Foxconn’s Gou says tough to cope with iPhone demand

TAIPEI (Reuters) – Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Group said on Wednesday the company’s flagship Hon Hai unit is finding it difficult to cope with the massive demand for Apple Inc‘s iPhones.

“It’s not easy to make the iPhones. We are falling short of meeting the huge demand,” Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou told reporters after a business forum.

However, he declined to comment on brokerage reports saying that the group’s other unit, Foxconn International Holdings (FIH), had taken on some production.

Hon Hai Precision Industry, the main listed entity of the parent Foxconn Technology Group, is the key assembler of Apple’s iPhones.

The group also owns FIH, which traditionally assembles non-Apple products, such as phones from Nokia Oyj and Huawei Technologies Co Ltd.

Shares of Foxconn International Holdings Ltd (FIH), the world’s biggest contract maker of cellphones, surged as much as 35 percent on Monday after Citigroup upgraded the stock to a ‘buy’ and said it expected the firm to start assembling iPhones this year.

Shares of FIH fell 5.7 percent in Hong Kong on Wednesday, while Hon Hai was up 0.6 percent in Taipei. (Reporting by Clare Jim and Lee Chyen yee; Editing by Anne Marie Roantree)

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MTV Launches Fundraiser for “Jersey Shore” Site Ravaged by Sandy

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “Jersey Shore” might be wrapping up its run, but the spirit of goodwill and humanity that the MTV reality hit has inspired will carry on.

MTV will air a one-hour fundraising special to help out Seaside Heights, N.J., the site where Snooki and her fellow orange-hued revelers played out most of their televised shenanigans, and was ravaged by Hurricane Sandy last week.

The one-hour special, “Restore the Shore,” will air live on November 15 at 11 p.m., with a tape delay for the west coast.

The special, which will also run in online and mobile formats, will feature the “Jersey Shore” cast as well as other special guests, and air from MTV’s Times Square studio in New York.

MTV is partnering with nonprofit organization Architecture for Humanity for the fundraising effort, with efforts primarily focused on rebuilding the Seaside Heights boardwalk, with additional assistance going to re-building efforts for businesses and residents in the community.

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Researchers Link High Blood Pressure to Brain Aging

California scientists have reported structural changes in the brains of adult patients who are relatively young and who also suffer from hypertension. Their findings directly link high blood pressure to brain aging.

The project, led by University of California Davis researchers, is the first to demonstrate this relationship in people just entering middle age, according to Medical News Today (MNT). Prior studies followed older patients.

Hypertension — high blood pressure — occurs when the force of a person’s blood against artery walls is high enough to cause medical problems, the Mayo Clinic says. A majority of patients have no symptoms. Among the complications are heart attacks, strokes, aneurysms, heart failure, issues with blood vessels in the kidneys and eyes, cognitive problems, and metabolic syndrome.

A normal blood pressure reading is 120/80. Pre-hypertension readings range from 120 to 139/80 to 89. Readings higher than 140/90 are considered high blood pressure.

Earlier studies demonstrated a relationship between high blood pressure and an elevated risk of brain injury, atrophy leading to brain processing problems, and dementia. The California researchers concluded that treating high blood pressure during middle age — years before most people think much about it — can help prevent cognitive problems later.

The scientists followed 579 subjects in the Framingham Heart Study. Most were in their late 30s when they joined the study in 2009.

Subjects were placed into one of three groups: normal blood pressure, pre-hypertensive, or high blood pressure. The researchers noted whether each was a smoker or took medication for blood pressure. Subjects then underwent MRIs of their brains, including measurements of any injury to white or gray matter.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, gray matter is comprised of cell bodies of neurons that talk to each other. White matter, says MNT, makes up the brain’s axons, long strands that transport electrical signals. Various imaging studies allowed the researchers to compare brains of the three blood pressure groups.

Among subjects with high blood pressure, brains were significantly less healthy and looked older than those of patients with normal blood pressure. In fact, the brain of a 33-year-old subject in the first group resembled that of a typical 40-year-old in the normal group. Subjects with high blood pressure on average had nine percent less gray matter in their frontal and temporal lobes than patients in the normal group.

