THIS WEEK China’s ruling Communist Party is holding the most important meeting it will hold all year, but there are none of the usual traffic restrictions, no rounding up of dissidents and bright flashes of patriotism at the Great Hall of the People in central Beijing.
Political power is not about open government in China, and most decisions are made by at most a few hundred party leaders in meeting rooms in Zhongnanhai, the political power base near the Forbidden City.
This year’s plenum will be no exception. Some 370 full members and alternates of the party’s central committee will meet behind firmly closed doors to try to hammer out the details of who will form the core leadership when President Hu Jintao next year passes over the reins of power in what is expected to become the world’s biggest economy in the next decade.
Premier Wen Jiabao and the rest of the government will end their terms in 2013.
Mr Hu is expected to carry out the handover at the party congress in October, although all the key decisions need to be made three months before that.
The intervening period is one of powerful political stasis – no major strategic decisions will be made and no dissent will be tolerated as the government becomes obsessed with a stable transition. Economic policy will focus on controlling inflation and keeping people at home happy. China is expected to be in neutral gear for the duration.
The only official statement relating to the plenum was carried on the government’s Xinhua news agency, which said the four-day meeting would be devoted to China’s “cultural development”. At stake are nine places on the politburo’s standing committee, which decides the fate of nearly 1.4 billion people in China, and increasingly has a say in the affairs of the rest of us too as China’s economic and political influence expands. The politburo itself has around 25 members.
The man expected to take over from Mr Hu at the helm of the politburo standing committee is vice-president Xi Jinping, who during last year’s conclave was promoted to vice chair of a key party military committee, cementing his position as the leader-in-waiting. Mr Wen’s place is expected to be taken, neatly, by vice-premier Li Keqiang.
The low-key nature of the plenum and the secrecy are all about keeping a placid face on the surface as top cadres fight among themselves over senior positions, and different power structures within the Communist Party elite clash.
The Chinese Communist Party is the largest political party in the world, with more than 80 million members. There are all sorts of political machinations expected in the coming months. What will become of Bo Xilai, the party boss of Chongqing, a former WTO negotiator and commerce minister who repeatedly outfoxed the EU in trade talks, and who since becoming chief in the southwestern municipality has stamped out organised crime and led an effort to reintroduce revolutionary songs and slogans.
It is a time when the professional China-watchers come into their own, the academics and analysts who, like the Kremlinologists of old, are expert at interpreting small signs to give a bigger picture in an environment of no public information.
Body language will be decoded and the order in which speakers appear on a podium studied for comparative importance. And then there will be simple profile issues – some expected vice-premier Wang Qishan and party organisation department head Li Yuanchao to play an important role during the plenum, which could signal an expanded role for them in the next administration.
Mr Hu is due to step down first as party general secretary, then step down as president in March 2013. When he will step down as head of the military is open to interpretation – his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, clung on for three years, cementing his legacy and diluting Mr Hu’s full accession to power.
The only information that might be made publicly available will concern how the meeting on cultural matters went. And that too will be sifted over like goat’s entrails for any signs of China’s future direction.