Xi Jinping’s Hand-Picked Baoding Chief Ousted by a Rival Faction

Baoding, a mid-size city in Hebei province south of Beijing, sits at the intersection of three of Xi Jinping’s most sensitive political assets: his signature Xiong’an planned-city megaproject, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei regional integration initiative, and the garrison city of the 82nd Group Army, one of China’s most capable ground combat formations. On May 25, 2026, Hebei provincial authorities confirmed that Dang Xiaolong, the outgoing party secretary of Baoding, had been replaced by Zhao Wenfeng, a technocratic official whose career ran parallel to the decade Li Keqiang served as China’s prime minister and whose factional ties run directly counter to Xi’s interests.

Baoding’s party secretary holds three jobs at once — and Xi needs to trust all three

Xiong’an New Area, located in eastern Baoding, is the centerpiece of Xi’s most ambitious urban planning project: a planned city formally designated in April 2017 by the Party’s central leadership bodies as a site of, in the regime’s own grandiose framing, “millennial significance and national importance.” The designation was intended to relieve overcrowding in Beijing and signal Xi’s transformative vision for northern China’s economic geography. Years on, Xiong’an’s streets remain largely empty; observers outside China have described it as a ghost city, its gleaming infrastructure devoid of the residents and businesses the project was meant to attract.

Baoding’s party secretary also chairs the Hebei office responsible for advancing the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei integration initiative, a Xi-signature policy that aims to meld the economies and infrastructure of three adjacent regions into a single coordinated zone, effectively functioning as Xi’s operational manager for the project on the ground.

The 82nd Group Army, one of China’s most capable and politically consequential ground combat formations, garrisons in Baoding. The city’s party secretary serves simultaneously as first party secretary of the Baoding Military Sub-district, a role that carries formal oversight responsibilities touching the 82nd Group Army’s political work chain. Placing this triple-role position in the hands of anyone Xi did not personally trust was, by any reading of CCP political logic, unthinkable.

Xi’s ousted Baoding chief was a Tsinghua alumnus from Xi’s home county

Dang Xiaolong, the official now removed, was about as close to Xi Jinping as a mid-ranking provincial official could get without sitting on the Politburo itself. He was born in Fuping County, Shaanxi province, the same county that Xi’s family roots in Shaanxi trace back to, a bond that carries real weight in Chinese political culture, where shared hometown origins frequently translate into patron-client loyalty. Dang also graduated from Tsinghua University, making him a fellow alumnus of Xi, who studied chemical engineering there in the late 1970s.

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When the Xiong’an New Area was formally established in April 2017, Dang was appointed its first provisional deputy party secretary, an assignment that Tang Jingyuan, a U.S.-based commentator who has closely tracked CCP personnel politics, reads as a direct expression of Xi’s trust. Tang argued in a recent broadcast that being handed the operational role of running Xiong’an at such a politically charged moment meant Dang was Xi’s designated gatekeeper of the project Xi treats as his defining political legacy.

Fang Hongwei, another Fuping-born official who served as party secretary of Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi province, was described in similar terms: a hometown loyalist stationed at the gate of Xi’s ancestral political heartland. Fang was publicly announced as fallen from grace on Nov. 7, 2025, and widely reported to have been detained by Party disciplinary investigators in circumstances described online as humiliating. Dang Xiaolong’s removal is less dramatic in form; the man who replaced him has rival-faction ties that reach directly into the networks Xi has spent a decade trying to dismantle.

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

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

Tang Jingyuan identifies Zhao as a technocratic official shaped by the State Council system that Li Keqiang presided over, a holdover from the faction Xi has consistently sought to sideline. Li Keqiang died in October 2023 under circumstances that prompted an unusual public outpouring of grief, and Hu Chunhua was quietly stripped of his positions beginning in 2023; the two figures Xi regarded with the deepest suspicion within the party system have both been removed from power, yet their factional networks apparently retain enough reach to place an ally at the heart of Baoding.

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

Hebei’s new personnel chief, in post six weeks, has her own rival-faction patrons

The decision to replace Dang with Zhao would have required the approval of Ge Qiaohong, appointed head of the Hebei provincial organization department on April 13, 2026. The organization department manages cadre appointments across the province; it is the mechanism through which the Party installs and removes officials at every level of the Hebei hierarchy. Ge had been in the post for barely six weeks when the Baoding announcement appeared.

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

Xi’s loyalists are being replaced, one by one, in strategically critical posts

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

Xi Jinping continues to hold the title of CCP general secretary, and the party machinery publicly defers to him. In Hebei, however, the actual movement of personnel is running counter to his interests, touching the most strategically sensitive nodes in China’s political geography.

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