BEIJING, June 29 (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - China has named a Paris-trained scientist who is not a member of the ruling Communist Party to the key post of health minister, the official Xinhua news agency said on Friday.

The standing committee of the National People's Congress, or parliament, approved the appointment of Chen Zhu, 54, on Friday, Xinhua said.

Chen's predecessor, Gao Qiang, took over the sensitive portfolio in 2005 from Vice Premier Wu Yi, who had doubled as health minister after the incumbent was sacked in April 2003 and blamed for the official cover-up of a deadly outbreak of SARS or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.

Xinhua said Chen was the second non-Party member to be given such a key appointment since the late 1970s following the naming of Wan Gang as science and technology minister in April.

Gao was made a vice minister but political analysts said it was not a demotion because he remained secretary of the ministry's Communist Party committee and outranks Chen.

In the years after the 1949 Communist revolution, some ministry portfolios were given to prominent non-Communist figures who in reality played second fiddle to their vice ministers who were party members.

Chen, born in Shanghai in 1953, had been vice president of the prestigious Chinese Academy of Sciences since 2000, according to his official biography on the academy's Web site (www.cas.ac.cn).

Unlike Gao, an economics major who climbed the hierarchy holding administrative jobs, Chen is a molecular biologist and an expert on leukaemia, receiving a doctorate degree from University of Paris VII in 1989.

One of 17 million urban "intellectual youth" sent down to the countryside during the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, Chen spent five years labouring in the rice-growing eastern province of Jiangxi in the 1970s.

He attended a Jiangxi medical vocational school in 1975 and went back to Shanghai in 1978 for graduate study, but a muck-raker who regularly exposes academic corruption accused Chen of poor scholarly ethics in 2001.

As health minister, Chen faces a series of public health challenges such as HIV-AIDS, human bird flu and reform of a problem-ridden medical system which has become increasingly prohibitive to the poor.


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