The body of the late Xie Fei, a vice-chairman of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee, was cremated on November 2 in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province.

Xie died of illness in Guangzhou on October 27 at the age of 67. He was also a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and vice-chairman of the Preparatory Committee of the Macao Special Administrative Region under the NPC Standing Committee.

During the days when Xie was in the hospital, and since he passed away, state leaders including Jiang Zemin, Li Peng, Zhu Rongji, Li Ruihuan, Wei Jianxing and Li Lanqing paid visits to Xie or expressed their sympathy to his relatives.

A ceremony was held before the cremation. Senior officials entrusted by the CPC Central Committee to attend the ceremony include Vice-President Hu Jintao, also a member of the Standing Committee of the CPC Central Committee Political Bureau, Zeng Qinghong, an alternate member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, and Zou Jiahua, a vice-chairman of the NPC Standing Committee.

Xie was form on November 4, 1932, into a poor peasant family in Lufeng County in Guangdong Province. He joined the CPC in July 1949 and he worked as a government and CPC official in his county at various levels until August 1960, when he became an editor of the local magazine, "Upstream."

Later, Xie worked in several departments of the provincial government and the provincial committee of the CPC. Since October 1976, he had been one of the three leading members of "Red Flag" magazine, an organ of the CPC Central Committee at that time. In 1979, Xie began to work in Guangdong as a deputy secretary general and head of the general office of the provincial committee of the CPC, and then had a series of leading positions in the province. In January 1991, he was made the chief of the provincial Party committee.

Xie was widely known for his remarkable contributions to the development of Guangdong, a reform-leading province in south China.

Xie was elected member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee at the fourteenth and fifteenth national congresses of the CPC, and became a vice-chairman of the NPC Standing Committee last year.