Hubei deputy governor Guo Youming in party probe

Guo Youming, deputy governor of Hubei province, has been placed under an internal investigation for seriously violating party discipline, Xinhua reported on Wednesday.

Guo oversaw the province’s land and natural resources management, agriculture, rural development, poverty relief and some large state infrastructure project such as the Three Gorges Dam project, according to his official profile, which was still on the provincial government’s website on Wednesday evening.

The state news agency gave no further details.

Guo was born in Suizhou in 1956 and was only about three years away from retirement. He joined the Communist Party in 1985 and worked his way up from a dam construction technician to the party secretary of Yichang, Hubei province, before being appointed the deputy governor in 2011.

He never left Hubei, save for a government leadership programme at the University of Toronto, Canada, in 2007.

The last time he appeared in public was on November 14, inspecting rural property reform in Wuhan, according to the government website.