Long-serving Guangdong governor Huang Huahua has stepped down after reaching the compulsory retirement age of 65 last month.
Guangdong's Provincial People's Congress accepted his resignation yesterday and named vice-governor Zhu Xiaodan acting governor, Xinhua reported. Huang had governed the province since 2003.
Huang, who was promoted to vice-governor in 2002, was the longest-serving governor in the province's history. There had been widespread speculation in recent years that he might step down before reaching the official retirement age due to a string of mass protests sparked by land disputes and strikes.
Huang's term in office accounted for almost a third of Guangdong's three decades of economic liberalisation, and political commentators said he had contributed to the province's outstanding economic growth, despite the challenges of severe acute respiratory syndrome in 2003, the global financial meltdown three years ago and the current pains of economic transition.
Huang, a native of Xingning county in Meizhou, was born in October 1946. He earned a mathematics degree at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou in 1964 and joined the Community Party the next year. In 1988, he became deputy party head and mayor of Meizhou and 10 years later he was elected party head of Guangzhou, the provincial capital.
'He tried to boost the Guangdong economy and he did it,' said Liu Pinan, president of the Macroeconomic Research Institute at the Guangdong Academy of Social Sciences. 'It's a pity that he failed to handle relations between the provincial government and citizens, which resulted in countless mass incidents.'
Disputes over the use and acquisition of land escalated as the provincial government encouraged large-scale industrial and property development projects.