Shanghai's mayor won a second five-year term yesterday, cementing his political survival after a wide-ranging corruption scandal brought down the city's Chinese Communist Party (CCP) boss.
Han Zheng (韓正), 57, was reappointed at the annual meeting of the municipal legislature, the official Xinhua news agency said.
Xinhua gave no details. Han's new term will run through Shanghai's staging of the 2010 World Expo, an opportunity for international exposure that the city hopes will rival Beijing's hosting of this year's Summer Olympic Games.
Han, first appointed mayor in 2003, pledged last week to repair the city's "negative image," a reference to the scandal that toppled Chen Liangyu (陳良宇), the city's most powerful official, in September 2006, as well as other top city officials and businessmen.
The mayor was never implicated in the investigation into misuse of city social security funds.
However, he was seen as tainted by his long association with Chen and likely owes his survival at least in part to the CCP's desire to maintain stability and investor confidence in China's biggest and wealthiest city.
While Shanghai has firmly established itself as China's financial center, it is struggling to modernize while contending with traffic snarls and a rising population of migrants from elsewhere in the country.
Most recently, hundreds of residents held unusually bold protests against a proposed extension of the city's showcase magnetic levitation train line.
Authorities have not yet indicated whether the multibillion-dollar project will still go ahead, but Han pledged last week to forestall protests by resolving tensions over construction projects and other issues.
He made no direct mention of the train or the recent protests.
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