I was shocked to discover in my late 30s that I had high blood pressure. During an appointment with a new gynecologist, my readings soared to 154/97 even though I had no symptoms. He immediately sent me across the street to see an internist. This fortunate intervention led to the need to monitor my numbers daily and permanent medication. Beyond protecting me from the most common complications of hypertension, it might well have prevented premature aging of my brain.

Vonda J. Sines has published thousands of print and online health and medical articles. She specializes in diseases and other conditions that affect the quality of life.

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The Next Four Years: Obama’s Steady, Slo-Mo Recovery

President Barack Obama promises to use his second term to boost the U.S. economy. The opposite is more like it: A strengthening economy will boost the president’s second term. The likelihood of continued job growth will increase tax revenue, which will make it easier to shrink the budget deficit while keeping taxes low and preserving essential spending. All this will occur without any magic emanating from the Oval Office. In fact, it would have occurred if Mitt Romney had been elected president. “The economy’s operating well below potential and there’s a lot of room for growth” whoever is in office, says Mark Zandi, chief economist of forecaster Moody’s Analytics (MCO).

Something could still go wrong, but the median prediction of 37 economists surveyed by Blue Chip Economic Indicators is that over the next four years, economic growth will gather momentum as jobless people go back to work and unused machinery is put back into service. “The self-correcting forces in the economy will prevail,” predicts Ben Herzon, senior economist at Macroeconomic Advisers, a forecasting firm in St. Louis.

By a range of indicators, the economy is better situated for growth today than it’s been in years. Banks have strengthened their balance sheets. Most households, which borrowed too much during the housing bubble, have gotten their debt back to normal levels through a combination of frugality and default. Upper-income households’ balance sheets “are as pristine as they’ve ever been,” although mortgage debt remains a heavy burden at lower income levels, Zandi says. Housing prices have gone from falling to rising, buoying confidence. Increased consumer spending should induce more business investment in a virtuous circle. And there’s pent-up demand for residential and commercial construction.

That’s not to say that growth will be gangbusters. In fact, it may not even be strong enough to get the U.S. back to full employment by the time the president’s second term comes to an end.

Obama worked hard during the campaign to persuade voters that he should not be held responsible for the weakness of the economy. Voters apparently listened: Not since Franklin D. Roosevelt has a president been reelected with the unemployment rate as high as it is now, 7.9 percent as of October.

By the same token, Obama can’t claim all the credit for the recovery that began slowly in June 2009 and is on track to continue through his second term.

Most economists say that the influence of the president, any president, over a nearly $ 16 trillion economy is smaller than commonly believed. “Knowing who’s going to be president takes you only about 10 percent of the way,” says Robert Shapiro, a Democratic adviser who is chairman of Sonecon, a Washington-based economic consultancy.

Even Obama’s own former chief economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, once said that: “Most all of the economy has nothing to do with the government.”

Presidents’ policy choices do matter during crises, like the one that greeted Obama when he took office in January 2009. As the president never tires of pointing out, the U.S. was losing about 800,000 jobs a month. Moody’s Zandi, who advised Republican candidate John McCain during the 2008 presidential campaign, argues that “what Obama did with regard to fiscal policy [in 2009] was critical to avoiding a depression.” A Republican president might have acted less aggressively and allowed the economy to tank.

Derring-do is no longer essential. “The economy needs less support from the government in the coming four years than in the past four years,” says Harm Bandholz, chief U.S. economist of UniCredit (UCG), a European banking group.

In any case, contrary to what both campaigns argued, Obama’s second term won’t look that different from what would have been Romney’s first when it comes to the factors that affect the overall economy. Federal deficits ballooned to over $ 1 trillion in each of the past four fiscal years because the deepest recession since World War II forced up government spending while depressing tax revenue. Things will start getting back to normal in the coming term as the economy continues to revive and more working people pay taxes. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts that even without any increase in tax rates (except for the scheduled expiration of the payroll tax break), federal revenues will jump 38 percent by 2016.

