A technocrat wants to uplift China’s slowest-growing province. Can he succeed?

Corruption, red tape and entrenched officialdom has Liaoning one of the country’s toughest places to do business. Read more at straitstimes.com.

BEIJING - The coastal Liaoning province, located in China’s gritty north-east rust belt known as Dongbei, is known to be notoriously tough for investors.

Rent-seeking officials and bureaucratic inertia have made the industrial province business-unfriendly – a reputation that explains why it recorded China’s slowest provincial growth in 2025, at 3.7 per cent.

Liaoning’s new party chief Xu Kunlin, a policy technocrat, wants to change things.

And he moves fast.

At a meeting of Liaoning parliamentarians on March 6, held during the annual Two Sessions in Beijing, he publicly chastised local cadres with unusual bluntness. 

“Some cadres don’t want to serve companies and the people – they just enjoy being officials,” he said, wagging a finger. “They start thinking about their next promotion, even though they haven’t done much work.”