China's ruling Communist Party has unveiled its new leadership line-up for the next decade.
Vice-President Xi Jinping takes over from outgoing President Hu Jintao as Communist Party General-Secretary and was also named head of the party's Central Military Commission.
Mr Xi is expected to succeed Mr Hu as president in March at the annual meeting of parliament.
The number of members of the Politburo Standing Committee has been reduced to seven from nine, as expected.
Mr Xi, 59, belongs to the party's "princeling" generation, the offspring of communist revolutionaries.
His father, former vice-premier Xi Zhongxun, fought alongside Mao Zedong in the Chinese civil war.
Mr Xi watched his father purged and later, during the Cultural Revolution, spent years in the hardscrabble countryside before making his way to university and then to power.
Married to a famous singer, Mr Xi has crafted a low-key and sometimes blunt political style. He has complained that officials' speeches and writings are clogged with party jargon and has demanded more plain speaking.
Mr Xi went to work in the poor northwest Chinese countryside as a "sent-down youth" during the chaos of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, and became a rural commune official.
He went on to study chemical engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing and later gained a degree in Marxist theory from Tsinghua and a doctorate in law.
A native of the poor, inland province of Shaanxi, Xi was promoted to governor of southeastern Fujian province in 1999 and became party boss in neighbouring Zhejiang province in 2003.
In 2007, Mr Xi secured the top job in China's commercial capital, Shanghai, when his predecessor was caught up in a huge corruption case.
Later that year he was promoted to the party's standing committee.