Both candidates promised to cut deficits by similar amounts. Romney vowed to cut taxes across the board and shrink the budget deficit entirely through spending cuts; Obama also plans to rely heavily on spending cuts, though he says he’ll get a quarter of the action through higher taxes. That distinction, while important to individual constituents, matters much less to economic forecasters.

The same goes for spending choices. Where the dollars go is of intense concern to lobbyists for defense contractors, farmers, and the like, but relatively unimportant to forecasters, who focus on the overall balance of spending and revenue more than its composition. Deficits could actually be smaller under Obama than they would have been under Romney—who, like George W. Bush, might have gotten Congress to give him lots of tax cuts but not so many spending cuts.

It’s telling that the major economic forecasters didn’t bother creating separate scenarios for an Obama win vs. a Romney win. The differences were too small to justify the effort.

Forecasters do care—a lot—about monetary policy, because interest rates have a big influence on economic activity. But the easy-money policy of the past four years is likely to continue throughout Obama’s second term. Wall Street was nervous that a President Romney would appoint an inflation hawk such as his adviser, Hoover Institution economist John Taylor, to replace Chairman Ben Bernanke when Bernanke’s term ends in January 2014. Obama will probably pick someone more in Bernanke’s mold, such as Vice Chairman Janet Yellen. Bottom line: little or no change.

So what will drive economic growth over the coming four years? Mostly the natural healing process.

The Fed’s rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee pegs the economy’s long-run potential growth rate at 2.3 percent to 2.5 percent. But growth is likely to exceed that pace slightly for the next few years as unused labor and capital get put back into service. Blue Chip Economic Indicators says the average forecast of economists it surveys is for growth of about 3 percent in 2014, 2015, and 2016, with the unemployment rate gradually sinking over the period from 7.4 percent to 6.9 percent to 6.5 percent.

Notice that the 6.5 percent unemployment predicted for Obama’s last year in office, while better, is still above the historical average. Blue Chip’s survey doesn’t have the jobless rate under 6 percent until 2019, showing just how long it takes for the economy to recover from a severe blow like the 2007-09 recession.

It’s possible growth could beat expectations by the end of Obama’s second term—but the economy may just as easily underperform. Growth forecasts are predicated on the assumption that the federal government keeps the confidence of the world’s investors by putting itself on a plausible path to long-term financial stability. Putting off spending cuts made sense when the economy was weak and vulnerable, but if Congress and the White House continue to avoid taking bad medicine when the economy is in better shape, bond investors may lose confidence and demand to be paid higher yields on America’s $ 11 trillion mountain of publicly held debt.

The state of the world economy will affect the U.S.’s prospects too, and there the American president has even less influence than he does at home. If Europe’s crisis gets bad enough, it could damage the U.S. financial system—payback for the harm that the U.S. did in 2008 after the Lehman Brothers crisis. Maybe a hard landing in China will disrupt global growth. Or war in the Middle East will cause an oil shock.

Even if none of that happens, job growth will be constrained by globalization, says John Silvia, chief economist of Wells Fargo Securities (WFC). U.S. companies will continue to satisfy growing foreign demand by building factories abroad, not in the U.S., Silvia says. “The character of the labor market has changed,” he says. “It’s much harder to integrate low-skilled or semi-skilled workers into the economy.”

Sonecon’s Shapiro says that “the central economic problem” of the next four years is to “change the path of earnings” so the benefits of economic growth reach ordinary workers, not just corporations and their shareholders.

Politically speaking, Obama’s biggest advantage is that expectations have been beaten down so far that even so-so economic growth will look pretty darn good to the average American.

For a while, anyway. The biggest risk for Obama is that by 2016, a slo-mo recovery in a socially polarized economy will cease to impress. The crises may be less extreme over the next four years, but the economic challenges are no smaller.

