China's elite gather for congress

Tania Branigan in Beijing

Beneath the glowing red star, and in front of a giant hammer and sickle, China's Communist party delegates gathered on Thursday to begin handing over control of the country that is home to a fifth of the world's population.

On Tuesday US citizens re-elected Barack Obama after a tightly fought contest. Now the world's second major power is commencing its once-a-decade leadership transition. The question is not who will take charge – Xi Jinping was anointed years ago – but what he plans and is capable of doing.

Outgoing leader Hu Jintao, general secretary and China's president, outlined the broad course for the new team: above all, it seemed, maintaining the party's tight grip on power. His report to the 18th party congress stressed staying in charge, not embracing change.

He warned that failing to tackle corruption "could prove fatal to the party and even cause the collapse of the party and the fall of the state", adding: "Leading officials … should both exercise strict self-discipline and strengthen education and supervision over their family and staff."

No one was above the law and whoever erred should face "justice without mercy", he added, in the sharpest warning he has delivered about the dangers of official abuses.

Some had hoped that this year's spate of scandals and embarrassments would encourage the party to tackle the problem at its roots, through fundamental reforms. But Hu told delegates: "We have held high the great banner of socialism with Chinese characteristics and neither taken the old and rigid closed-door policy nor taken the erroneous path of changing the banner."

Later he spelled out: "We will never copy a western political system."

Zhang Jian, a political scientist at Peking University, said the report appeared to have sent "a very strong message to any expectations of reform: we are not going to change; we are going to stay where we are".

Chen Ziming, an independent Beijing-based scholar, said: "I did not expect any big breakthrough, but this time there is not even a small breakthrough."

The congress, held in Beijing's cavernous Great Hall of the People, is old-school Communist pomp. Its political outcomes are as choreographed as the red-jacketed attendants who stepped across the dais in Busby Berkeley unison to top up the cups of tea.

"It's almost like a show for the party. The main decisions have been made already," said Dali Yang, a political scientist at the University of Chicago.

Steve Tsang, an expert on Chinese politics at the University of Nottingham, said: "We don't have a say on politics in China, but neither do its citizens – or, for that matter, most of the 82 million members of the Communist party. That doesn't mean it isn't important.

"The leadership will decide what happens to the world's second largest economy over the next 10 years. The real question is not who rises and falls but whether they will be able to work together and have the capacity to introduce reforms for restructuring the economy."

China has transformed itself since Hu took power. In 2002 it was the world's sixth largest economy; now it is the second. It is, for the first time, a predominantly urban nation, with just over half its 1.4 billion citizens living in cities. Its global might is growing.

Yet most say Hu has overseen a decade of maintaining the status quo, concluding with an annus horribilis for the leadership.

The case of politician Bo Xilai – now awaiting prosecution after his wife's conviction for murdering British businessman Neil Heywood – and other revelations about leaders and their families have fed public cynicism. Meanwhile, economic, social, political and environmental problems have accumulated over years of unbalanced, breakneck growth in a state-dominated economy, and threaten to become still more evident as the pace of growth ebbs. The sense of both crisis and stasis has amplified calls for change.

The report to congress reviews the five years since the last meeting and lays out a general path ahead. Consensus and continuity are key; the document is circulated widely and takes several months, numerous drafts and countless revisions to produce.

The delegates will have known the content before they arrived in the hall – though Xi scribbled assiduously throughout. Hu's predecessor, Jiang Zemin, looked less enthralled, glancing at his watch and yawning during the 90-minute address, an edited version of the report.

Jiang had entered with Hu and sat beside him, highlighting the power he still wields.

Xi will be first among equals in the new Politburo select committee, which will almost certainly be all male, as it always has. The line-up will be unveiled next week after the members are formally appointed by the central committee – itself chosen by the 2,268 congress delegates – but in reality it results from years of backroom politicking by the incumbents and party patriarchs.

Hu's speech nodded to the risks and challenges the new leaders face. "Social problems have increased markedly," it warned, and there was perhaps marginally more stress on the need to support the rural poor and integrate urban and rural development. There was also a possible hint at strengthening the role of the market. Environmental issues had a section to themselves for the first time.

China's neighbours are less likely to welcome the commitment to "enhance our capacity for exploiting marine resources … resolutely safeguard China's maritime rights and interests and build China into a maritime power", given the territorial disputes in the South and East China Seas.

In a reflection of broad social concerns, Hu also stressed the need to improve civic morality and to "exalt the true, the good and the beautiful and reject the false, the evil and the ugly".

But overall the blandness was "a fitting finale to 10 years of Huism," said Kerry Brown, professor of Chinese politics at the University of Sydney. "When you think of the extraordinary events going on, and put it beside Obama's victory speech, you realise we are dealing with an elite from another planet."
Guardian