China says top Macau official plunges to death in fall

China says its head representative to Macau has died after a fall from his residential building.

The Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office of China's State Council says in a statement Sunday that Zheng Xiaosong, the director of China's liaison office in Macau, was suffering from depression.

The statement says he died on Saturday evening at the building where he lived. It did not give further details.

Zheng, who was 59, assumed his post last September and was part of the ruling Communist Party's elite Central Committee.

Like Hong Kong, Macau is a semiautonomous region with a separate legal system from mainland China.

The former Portuguese territory's economy has boomed over the past decade as supercharged growth in the casino industry transformed the seedy backwater into a glitzy gambling powerhouse.