General Shao Hua, wife of Mao Anqing, the second son of Chairman Mao Zedong, has been reelected president of the China Photographers Association (CPA).

The election took place over the weekend when the CPA national congress was held in Beijing.

Shao, 69, a major general of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), is also vice director of the military encyclopedia department of the PLA Academy of Military Sciences.

Shao, a native of Hunan in central China, was first elected CPA president in 2002.

Her photographic skills dated back to the 1950s when she began to shoot pictures for Chairman Mao with a camera brought from the Soviet Union by Mao Anying, Mao's elder son.

When Shao acted as a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) from 1988 to 2002, she went among the public with her camera.

She traveled through old revolutionary bases, factories, mines, impoverished villages, schools and army units, amassing material for dozens of proposals to improve the lives of the people, which she tabled with the country's top advisory body.

Shao also chronicled with her self-taught photographic skills the life of her husband Mao Anqing, a Russian linguistic expert, who died in March at the age of 84.

(Xinhua News Agency November 26, 2007)