Businessweek.com — Top News

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Canada firms to capitalize on nuclear trade with India

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Canadian firms will be able to export uranium and nuclear reactors to India for the first time in almost four decades under an agreement between the two nations, their prime ministers said, but more work is needed to implement the deal.

Once implemented, the agreement will end a ban on nuclear cooperation Canada imposed in 1976 after India secretly exploded its first nuclear bomb in 1974, commonly called the “Smiling Buddha”, using material from a Canadian-built reactor in India.

“Being able to resolve these issues and move forward is, we believe, a really important economic opportunity for an important Canadian industry, part of the energy industry, that should pay dividends in terms of jobs and growth for Canadians down the road,” Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said on Tuesday on a visit to New Delhi.

A negotiator with the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC), speaking on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the talks, said that what remained was a careful legal review of the language; translation into French and Hindi; and then a signing.

This is not expected to take very long, he said. The two sides have set up a joint committee to liaise on nuclear issues, but he said it would not be negotiating.

India aims to lift its nuclear capacity to 63,000 MW in the next 20 years by adding nearly 30 reactors. The country currently operates 20 mostly small reactors at six sites with a capacity of 4,780 MW, or 2 percent of its total power capacity, according to the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited.

Canada’s ambassador to India, Stewart Beck, said on Monday his country wanted to be able to track all nuclear material, but that India felt it only needed to report to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

It was not clear who made concessions in the talks and how effective the safeguards would be to ensure that Canadian material did not get used again for making nuclear weapons.

However, the CNSC official said India would now be required to notify Canada of any transfers to a third country and trade could only go to facilities that are safeguarded by the IAEA.

PROBABLY BEATING AUSTRALIA

Harper said the CNSC had worked to “achieve all of our objectives in terms of non-proliferation”.

Canada is in a race against Australia, its strategic ally but a commercial rival in the uranium business. Australia is also trying to nail down safeguards under which it too could sell uranium to India.

“We are effectively ahead of the Australians,” the CNSC official said, noting however that Russia and Kazakhstan were already supplying into India.

Opening up the Indian market would be a big help to Canada’s Cameco Corp, which is the world’s largest publicly traded uranium producer but which recently cut its long-term output targets due to the Fukushima disaster.

“Anytime we can reduce the roadblocks to selling our product around the world is always helpful,” Cameco chief executive Tim Gitzel told Reuters in Canada. “It opens a new market for us with the appropriate safeguards in place. So this is good news.”

Another potential beneficiary is Canadian engineering firm SNC Lavalin Group Inc, which bought the government’s commercial nuclear division, which designed the Candu reactor that is in use in numerous countries.

“As far as the sales of reactors goes, we would normally now request that Canada be accorded the same treatment as the Russians, the French and the Americans and that a site be designated in India for the implementation of at least a twin- unit Candu nuclear power station,” SNC Lavalin International President Ronald Denom, part of Harper’s delegation in India, told Reuters.

He also said it should open up the market to service the existing reactors in India.

Harper also said Canada welcomed foreign investment, after the country temporarily blocked Malaysian state oil firm Petronas’ C$ 5.17 billion ($ 5.19 billion) bid for gas producer Progress Energy Resources on October 20.

Late on Friday, Canada extended to December 10 its review of a $ 15.1 billion bid made in July by China’s CNOOC Ltd for Canadian energy producer Nexen Inc.

“Those decisions have to be taken looking at the global evolving economy in which we operate,” Harper said.

($ 1 = C$ 0.9965)

(Additional reporting by Julie Gordon in Toronto; Additional writing by Frank Jack Daniel; Editing by Jonathan Thatcher and Michael Roddy)

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News Summary: IDC says Apple tablet share drops

HEADING DOWN: Apple‘s share of the market for tablet computers fell to 50 percent in the third quarter as the iPad faced more competition.

STILL UP: In the July-September period, Apple shipped 14 million devices, up 26 percent from a year ago. But its share fell because the overall tablet market grew by 50 percent.

