Feng Wei, 61, had been asked to stay on to handle legal issues relating to calls for independence in Hong Kong
A top Beijing official in Hong Kong and Macau affairs stepped down after a year of delay in retirement, making way for a successor with years of work relating to the city and experience in both foreign affairs and party disciplinary works.
The State Council, China’s central government, announced on Saturday that Feng Wei had been relieved of the post of deputy director of its Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, and Deng Zhonghua had been appointed to fill the position.
Feng was originally expected to retire late last year when he turned 60, the usual age for vice-ministerial officials to end their tenure.
Deng, 57, is the second number two functionary appointed to the office in the past two years with anticorruption experience, after Pan Shengzhou, who was appointed to run discipline inspection within the office in June last year.
Before the latest appointment, Deng had since last September been leading a team of inspectors sent by the Chinese Communist Party’s discipline watchdog to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the country’s top official think tank.
Educated in law like Feng, Deng spent a total of 15 years in the foreign ministry’s Hong Kong and Macau affairs department and worked as a cadre in the Chinese representative office of the Sino-British Joint Liaison Group between 1988 and 1991 to discuss the city’s handover from Britain to China.
