Jia Qinglin
A member of the Standing Committee of the 17th CCP Central Committee Politburo, Jia Qinglin has been chair of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Committee (CPPCC) since 2003. As he was in the Standing Committee of the 16th CCP Central Committee Politburo, Jia ranks fourth in the CCP. Jia is widely known as a close friend of Jiang Zemin, and for the fact that he escaped political fallout despite his proximity to the Xiamen smuggling scandal of the late 1990s--Jia was party secretary in Fujian during the height of the smuggling, and his wife, Lin Youfang, was the party secretary of a major Fujian trading company.
Jia was born in Qingdao, Shandong, in March 1940; his ancestral home is Botou, Hebei. An engineer by education, he specialized in electrical motor and appliance design at the Hebei Engineering College Department of Electric Power and graduated in 1962. Jia then began a stint as a technician of the plant bureau of the First Ministry of the Machine Building Industry and as a deputy secretary of the ministry's CYLC organization.
After two years of manual labor in Jiangxi at the May 7th Cadre School of the First Ministry of the Machine Building Industry, Jia was named a technician in the ministry's policy research office in 1971 and became the product management bureau chief in 1973. He served as general manager of the China National Machinery and Equipment Import/Export Corp. from 1978-83, at which time he was named director and party secretary of the Taiyuan Heavy Machinery Plant in Shanxi.
In 1985, Jia began his rise through the Fujian provincial party apparatus by being appointed CCP deputy secretary, a position he held until 1993, when he was named CCP secretary of Fujian which he held for two years. Jia also served as Fujian governor for three years from 1991-94. In 1996, Jia was appointed CCP deputy secretary of Beijing and also Beijing mayor, a position he held until 1999. In 1997, he became CCP secretary of Beijing, a position he held through October 2002.
Jia was a member of the 14th-17th CCP central committees and was first appointed to the Politburo in 1997. He was named to the Politburo Standing Committee in November 2002.