FACTORS: Apple had no new tablets out in the third quarter. It also might have seen sales slow amid expectations of a smaller iPad. Apple could regain share in the holiday quarter with last Friday’s release of new iPad devices.

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Springsteen, Jay-Z put the pop in Obama rally

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Someone has to introduce the president.

On Monday, the final day of the presidential campaign, President Barack Obama, however, didn’t bring along an opening act. He brought along two main acts.

Bruce Springsteen. Jay-Z. Theirs wasn’t an introduction, it was pop culture moment.

The Boss was spending the entire day with Obama, traveling on Air Force One from Madison, Wis., to Columbus, Ohio, and then to Des Moines, Iowa, where Obama planned a coda for his campaign, a finale where his run for the presidency began five years ago.

Jay-Z boomed his way into Columbus‘s Nationwide Arena, performing a rendition of his hit “99 Problems” with a political twist for a crowd estimated by fire officials at more than 15,000 people. He changed a key R-rated word to make his own political endorsement. “I got 99 problems but Mitt ain’t one,” he sang.

“They tell the story of what our country is,” Obama said of the two performers, “but also of what it should be and what it can be.”

Springsteen added a whole new sense of vigor, even giddiness, to the Obama entourage, with many of the president’s aides and advisers clearly star-struck by the rocker’s presence.

Springsteen, in jeans, black boots, a work shirt, vest and leather jacket, was not wearing the typical Air Force One attire. But the Obama camp has left formality aside; many aides are growing beards through Election Day and ties have been left behind in favor of sweaters for the chilly outdoor events during the last hours of the campaign.

Asked if there was any downside to using celebrity glitz instead of substance to drive voters to the polls in the final days, Obama spokeswoman Jen Psaki laughed. “I think Bruce Springsteen might be offended by you calling him glitzy,” she said.

“Bruce Springsteen, and some other celebrities who have been helping us, reach a broad audience that sometimes tune out what’s being said by politicians,” she said.

As Psaki spoke to reporters at the back of the plane, Obama was up front and on the phone with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie discussing the recovery from Superstorm Sandy. Christie, who says he has attended more than 100 Springsteen concerts, said Obama then handed the phone to Springsteen, a New Jersey native whose songs often have been tributes to his youth in the state.

Upon landing in Columbus, Springsteen told a reporter that it was his first trip on Air Force One. Grinning, he said, “It was pretty cool.” As for New Jersey, he said, “I’m feeling pretty hopeful” that the state’s hard-hit shore will recover.

In Madison and Columbus, Springsteen serenaded audiences with renditions of top anthems “No Surrender,” ”Promised Land” and “Land of Hope and Dreams.” But he also has a custom-made campaign song named after the Obama motto “Forward” — which he acknowledged was “not the best I’ve ever written.”

“How many things rhyme with Obama?” he asked.

Obama, no doubt, didn’t mind.

“I’m going to be fine with Bruce Springsteen on the last day that I’ll ever campaign,” he said above the din of the crowd.

“That’s not a bad way to bring it home. With The Boss. With The Boss.”

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Osbourne Has Double Mastectomy

Sharon Osbourne underwent a double mastectomy when she learned she carried a gene for breast cancer, she told Hello! magazine in an article that hit newsstands this morning.

Although Osbourne, the wife of Black Sabbath front man Ozzy Osbourne, was not diagnosed with breast cancer, she was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2002, and said the experience prompted her to have both her breasts removed in a 13-hour operation.

“As soon as I found out I had the breast cancer gene, I thought, ‘The odds are not in my favor’,” Sharon told the magazine. “I’ve had cancer before and I didn’t want to live under that cloud. I decided to just take everything off, and had a double mastectomy.”

Osbourne had a foot of her colon removed in 2002 and underwent chemotherapy. Once she was in remission, she founded the Sharon Osbourne Colon Cancer Program at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in California in 2004.

A new grandmother to her son Jack’s daughter, Pearl, Osbourne told Hello! she didn’t feel sorry for herself.

