New China standing committee members

The Chinese Communist Party has elected four new members to its nine-member standing committee, the most powerful political body in the country.

XI JINPING

Xi Jinping is seen as a "princeling", a term applied to senior officials who are believed to owe their promotion to family connections.

Xi tackled corruption in Fujian

Xi, born in Shaanxi Province in 1953, is the son of revolutionary veteran Xi Zhongxun, one of the Communist Party's founding fathers.

Xi Jinping studied engineering at Tsinghua University, which has produced many of China's current top leaders, including President Hu Jintao.

He has since held party positions in the provinces of Shaanxi, Hebei, Zhejiang and Fujian, where he cleaned up after a major corruption scandal.

The province, on China's east coast, is one of the most prosperous in the country, attracting investment from Taiwan.

Xi was made party chief of Shanghai in 2007 when its former chief, Chen Liangyu, was sacked following corruption charges.

LI KEQIANG

Li Keqiang has already had a colourful career that has included manual labour on a rural commune and running a major province.

Li has longstanding links to the president

Born in 1955 in Anhui Province, Li studied law at Beijing's prestigious Peking University after his spell on a commune.

He joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1976 and slowly made his way up the party's hierarchy after graduation.

He joined the upper echelons of the party's youth league in the 1980s when current President Hu Jintao was in charge of the organisation.

Li was chosen as deputy-secretary of the party in Henan Province in 1998, and became party secretary of Liaoning Province in 2004.

He has impressed many by his efforts to revitalise Liaoning, an industrial province that has suffered following China's economic reforms.

HE GUOQIANG

He Guoqiang is a chemical engineer by training who rose to become head of the Communist Party's organisational department.

This apparently obscure department is in charge of investigating officials before they are promoted, so it has influence and power.

He was born in Hunan Province in 1943 and studied at the Beijing Institute of Chemical Engineering.

He Guoqiang had a number of jobs at a fertiliser plant in the 1970s and 80s, before starting his rise through the party hierarchy.

One incident in Fujian Province shows this low-profile figure has a knack for political survival.

He was the province's deputy party chief when it was gripped by the largest smuggling case in party history, but he survived the scandal.

Good relations with former President Jiang Zemin are thought to have protected him.

ZHOU YONGKANG

The man who rose to become China's top policeman, and a senior politician, made his name in the oil industry.

Zhou, an engineer specialising in exploration, was previously general manager of the China National Petroleum Corporation, the country's largest oil and gas producer.

Before becoming head of China's Public Security Ministry, he was the party head in Sichuan Province Zhou, born in 1942 in Jiangsu Province, has enhanced the prestige of the police since he went to the public security ministry.

He has also shown he is no soft touch when it comes to policing duties, often expressing his willingness to crack down on "hostile forces".

But he has also tried to root out police abuse.