Baoding leader handpicked by Xi Jinping ousted by rival faction

When the new Xiong’an area was officially established in April 2017, Dang was named the party’s first provisional deputy secretary, an assignment that Tang Jingyuan, a U.S.-based commentator who has closely followed CCP personnel policies, sees as a direct expression of Xi’s confidence. Tang argued in a recent broadcast that being given the operational role of leading Xiong’an at such a politically charged moment meant that Dang was Xi’s designated custodian of the project that Xi considers his defining political legacy.

Fang Hongwei, another Fuping-born official who served as party secretary in Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi province, was described in similar terms: a hometown loyalist stationed at the gates of Xi’s ancestral political heartland. Fang was publicly announced as deposed on November 7, 2025, and it was widely reported that he had been arrested by Party disciplinary investigators in circumstances described online as humiliating. The impeachment of Dang Xiaolong is less dramatic in form; the man who replaced him has ties to rival factions that directly touch the networks Xi spent a decade trying to dismantle.

Xi loyalist replaced by official shaped by Li Keqiang’s rival faction

The man installed in Dang’s place, Zhao Wenfeng, spent virtually his entire career in Shijiazhuang, Hebei’s provincial capital, working in planning and economic development roles. His official biography corresponds almost exactly to the decade that Li Keqiang served as Chinese premier, from 2013 to 2023. It also briefly overlaps with the period in which Hu Chunhua, another figure associated with the Communist Youth League faction led by Li within the Party, served as acting governor of Hebei from April 2008 to November 2009. Between November 2008 and June 2009, Zhao worked in the municipal government of Shijiazhuang. offices, which gives him approximately seven months of institutional proximity with the provincial administration of Hu Chunhua.

Tang Jingyuan identifies Zhao as a technocratic official shaped by the State Council system chaired by Li Keqiang, a remnant of the faction Xi always sought to sideline. Li Keqiang died in October 2023 in circumstances that caused an unusual public outpouring of grief, and Hu Chunhua was quietly removed from office starting in 2023; The two figures Xi viewed with deepest suspicion within the party system have both been removed from power, but their factional networks apparently retain enough reach to place an ally at the heart of Baoding.

Tang’s reading is straightforward: if Xi controlled the party apparatus as firmly as his public image suggests, the appointment of Zhao Wenfeng would have been impossible.

Hebei’s new personnel chief, in office for six weeks, has her own bosses from rival factions

The decision to replace Dang with Zhao would have required the approval of Ge Qiaohong, who was appointed head of the Hebei Province Organization Department on April 13, 2026. The Organization Department handles cadre appointments throughout the province; it is the mechanism by which the Party installs and dismisses officials at all levels of the Hebei hierarchy. Ge had been in office for barely six weeks when Baoding’s announcement appeared.

Tang Jingyuan’s analysis links two of Ge’s major career clients directly to the networks Xi spent years suppressing. One of them is Chen Yichu, former vice chairman of the Party-controlled political advisory body of Henan province, who was a Tsinghua classmate of former CCP general secretary Hu Jintao. The other is Qi Jinli, former deputy party secretary of Zhengzhou and associate of Li Keqiang. A provincial organization leader with clear Communist Youth League lineage, within weeks of taking office, removed one of Xi’s most strategically placed loyalists and installed a figure from the rival faction in his place.

Xi loyalists replaced, one by one, in strategically critical positions

The November 2025 purge of Fang Hongwei, the Fuping-born Xi loyalist whom Tang identifies as Xi’s guardian of his Shaanxi political base, and now the removal of Dang Xiaolong from Baoding: two loyalists from his hometown, two strategically critical positions, both lost to replacements by rival factions within seven months.

Xi Jinping continues to hold the title of general secretary of the CCP, and the party apparatus publicly defers to him. In Hebei, however, personnel movements run counter to its interests, affecting the most strategically sensitive nodes of Chinese political geography.

Tang concluded that the personnel file contradicts Xi’s public image of unquestioned control: the grip is weakening.