New China Party Leadership Elected
The Communist Party of China (CPC) on Wednesday elected a new Central Committee at the closing session of its 18th National Congress, unveiling the new leadership lineup for the coming five years.
Elected by 2,307 delegates by secret ballots, the new CPC Central Committee includes 205 members and 171 alternate members, of whom nearly half are new faces.
The 17th CPC Central Committee had 204 members and 167 alternate members.
The five-yearly congress on Wednesday also installed through secret ballots a new Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, of which more than three-fourths members are newly-nominated.
NEW FACES
"The congress elected a new Central Committee of the Party and replaced older leaders with younger ones," Hu Jintao said in an address at the closing session of the 18th CPC National Congress in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.
According to the election result, Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang were elected to the 18th CPC Central Committee, the Party's top decision-making body.
Sixty nine-year-old Hu, 71-year-old Wu Bangguo, 70-year-old Wen Jiabao, 72-year-old Jia Qinglin, 68-year-old Li Changchun, 69-year-old He Guoqiang and 69-year-old Zhou Yongkang, who were members of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the 17th CPC Central Committee, are not in the new Central Committee.
Meanwhile, Wang Qishan, Liu Yunshan, Liu Yandong, Li Yuanchao, Wang Yang, Zhang Gaoli, Zhang Dejiang, Yu Zhengsheng, all members of the Political Bureau of the 17th CPC Central Committee, were elected to the 18th CPC Central Committee, along with Fan Changlong and Xu Qiliang, who were appointed vice chairmen of the CPC Central Military Commission early this month.
Wang Qishan was also elected to the new Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the Party's highest anti-corruption body.
According to the Party Constitution, the highest leading body of the CPC is the National Congress and the Central Committee it elects, and all constituent organizations and members of the Party are subordinate to the National Congress and the Central Committee.
The 18th CPC Central Committee will elect the Political Bureau, the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau and the General Secretary at its first plenum on Thursday morning.
NEW TRAITS
To further promote intra-Party democracy, the CPC introduced larger margins in preliminary elections to elect the new Central Committee.
Before the formal election on Wednesday morning, delegates to the congress held preliminary elections to determine formal candidates of members and alternate members of the 18th CPC Central Committee and of members of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.
The nominees for primary elections were 9.3 percent more than the elected members of the CPC Central Committee, 11.1 percent more than the seats for alternate members.
The margins were 1 percentage point and 1.5 percentage points higher, respectively, than those at the preliminary elections five years ago.
Nearly half of elected members and alternate members of the new Central Committee, or 184 people, are new comers. Fresh blood elected to the 130-members Central Commission for Discipline Inspection accounted for 76.9 percent of the total.
The CPC Central Committee members are aged 56.1 on average, with 33 females and 39 from ethnic minorities. About 95.7 percent of the members received education at or above university levels.
"Many members of the new Central Committee were elected unanimously, indicating they are highly recognized as the elites of our Party," said Zheng Weiwen, a delegate to the congress.
Zheng said many elected members used to work in different positions and had excellent career performance in communities or in remote villages and border areas where the conditions were harsh.
"With such experiences, they care about the concerns of the people and focus more on improving people's livelihood," he said, adding some elected members are young and professional experts in science, technology and education.
To select candidates for the elections, the CPC dispatched a total of 68 inspection teams from July 2011 to June 2012 to 31 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities, as well as Party and government departments and financial institutions at the central level, centrally-administered enterprises and armed forces units.
More than 27,500 people were interviewed individually during the process.
The Party adopted stringent standards concerning the examination of those proposed nominees of the new Central Committee and Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.
Inspection teams also conducted extensive surveys on candidates' performance and personal integrity among people at the grassroots level and handed out more than 29,000 questionnaires in 31 provincial-level regions.
The Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the 17th CPC Central Committee convened 11 special meetings to listen to the reports from the inspection teams and narrowed down the name-lists before submitting them to the 18th CPC National Congress for deliberation.
（Source: Xinhua）
