Sartorially speaking, there was nothing to set the two men apart. They wore the same dark blue suits and red-hued ties as their seven comrades on the podium.

Wordlessly, they maintained anodyne fixed smiles as President Hu Jintao introduced them and other members of the Communist Party's supreme policymaking body to the world on Monday.

One of the two men, however, is primed to be the next leader of the world's most populous nation. Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang are not only new members of China's innermost political sanctum. They are also the youngest – at ages 54 and 52 respectively – and rising stars of the next generation hoping to guide China's continued rise as a global power.

In a sign of the checks and balances that today moderate change in the Communist Party, say analysts of China's murky politics, the two have risen from different backgrounds – one from the booming southeast coast and the other from the lagging northern Rust-Belt – to their new posts on the Standing Committee of the Communist Party's Political Bureau.

Mr. Xi, currently party chief in the dynamic metropolis of Shanghai, is a so-called "princeling," the son of a former vice premier, and he is married to a well-known singer. He has made his name in the southern coastal provinces that were the first to cast off the economic shackles of state control, experimenting with reform, foreign investment, and rapid modernization.

Mr. Li, who has been party chief in the poor, heavy-industrial province of Liaoning for the past three years, worked his way up the system from a base in the Communist Youth League, under the patronage of his mentor, Mr. Hu. His experience is rooted in China's poorer, more conservative hinterland.

Though Xi is a nominal nose ahead of Li in the running to succeed Hu in five years' time (Hu introduced Xi immediately before Li, in a subtle but significant indication of the hierarchy), the succession is by no means written in stone.

"They have left the door open for competition, which is quite unusual in the Chinese political system," says Li Cheng, who monitors China's leadership struggles from the Brookings Institution in Washington. "A lot of things could happen in the next five years."

Both front-runners face a delicate task during Hu's second presidential term: Neither is especially well known or popular, so each must carve out a reputation without upstaging his elders; and without straying from the party line.

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