Do we like them?

Do we like Han Zheng?

Our score: 3 out of 10. Rights groups tie him to Beijing's Hong Kong policy, and his own record on LGBTQ+ people, women and migrants is a blank, with no personal good deeds found.

Han Zheng is China's vice president, Xi Jinping's deputy, a job he has held since March 2023. He's a career Communist Party official, and back in 2013 he was a senior Shanghai figure out publicly selling the city's free trade zone experiment. Think steady administrator, not celebrity.

That makes the usual goss thin. We found no court case, no lawsuit and no personal scandal on him, and nothing about how he treats staff or colleagues. For a bloke at the very top of a one-party state, that tells you more about what gets reported than about the man.

The harm check is where it gets heavy. Caixin reported in 2020 that he sat on the top policymaking body for Hong Kong. In January 2025, Tibetan, Uyghur and Hong Kong activist groups protested his presence at Donald Trump's inauguration, calling him “a key architect of China's oppressive policies”. That is the activists' charge, and we found no sourced reply from him.

On the rest of the test, the cupboard is bare. We found no words of his about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or vaccines, so we won't guess what he thinks. No one has been caught platforming conspiracy theories through him either, but a quiet record isn't a clean one when you sit this high in the system.

The recent stuff is diplomacy. In September he addressed the UN General Assembly, where reports say he stuck to China's standard line on development and global governance. In June he met former US Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao in Beijing and urged stronger China-US ties.

On the planet, he talks the talk. At a 2025 energy conference, China's Foreign Ministry's readout had him calling for collaboration on renewables, grid links and smart energy. Those are speeches, though, and we found no independent check of what he personally has done.