“For me, it wasn’t a big decision, it was a no-brainer,” she said. “I didn’t want to live the rest of my life with that shadow hanging over me. I want to be around for a long time and be a grandmother to Pearl.

Click here to read more about the Osbourne family’s woes.

Women who have the “breast cancer gene” have mutated BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes, according to the National Cancer Institute. Normally, the genes are tumor suppressors, but a blood test can reveal that they don’t function properly.

A 2008 study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology revealed that more women were choosing to have double mastectomies, removing both the breast with cancer and the other healthy breast. The study found that the rate of the procedure, called a contralateral prophylactic mastectomy, more than doubled between 1998 and 2003. Although the study author said the preventative surgery did not decrease cancer risk, women said they did not regret their decision to remove their healthy breasts.

Several other celebrities have opted for double mastectomies in the past, including Christina Applegate and Kathy Bates.

Applegate, 40, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008. She told More magazine last month that she originally had two lumpectomies, but when she learned that she had a mutated BRCA1 gene, she decided to have the more extreme surgery.

Bates announced in September that she was recovering from a double mastectomy after receiving a breast cancer diagnosis. Bates, an Oscar-winner, battled ovarian cancer in 2003.

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The Polls Shift Toward Obama

Anxious poll watchers didn’t have to wait until 1 p.m. Monday to get the results of Gallup’s obsessively followed daily presidential tracking poll. That’s because Bloomberg Businessweek‘s Ira Boudway got ahold of them and published them early. The story they tell is the same one being reflected in other tracking polls: late movement toward President Obama.

In the last Gallup tracking poll of likely voters, on Oct. 29th, Romney led Obama 51-46. Then Hurricane Sandy hit and Gallup put its polling operation on ice for a few days. Monday’s numbers put the race at 49-48 Romney over Obama, essentially a tie.

For most of the past few months, Gallup’s daily track has been a notable outlier in that it consistently showed much bigger Romney leads than other quality tracking polls were showing. Now, Gallup’s numbers have moved in the direction of the other polls. And the other polls show Obama leading narrowly: NBC/Wall Street Journal (Obama +1), ABC/Washington Post (Obama +1), and Pew Research (Obama +3).

Nearly every independent pollster and most reporters expect Obama to win narrowly. Democrats think it will happen, too. But a surprisingly large number of Republicans are expecting a Romney win; some even expect a Romney blowout. I say “surprisingly” because within the mainstream of politics and polling, never before has there been such fundamental disagreement about what was going to happen this late in the game. Come Wednesday morning, one group is going to turn out to have been very, very wrong.

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Cautious reformers tipped for new China leadership

BEIJING (Reuters) – China‘s ruling Communist Party will this month unveil its new top leadership team, expected to again be an all-male cast of politicians whose instincts are to move cautiously on reform.

Sources close to the leadership say 10 main candidates are vying for seven seats on the party’s next Politburo Standing Committee, the peak decision-making body which will steer the world’s second-largest economy for the next five years.

Only two candidates are considered certainties going into the party’s 18th congress, which starts on Thursday: leader-in-waiting Xi Jinping and his designated deputy, Li Keqiang, who are set to be installed as president and premier next March.

Of the remaining eight contenders, only one has the reputation as a political reformer and only one is a woman.

Following are short biographies of the candidates, including their reform credentials and possible portfolio responsibilities.

XI JINPING

REFORM CREDENTIALS: Considered a cautious reformer, having spent time in top positions in Fujian and Zhejiang provinces, both at the forefront of China‘s economic reforms.

Xi Jinping, 59, is China‘s vice president and President Hu Jintao’s anointed successor. He will take over as Communist Party boss at the congress and then as head of state in March.

Xi 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. 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, 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.

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 doctorate in Marxist theory from Tsinghua.

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 neighboring Zhejiang province in 2003.

In 2007, the tall, portly 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.

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LI KEQIANG

REFORM CREDENTIALS: Seen as another cautious reformer due to his relatively liberal university experiences.

