Xia Deren, who was elected by the Dalian Municipal People's Congress on Sunday, said his motto is that the people's government must serve the people. As a government official, he must first love the people, promote clean and creative government, and cherish the sense of serving the people, he noted.

The new mayor, a music lover, gives top priority to developing science and technology in Dalian, one of the 14 open cities along China's coast. It has 20 universities, with over 200,000 students on campus, more than 100 research institutes, and is China's third largest software research center.

Xia, a former university professor, pledged to make the city more prosperous by taking advantage of his academic background and by using what he learnt as a teacher and financial researcher to help him fulfill his duties as the mayor of the bustling coastal city in Liaoning Province.

Xia, who was born in Dalian in 1955, worked in the countryside as a "re-educated youth" until 1978 when he entered the Northeast China Finance and Economics University, where he obtained his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in finance.

In the 1980s and 1990s, he built up his academic reputation through authoritative studies on financial issues and published a series of books and articles. Many of his proposals and views were accepted by the State Council and the central bank.

In 1998, he was appointed a deputy mayor of the city and in 2001, he was promoted to the position of deputy governor of the provincial government.

In December 2002, he returned to Dalian as a deputy secretary of the city's committee of the Communist Party of China before taking over the new government job.

(Xinhua News Agency January 15, 2003)