He was then transferred to the Shanghai planning commission to work as the vice director in December 1994. He then successively served as the deputy governor of Songjiang County, the deputy governor of Changning District from 1996 to 2001.
In July 2001, he joined the third batch of Shanghai cadres to join the "Help Tibet" campaign. At 38, he was appointed as the deputy party chief of Shigatse in Tibet, one of the most remote cities of China, on the border with Nepal and Bhutan. While in Tibet, he suffered from severe altitude sickness, with symptoms of frequent headache and insomnia. His hair turned grizzled after one year as a result.[1]
After coming back from Tibet, he was appointed as the governor of Zhabei District in July 2004, and then the deputy secretary-general of the Shanghai government in May 2008.
In May 2012, he was named a member of the Shanghai municipal party standing committee and in June became Secretary-General of the Party Committee, as the political secretary to Yu Zhengsheng and then Han Zheng.[2] In January 2017, he was promoted to deputy party chief of Shanghai.[3]
On 6 December 2019, he was appointed acting Governor of Henan Province.[4] He was elected as the governor on 14 January 2020. In his Henan stint, COVID-19 pandemic smashed through China. In Henan, many tough and controversial measures were taken, such as using muck trucks and trenches to blockade the road with Hubei which was the centre of the pandemic, and putting up radical slogans such as "If you come back home while being infected with Covid-19, then you are a shameful descendent to your family".[5] Such measures were popular among Chinese netizens on Weibo, and Geng Hong was praised as the "provincial governor you should steal from others".[6]
