The "seventeenth national party congress" in the People's Republic of China (PRC) hardly sounds like an event that merits frontpage headlines far outside Beijing. Nor, on past precedents, will the gathering in the Great Hall of the People on 15-19 October 2007 see much in the way of visible drama.
Kerry Brown is an associate fellow on the Asia programme, Chatham House, and director of Strategic China Ltd.
His most recent book is Struggling Giant: China in the 21st Century (Anthem Press, 2007)
Also by Kerry Brown on openDemocracy:
"China's top fifty: the China power list" (2 April 2007)
"China goes global" (2 August 2007)
On the contrary, the images beamed to China's own people and to the world will be familiar, as lengthy speeches from the rostrum will be delivered in front of the serried, impassive 2,217 delegates from across the PRC. Some will be wearing their colourful "ethnic minority" dress, some scribbling on the sheets of paper before them, some sipping from their small cups of tea, some even appearing to be in a deep slumber.
The choreography of political transition will also be routine. Towards the end of the week of meetings, the newly "elected" top-level leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) - and therefore of China - will troop onto the stage from behind a curtain. Hu Jintao (president) and Wen Jiabao (prime minister) will occupy the first two slots, as they reach the second term in their respective offices.
But look around them - for here is the reason why the seventeenth congress of the CCP is worth attending to, even (perhaps) worth one or two headlines. There, beside Hu and Wen will emerge the figures who will compose the new leadership of China for the next five years, and have a chance to shape its course for far longer.
As they stand silently in face of the flashing light-bulbs and the obedient applause of the assembled cadres, China's people and the world will also have the first tangible clues about who may be in the best position to replace the current "fourth generation" leadership, which will come to an end in 2012 at the eighteenth party congress (see Li Datong, "China's leadership: the next generation", 3 October 2007).
The national and international context China's rulers find themselves in helps to fuel intense speculation about who will follow Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao and in which direction they will take China.
Elitists vs popularists
It is the openness of the current intra-party situation, and the fact that there are real choices to be made, which is striking. Hu Jintao's elevation (which occurred in 2002, and signalled the gradual erosion of his predecessor Jiang Zemin's power) seemed preordained from as early as 1992, when he returned from two years in Tibet; at the time, Deng Xiaoping, paramount leader in the 1980s and early 1990s, made it clear towards the end of that period that Hu had his imprimatur.
Today, there is no one with anything like Deng's political capital to set the seal on a leadership succession. Instead, there are a group of politicians in their late 40s and 50s each of whom has a reasonable chance of stepping into Hu and Wen's shoes. This makes the Beijing party congress of October 2007 the first big step on the path towards supreme power in China.
Those likely to move into leadership positions at the conclusion of the congress broadly divide into two camps. On one side, there are what may be called the "elitists": those with impeccable familial links to the party (such as current trade minister Bo Xilai and Shanghai party secretary Xi Jinping, both princelings whose fathers were famous party leaders). The careers of this group have mostly been spent in the booming costal regions, or in the central government. The party exudes from every pore of their bodies; they live and die for it.
Also on China's politics in openDemocracy:
Andreas Lorenz, "China's environmental suicide: a government minister speaks" (6 April 2005)
Lung Ying-tai, "A question of civility: an open letter to Hu Jintao" (15 February 2006)
David Wall, "The plan and the party" (29 March 2006)
Christopher R Hughes, "Chinese nationalism in the global era" (18 April 2006)
Li Datong, "Beijing's Olympics, China's politics" (22 August 2007)
Li Datong, "China's leadership: the next generation" (3 October 2007)
On the other side is a less well-known group who may be called the "popularists". It is represented by people like Liaoning party secretary Li Keqiang, and the mayor of Chongqing (the world's most populous city), Wang Yang. These leaders have their roots in the less developed western regions of China, have worked their way up through party organisations (such as the party's youth league), and have had limited exposure to western countries. In educational terms, this group has a more mixed background than the engineers who compose the entire current standing committee, many of whom studied in the Soviet Union; a number of the "popularists" have politics, management and law degrees, and their doctorates mostly come from Chinese universities.
What makes the outcome of the contest between these two groups compelling is that China now has real choices to make, and this means that who is in command will have important consequences for the country's direction.
The challenges facing the new leadership will put the Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao period into a different perspective. Their era seems likely to be remembered as an era of "muddling through" in political terms. Political reform has remained where it has been since 1989: off the agenda. Instead, economic development has continued to hold the limelight.
China is poised to overtake Germany to become the world's third largest economy and (by 2010) the world's largest trading entity - both within the term of this congress. Among the policy problems of this success that will face the country's new leaders are China's severe environmental problems, hunger for energy supplies, and need to radically reposition its economy away from the current (manufacturing-intense, export-orientated) model.
Inside, outside
The predicament of the current and forthcoming Chinese leadership is both in the scale of the domestic issues it must address, and the fact that these are emerging at a time when China's role in the world - from Sudan to Burma - is being increasingly questioned.
The build-up to the Beijing-hosted Olympic games on 8-24 August 2008 connects these two dimensions in a potent way. The glare of global publicity and attention is on China is a way that is both unprecedented and impossible for the Chinese government to control. There is at least a distinct possibility that far from enhancing China's international image, the government's defensiveness and mishandling of foreign journalists will turn the Olympics from being a showcase of China's new enhanced global status into an exposure of how far it still has to go.
The domestic difficulties crowding in on the party leadership are well-documented; they include its degraded environment (which has suffered most from three decades of breakneck industrial development), increasing social inequality, corruption, and the need for financial-sector reform. The post-congress strategy will be to follow the example of the 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping set out the broad parameters within which China would develop: encouraging a stable and benign international environment, while working to manage and improve China's internal coherence and strength.
The international difficulties are highlighted by the eruption of dissent in Burma, a neighbour of China with whose military regime Beijing has close economic ties. The crisis in Rangoon raises the question of how much China is willing to do in the interests of preserving international stability. In protecting its own economic and strategic interests, China - for very different reasons to western liberal democracies - does not wish to see instability in the region.
Thus, it is prepared to forsake sentimental attachments and use its considerable influence to bring countries such as Burma and North Korea to the negotiating table. If its interests (energy supplies, political reliability) are under threat, it is willing to apply behind-the-scenes pressure, and if necessary threaten to withdraw support. The political elites in North Korea or Burma know that China's abandonment of them would be devastating, which may be a factor in their own search for unlikely allies elsewhere in current straitened circumstances.
It's getting harder all the time
Whatever the leadership in China looks like after the seventeenth party congress onwards, it is certain that the policy directions they take will affect the rest of the world more than ever before. Global economic growth, especially in light of a potential United States downturn, is more dependent than ever on China's performance (see "China goes global", 2 August 2007). The controversy over the quality of Chinese exports in the food and toy sectors (to name only those) has itself confirmed the degree of interdependence between China and the world, which makes disengagement on either side - as would have been an option in the past - unworkable.
In this sense, the faces who will step from behind that curtain during the week of 15-19 October in Beijing will be those of genuinely global leaders. The rest of the world need to learn about them: their track record, their ideological leanings, their intellectual capacity, their interests. Will these new standing-committee members finally be ready to grapple with China's greatest challenge of all: political reform?
The elitists and popularists have many evident differences: from attitudes to the role of foreign investment in China, to the country's global conduct. But one thing unites them: a desire to see the Chinese Communist Party stay in power. How they seek to ensure this, and how the rest of the world responds to what they do, will be one of the key themes of the coming decade.
