(XINHUA)

Zhao Houlin was elected to head the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) for the next four years during the 2014 ITU Plenipotentiary Conference in South Korea's port city Busan on October 23. He will be the first Chinese secretary general in the 150-year history of ITU, a UN specialized agency for information and communication technologies. He will take office in January 2015.

Zhao, 64, earned a Master's in telematics from the University of Essex in the UK in 1985. From 1999 to 2006, Zhao served as the first non-European director of ITU's Telecommunication Standardization Bureau. He was later elected ITU deputy secretary general in 2006 and re-elected for a second four-year term in 2010.

Zhao is just the third Chinese citizen elected to head a UN organization. The other two are Margaret Chan, Director General of the World Health Organization, and Li Yong, Director General of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization.