1. Zhao Leji was born on 8 March 1958 and is a Chinese politician who is the current chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress and the third-ranking member of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.
Zhao Leji entered the CCP Politburo in 2012 and was promoted to the Politburo Standing Committee five years later.
Zhao Leji was born in Xining, Qinghai province on 8 March 1958.
In 1974, during the later years of the Cultural Revolution, Zhao went to the countryside as a sent-down youth to perform manual labour at an agricultural commune in Guide County, Qinghai.
Zhao Leji joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1975 and entered Peking University in 1977 as a Worker-Peasant-Soldier student; he received an undergraduate degree of philosophy there in January 1980.
Zhao Leji then spent three years teaching at the Qinghai School of Commerce, holding various positions such as instructor, secretary of the Communist Youth League wing of the provincial department of commerce, as well as the deputy head of the dean's office.
In 1993, Zhao Leji was appointed an assistant governor of Qinghai, entering the provincial government and becoming part of the inner circle of then Qinghai party secretary Yin Kesheng.
Zhao Leji was then elevated to vice governor of Qinghai in 1994, and then was appointed as Party secretary of his hometown Xining in 1997.
Zhao Leji acceded to the post of governor in 1999 at age 42, becoming the youngest provincial governor in the country at the time.
Zhao Leji was additionally was appointed as a member of the CCP Central Committee after the 16th CCP National Congress in 2002.
Zhao Leji became Party secretary of Qinghai in 2003 after having spent nearly five years in the Governor's office.
Zhao Leji spoke in Shaanxi dialect even at government meetings.
In 2007, Zhao Leji was transferred to become party secretary in his parents' home province of Shaanxi, having taken on the top jobs in both his 'native' province and the province of his birth, breaking an unspoken rule in the Communist Party that party secretaries should never hail from the province they are native to.
In Shaanxi, Zhao Leji oversaw the expansion and development of the GuanZhong-TianShui economic belt.
Zhao Leji was chosen to be the 6th-ranking member of the Politburo Standing Committee, China's top decision-making body, at the 1st plenary session of the 19th Central Committee of the CCP on 25 October 2017.
In September 2021, Zhao Leji spoke at a conference, announcing a nationwide audit of major financial firms and regulators.
In March 2024, during a meeting of the NPC Standing Committee, Zhao Leji pledged to revise the National Defense Education Law with a focus on "modernizing China's system and capacity for national security".
Zhao Leji missed the closing meeting of the third session of the 14th National People's Congress on 11 March 2025 due to a respiratory tract infection, which marked the first time in decades that the NPC closing meeting was not attended by all members of the Politburo Standing Committee.