Xu Kuangdi

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Xu Kuangdi (b. 1937) is a Chinese politician of the ruling Communist Party. He was mayor of Shanghai from 1995 to 2001. He supervised the transformation of Shanghai during his administration into a center for international investment and trade that helped lead the intensive development of China's economy. He was demoted in 2001, apparently as the result of intra-Party rivalries between President Jiang Zemin and Premier Zhu Rongji, both former Mayors of Shanghai, to a far more obscure and powerless position as party chief of the Academy of Engineering in Beijing and replaced by Executive Vice-Mayor Chen Liangyu, one of Jiang's political followers. He continues as Vice-Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

Xu was born in Tongxiang (桐乡), in Zhejiang Province. He graduated from the Beijing Institute of Iron and Steel Engineering in 1959, during the midst of the Great Leap Forward, and was a professor there from 1959 to 1963, then at the Shanghai Institute of Engineering from 1963 to 1971, through the height of the Cultural Revolution. He did not join the Communist Party of China until 1983. He studied in Britain in 1982 and 1983 and worked in Sweden from 1984 to 1985; he also won a national award for his design of a stainless steel pipe for use in aircraft production.

He held a number of other academic positions through 1991, when Zhu appointed him as director of the Shanghai Municipal Planning Committee, allegedly because he had remarked that he hated central planning. That position led to a number of increasingly powerful positions within the municipal government of Shanghai. He was an alternate member of the 14th CPC Central Committee and member of the 15th and 16th CPC Central Committees.