A 59-year-old economist was elected governor of Central China's Henan Province, one of the country's leading grain-producing regions, on Tuesday.

Xie Fuzhan, the head of China's National Bureau of Statistics from 2006 to 2008, was elected governor of Henan at the second session of the 12th Henan Provincial People's Congress.

Xie served as a researcher and then as vice director of the Development Research Center of China's State Council from 1986 to 2006. He was appointed director of the Research Institute of China's State Council in 2008.

The new governor was a visiting scholar at Princeton University in the United States in the early 1990s. He also worked with the People's Daily, the flagship newspaper of the Communist Party of China, for three years in the 1980s.

Guo Gengmao, secretary of the Henan Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China, was elected director of the Standing Committee of the Henan Provincial People's Congress at the same meeting.