When Vietnam's Communist Party confirmed National Assembly chairman Nong Duc Manh as its new leader on Sunday, politicians within and outside the country's borders hailed him for his youth, integrity and reform-mindedness. It is precisely those three qualities that his party has been criticised in lacking.

At 60, Mr Manh may not be a young head of state by western standards, but party officials and diplomats see him as a welcome change to his conservative septuagenarian predecessor, Le Kha Phieu, who was increasingly seen as an obstacle to Vietnam's modernisartion.

Mr Manh's mandate is clear - to curb the rampant corruption suffocating Vietnam's progress (Vietnam ranks as the most corrupt country in Asia, scoring 9.75 out of a possible 10 in a recent survey by Political and Economic Risk Consultancy, based in Hong Kong) and to speed up the reforms the country needs to revive the levels of foreign investment of the mid 1990s.

Though the international response has been positive, diplomats and officials at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank are guardedly optimistic about what Mr Manh will be able to achieve.

His biggest success so far has been as National Assembly chairman, a post he was elected to in 1992 and again in 1997. As chairman, he was known for leading by consensus and was able to slowly transform the rubber-stamping body into a forum for lively debates, which are televised.

But Mr Manh is even better known for something over which he has little control - his lineage. Born on September 11 1940 in Cuong Loi village in the northern Boc Can province, Mr Manh is believed to be the illegitimate son of Ho Chi Minh. Realising the power Vietnam's favourite revolutionary hero still holds, Mr Manh has done little to quash the rumour.

Trained as a forestry engineer in the former Soviet Union, Mr Manh became a member of the Communist party in 1963 and joined the provincial party executive committee for Bac Thai in 1977. He nurtured his political career on the local level, while he worked at the Provincial Forestry Service, where he became deputy director and then director in the late 1970s.

He made the jump onto the national stage in the late 1980s when he became an alternate member of the powerful central committee. In March 1989 he became a full member of that committee, the same 150-member body that would a little more than a decade later make him Vietnam's leader.

In 1991, following two years as the director of the party's Nationalities Commission, he became a member of the elite Political Bureau, whose members rank at the highest levels of government and decide much of the country's policy directive.

After nearly 10 years as chairman of the National Assembly, the country's fourth most influential position, he was promoted to its highest rank. Many of those who on Sunday approved the central committee's decision to appoint Mr Manh, hope he will be able to reunite the increasingly splintered party, which has managed to attract only 2m members amid a population of nearly 80m.

Another hope is that the appointment of Mr Manh, who is a member of the Tay minority and the first ethnic minority to hold the party's top post, will quell the recent unrest among ethnic minorities in Vietnam's coffee-growing region's who are angry about the encroachment of their traditional lands.

But his most important task will be to spur Vietnam's economic growth to the targeted 7 per cent by transforming the country into an attractive place for foreign enterprises to invest. The size of the challenge is formidable.