Vice Premier Li Keqiang, 57, is the man tipped to be China‘s next premier, taking over from Wen Jiabao.

His ascent will mark an extraordinary rise for a man who as a youth was sent to toil in the countryside during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

He was born in Anhui province in 1955, son of a local rural official. Li worked on a commune that was one of the first places to quietly revive private bonuses in farming in the late 1970s. By the time he left Anhui, Li was a Communist Party member and secretary of his production brigade.

He studied law at the elite Peking University, which was among the first Chinese schools to resume teaching law after the Cultural Revolution. He worked to master English and co-translated “The Due Process of Law” by Lord Denning, the famed English jurist.

In 1980, Li, then in the official student union, endorsed controversial campus elections. Party conservatives were aghast, but Li, already a prudent political player, stayed out of the controversial vote.

He climbed the party ranks and in 1983 joined the Communist Youth League’s central secretariat, headed then by Hu Jintao.

Li later served in challenging party chief posts in Liaoning, a frigid northeastern rustbelt province, and rural Henan province. He was named to the powerful nine-member standing committee in 2007.

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WANG QISHAN

REFORM CREDENTIALS: A financial reformer and problem solver with deep experience tackling tricky economic and political problems.

Wang Qishan, 64, is the most junior of four vice premiers and an ex-mayor of Beijing. But he has a keen grasp of complex economic issues and is the only likely member of the Standing Committee to have been chief executive of a corporation, leading the state-owned China Construction Bank from 1994 to 1997. As such, he may take a leading role in shaping economic policy, including trade and foreign investment.

Wang is an experienced negotiator who has led finance and trade negotiations as well as the Strategic and Economic Dialogue with the United States. He is a favorite of foreign investors and has long been seen as a problem solver, sorting out a debt crisis in Guangdong province where he was vice governor in the late 1990s and replacing the sacked Beijing mayor after a cover-up of the deadly SARS virus in 2003.

Wang is also a princeling, son-in-law of a former vice premier and ex-standing committee member, Yao Yilin. His possible portfolio could be chairman of the National People’s Congress (China’s rubber-stamp parliament), head of parliament’s advisory body, executive vice premier (responsible for economic issues) or the party’s top anti-corruption official.

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LIU YUNSHAN

REFORM CREDENTIALS: A conservative who has kept domestic media on a tight leash.

Liu Yunshan, 65, may take over the propaganda and ideology portfolio for the Standing Committee.

He has a background in media, once working as a reporter for state-run news agency Xinhua in Inner Mongolia, where he later served in party and propaganda roles before shifting to Beijing.

As minister of the party’s Propaganda Department since 2002, Liu has also sought to control China‘s Internet, which has more than 500 million users. He has been a member of the wider Politburo for two five-year terms ending this year.

Liu has not worked directly for the Communist Youth League, but is aligned to it through his lengthy career in an inland, poor province, long ties to the party’s propaganda system and close relationship with Hu Jintao.

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LI YUANCHAO

REFORM CREDENTIALS: A reformer who has courted foreign investment and studied in the United States.

Li Yuanchao, 61, oversees the appointment of senior party, government, military and state-owned enterprise officials as head of the party’s powerful organization department. On the Standing Committee, he could head the fight against corruption.

Li, whose father was a vice-mayor of Shanghai, has risen far since his parents were persecuted and he was a humble farm hand during the Cultural Revolution.

Politically astute, Li can navigate between interest groups, from Hu’s Youth League power base to the princelings.

As party chief in his native province, Jiangsu, from 2002 to 2007, Li oversaw a rapid rise in personal incomes and economic development, attracting foreign investment from global industrial leaders such as Ford, Samsung and Caterpillar.

He earned mathematics and economics degrees from two of China‘s best universities and a doctorate in law. He also spent time at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government in the United States.

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ZHANG DEJIANG

REFORM CREDENTIALS: A conservative trained in North Korea.

Zhang Dejiang, 65, saw his chances of promotion boosted this year when he was chosen to replace disgraced politician Bo Xilai as Chongqing party boss. He also serves as vice premier in charge of industry, though his record has been tarnished by the downfall of the railway minister last year for corruption.

