his first speech as Liaoning Party chief – and 24 references to Xi Jinping – while flanked by the outgoing Hao in remarks which championed the economic development of the province. Xu’s appointment from Jiangsu to Liaoning is seen as a latest attempt by the Chinese central government to kickstart enduring economic and industrial malaise in the northeast exacerbated by sanctions and closed trade routes to the DPRK during Covid-19.

Xu oversaw rapid economic development in Jiangsu province, serving as Party secretary of tech powerhouse Suzhou city from 2020, before his promotion as governor of Jiangsu province in 2022, a position he held until his recent transfer north to Liaoning.

Jiangsu province records more direct investment and trade from South Korea than any other province in China, and under Xu’s watch Suzhou saw Samsung extend its 30-year joint venture in the city. Weeks before leaving his post in Jiangsu, Xu welcomed Kim Tae-hung (김태흠/金泰钦), governor of South Korea’s of South Chungcheong province, to Nanjing.

Xu has had previous high-level contact with North Korean officials also, sitting in on a meeting in 2018 between Li Qiang (李强), current Chinese premier and at the time a member of the Political Bureau of the CCP Central Committee, and Pak Thae-song (박태성/朴泰成), current DPRK premier and then vice chairman of the Central Committee of the Worker’s Party of Korea (WPK). Xu was at the time vice mayor of Shanghai. A few months later, and in the same role in Shanghai, Xu took part in a Northeast Asia security summit in the city with DPRK and US officials as part of a security discussion which included the thorny issue of North Korean nuclear weapons. Xu therefore had a close view of the flurry of diplomatic activity which saw North Korean leader Kim Jong-un hold a series of meetings with both Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump.

Xu has wasted little time in his first month in the top job in Liaoning.  After launching a new Northeastern region under-18 football league, he made an on-site inspection to the petrochemical city of Benxi, north of Dandong.

In an announcement by the Liaoning provincial government released today, following a meeting on its anti-corruption drive, familiar points were raised: “the political ecology” of Liaoning needed to be “continuously purified”, there was a need for better coordination of anti-corruption investigations, and a sense of starting “a new chapter” in the struggle. Xu indicated that “both overt and covert investigations” were needed to enhance public trust. He also called out the problem of “false accusations” and pledged to quickly clear the names of those who had been falsely accused, and to punish those who brought spurious accusations of corruption.

The emphasis on fighting corruption correlates to unique challenges in Liaoning and neighbouring Jilin, the only Chinese provinces with land crossings to the DPRK, which remain susceptible to longstanding smuggling or other illicit border trade activity.

Xu has had no known contact with North Korean visitors as yet.

In Dandong city, there was also movement in the top job last year. Song was named Party secretary following lesser posts in the province, including in Tieling, a small but provincially significant coal town in the north of Liaoning.

Song joined the CCP in May of 1989 at the height of the student movement which led to Tiananmen Square and the lethal confrontation with the People’s Liberation Army the following month.

By 2004, Song had had been appointed head of the riot control unit (防暴支队支队) in Dalian City Public Security Bureau. Readers with experience in northeast China in the early 2000s will recall that controlling mass disturbances in Liaoning at that time was a serious business. Workers in the petrochemical and heavy-industrial city of Liaoyang, about an hour south of Shenyang, assembled in their tens of thousands in 2002.

In 2006, Song rose to head of the political bureau of Dalian City Public Security Bureau (大连市公安局政治部主任), as reported by Beijing Qingnianbao, and concurrently served as head of all police in Dalian’s Zhonghsan district, a dense hub in the centre of the city. In 2007, he remained in this post, welcoming cadre from Inner Mongolia to study Liaoning’s transport management system. Cross-provincial awareness was also clear in his participation in organising public security and earthquake relief for Sichuan in 2008.

Song remained in Dalian into the early 2010s becoming director of the city’s transportation bureau in 2013, and in 2016 Party secretary of the city’s Ganjingzi District before an appointment to Shenyang, the provincial capital, as a member of the Municipal Standing Committee in late 2018.

In 2024, Song took on a parallel appointment as secretary of Dandong area military committee [丹东军分区党委第一书记]. In a 27 October statement, there is a notable juxtaposition of these roles, with the conclusion that national defence and civil-military fusion can help to secure greater tourism revenues.

Song has occasionally been seen in military fatigues in Dandong, emphasising the CCP’s overall preparedness for contingencies along its national frontier, and in public comments regularly returns to themes of smooth inter-agency coordination during emergencies.

Song’s experience in public security in Dalian and Tieling, however, did not appear to include much by way of diplomacy – it will be intriguing to observe the extent to which Dandong’s new Party chief interacts with North Korean, South Korean, Mongolian, Japanese, or Russian visitors to Dandong in the months and years ahead.