Liu Shiyu was appointed as Party leader and chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC), according to decisions made by the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the State Council on Saturday. Xiao Gang, former head of the CSRC, was removed from his post as the chairman as well as the Party leader of the commission.
Chinese stocks slumped 23 percent in January, their poorest month since the depths of the global financial crisis in 2008, a performance that made the Shanghai exchange the world's worst-performing major market.
A series of moves intended to smooth dramatic swings in stock prices that began last June instead created panic.
Xiao, 57, took over as chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission in March 2013. He was in charge of overseeing the market in mid-2015 when the benchmark Shanghai index plummeted by almost a third, wiping off trillions of dollars and jolting global markets.
Calls for Xiao's departure, heard regularly since the debacle, heated up early in January after the CSRC's deployment of a "circuit breaker" closed the Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges early twice in four days before it was scrapped.
Xiao's successor, Liu, 55 years old, has spent most of his career in banking. He served as a vice-governor of the People's Bank of China, the central bank, before being tapped as chairman of the Agricultural Bank of China, the country's third-largest lender.