Zhang is close to former president Jiang Zemin who still wields some influence. He studied economics at Kim Il-sung University in North Korea and is a native of northeast China.

On his watch as party chief of Guangdong, the southern province maintained its position as a powerhouse of China‘s economic growth, even as it struggled with energy shortages, corruption-fuelled unrest and the 2003 SARS epidemic.

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ZHANG GAOLI

REFORM CREDENTIALS: A financial reformer with experience in more developed parts of China.

Zhang Gaoli, 65, party chief of the northern port city of Tianjin and a Politburo member since 2007, is seen as a Jiang Zemin ally but also acceptable to President Hu, who has visited Tianjin three times since 2008. Zhang is an advocate of greater foreign investment and he introduced financial reforms in a bid to turn the city into a financial center in northern China.

He was sent to clean up Tianjin, which was hit by a string of corruption scandals implicating his predecessor and the former top adviser to the city’s lawmaking body. The adviser committed suicide shortly after Zhang’s arrival.

A native of southeastern Fujian province, Zhang trained as an economist. He also served as party chief and governor of eastern Shandong province and as Guangdong vice governor.

Zhang is low-key with a down-to-earth work style, and not much is known about his specific interests and aspirations. But with his leadership experience in more economically advanced cities and provinces, including party secretary of the showcase manufacturing and export-driven city of Shenzhen, he could be named executive vice premier.

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WANG YANG

REFORM CREDENTIALS: Seen by many in the West as a beacon of political reform.

Wang Yang, 57, is party chief of the export dependent economic hub of Guangdong province. He was not included in a list of preferred Standing Committee candidates drawn up by Xi, Hu and Hu’s predecessor, Jiang Zemin, according to sources close to the leadership, but is firmly in the running.

Born into a poor rural family in eastern Anhui province, Wang dropped out of high school and went to work in a food factory at age 17 to help support his family after his father died. These experiences may have shaped his desire for more socially inclusive policies, including his “Happy Guangdong” model of development designed to improve quality of life.

Concerned about the social impact of three decades of blistering development, he lobbied for social and political reform. However, this approach has drawn criticism from party conservatives and Wang has more recently adopted the party’s more familiar method of control and punishment to keep order.

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YU ZHENGSHENG

REFORM CREDENTIALS: Relatively low-key but considered a cautious reformer.

Yu Zhengsheng, 67, is party boss in China‘s financial hub and most cosmopolitan city, Shanghai.

His impeccable Communist pedigree made him a rising star in the mid-1980s until his brother, an intelligence official, defected to the United States. His close ties with Deng Pufang, the eldest son of late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, spared him the full political repercussions but he was taken off the fast track.

Yu bided his time in ministerial ranks until bouncing back, joining the Politburo in 2002. However, the princeling’s age would require him to retire in 2017 after one term.

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LIU YANDONG

REFORM CREDENTIALS: Uncertain.

Liu Yandong, who turns 67 this month, is the only woman given a serious chance to join the Standing Committee but is considered a dark horse. She is a princeling also tied to President Hu’s Youth League faction.

If promoted, she could head up parliament’s advisory body, but her age would also force her to retire after only one term.

Her bigger challenge is that no woman has made it into the Standing Committee since 1949. Not even Jiang Qing, the widow of late Chairman Mao Zedong, made it that far.

Liu, daughter of a former vice-minister of agriculture, is currently the only woman in the 25-member Politburo, a minority in China‘s male-dominated political culture. She has been on the wider Politburo since 2007 as one of five state councilors, a rank senior to a cabinet minister but junior to a vice-premier.

(Reporting by Terril Yue Jones, Ben Blanchard, Benjamin Kang Lim and Sui-Lee Wee in Beijing. Additional reporting by Chris Ip, Grace Li, Jean Lin, Young Wang, Alice Woodhouse and Julie Zhu; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan and Mark Bendeich)

World News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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