Veteran of ‘iPhone City’ tapped as party boss of China’s Silicon Valley

China’s southern tech hub of Shenzhen has a new Communist Party chief, nearly six months after the city’s former party boss was promoted to provincial governor.State media announced on Sunday that Jin Lei, 56, had been appointed Shenzhen’s party chief as well as a member of the Guangdong provincial party committee and its standing committee.Jin, an economist and former official in the southwestern province of Sichuan, takes over from Meng Fanli, who had been in the position since April 2022.Meng was promoted to Guangdong’s governor in October and retained the Shenzhen position until the naming of his replacement.Jin was born in the central province of Henan in 1970 and obtained a bachelor’s degree from Wuhan University’s political science department in 1992.He was awarded a master’s degree in economics from Xiamen University in 2002, according to the Shenzhen-based Securities Times.