Background
Xu Kuangdi is a native of Tongxiang city in Zhejiang Province. He was born on December, 1937.
匡迪 徐
Xu Kuangdi is a native of Tongxiang city in Zhejiang Province. He was born on December, 1937.
In 1959 he graduated from the Metallurgical Department of the Beijing Institute of Iron and Steel Technology.
He then served as a teaching assistant in this department, and as teaching assistant and deputy director at the Teaching and Research Office of the Shanghai Institute of Technology. He subsequently worked at a ‘May Seventh’ Cadre School in Fengyang, Anhui Province, before he was transferred to the Shanghai Institute of Mechanics in 1972 to lecture in the Metallurgical Department. Between 1980 and 1989 he served as professor and dean of the Shanghai University of Technology and as the university’s executive vice president. From 1982 to 1983 he was a visiting scholar at Imperial College, United Kingdom, and from 1984 to 1985 he served as deputy chief engineer and technical manager of the Scandinavian Lance Corporation, Sweden.
In 1989 then-Premier Zhu Rongji brought Xu into the Shanghai government where he became deputy director of the Shanghai Municipal Higher Education Bureau. In 1991 Zhu Rongji appointed Xu to head the Municipal Planning Commission, allegedly because Xu had remarked that he hated central planning. In 1992 Xu Kuangdi was elected vice mayor of Shanghai, and in 1992 he became mayor, a post he held until December 2001.
He also served as director of the Municipal Labor and Wages Committee. From 1994 to 2001 Xu served as deputy secretary of the CCP Shanghai Municipal Committee. In 1995, he was elected a member of CAE, and in 1996, as vice chairman of the Chinese Mayors Association. In 2001 he was suddenly demoted and transferred to a ‘pre-retirement job’ as party chief of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. The following year he was appointed its president, and in 2003 elected president of the CFIE. He was considered to be a popular and dynamic mayor and was widely praised for promoting Shanghai as a world financial and industrial center. Among foreign investors, Xu enjoyed a good reputation.
In March 2003, he was elected vice chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, China’s top political advisory body and the highest body of the patriotic United Front. He also serves as vice chair- man of the State Council’s Academic Degrees Committee and is a member of the State Leading Group for Science, Technology and Education (both posts held since 2003). In addition, Xu was elected a member of both the 15th and 16th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.
He joined Communist Party in 1983.