If yesterday's final vote for the Communist Party's new Central Committee portended anything, Xi Jinping would outstrip Li Keqiang in the two-horse race for the country's top job in five years - with a razor-thin margin. In closed-door balloting, which was not made public, Mr Xi, 54, the Shanghai party chief, garnered 2,227 votes out of 2,235, and Mr Li, his Liaoning province counterpart, two years younger, had 2,226. The two men are for the time being the most watchable hotshots in national politics. In the lead-up to the congress, they were deadlocked in an intriguing competition to succeed the incumbent party chief Hu Jintao in 2012. Mr Li is Mr Hu's top protege and his supposedly favoured choice, while Mr Xi, a 'princeling' with an impeccable political pedigree, is said to be acceptable to all factions. Jia Qinglin, another eye-catcher despite being for all the wrong reasons, scrambled to get 2,169 votes - a conspicuously low number in yesterday's high voting. 'He got 66 negative votes, and this was really bad,' said a delegate who kept notes on the voting result of every new Central Committee member. Mr Jia, chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, survived the notorious Yuanhua smuggling case in Fujian - thanks to former party chief Jiang Zemin's vigorous protection - but his appeal within the party took a fatal beating. Li Yuanchao, the party chief of Jiangsu province and Mr Hu's ally, won 2,227 votes, while Beijing party chief Liu Qi, 65, gathered 2,230. Ling Jihua, another hot name on the ballot, pulled 2,221 votes. Mr Ling, 50, once Mr Hu's personal secretary and most trusted aide, was last month appointed as head of the Central Committee's General Office. In the voting for the alternate membership of the Central Committee, Jia Tingan, whose patron is also Mr Jiang, fared abysmally. He came last on 'more than 50 negative votes'.
