Qin Guangrong, former vice secretary of the Yunnan Provincial Committee of Communist Party of China (CPC), was elected governor of the southwest China's Yunnan Province by the provincial legislature on Wednesday.

Qin, 56, was elected at the fifth session of the 10th Yunnan Provincial People's Congress.

He joined the CPC in 1972 and graduated from the Hengyang Normal School in Hunan in 1975. Qin also holds a masters degree in Management Science and Engineering obtained from his postgraduate study at the Central South University of Technology.

A native of Yongzhou City, central China's Hunan Province, Qin had worked as the secretary of the Municipal Committee of Communist Party in Changsha, capital of Hunan. He moved to Yunnan in 1999 and had served as acting governor of Yunnan.

Qin, who has been acting governor of the province since November last year, is also an alternate member of the 15th and 16th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.

His predecessor, 64-year-old Xu Rongkai, who had held the post since January 2002, resigned at the end of last year and is now deputy chief of the Committee of Education, Science, Culture and Public Health of the National People's Congress.

(Xinhua News Agency January 31, 2007)