CHINA:Wearing a sharp blue suit, a red-and-blue striped tie and standing on a podium bedecked with pink flowers, China's Communist Party leader Hu Jintao underlined his commitment to reform while promising continuity during a speech to his party colleagues in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing yesterday.
"We must uphold the party's role as the core of leadership in directing the overall situation," Hu said in his 2½-hour address to 2,200 delegates at the opening of the party's 17th congress, a five-yearly event at which Hu is expected to consolidate his grip on power.
While his speech contained few surprises in terms of content, it was significant in the number of subjects he addressed. The president, who is party leader and head of the military, called for peace talks with Taiwan and promised more action on environmental woes while still pursuing strong economic growth.
Hu's road map for China in the next five years pledged the 73 million-member Communist Party would continue on a reformist path, with more accountability within the ranks and further efforts to stamp out corruption, but did not offer any signs the party was ready to yield an inch on its monopoly on power.
The government needed to stamp out widespread corruption as it could destabilise party control. "Resolutely punishing and effectively preventing corruption bears on the popular support for the party and on its very survival, and is therefore a major political task the party must attend to at all times," said Hu.
The Chinese word for democracy, mingzhu, featured more than 60 times in his speech, a fact pointed out by the state news agency Xinhua, but this should not be read as a move towards western-style democracy, even the Swedish model reformers in China like to hold up as an example of where the country could go. Hu has ruled out western-style democracy for China on several occasions.
His intentions are more for "expanded democracy" or "socialist democracy", which basically means greater participation in government with no change in the party's role running the show. Within the party structure, that means the centre of power, the politburo, would be answerable to a wider party membership.
"We will establish a healthy system under which the politburo regularly reports its work to plenary sessions of the central committee and accepts [ central committee] oversight," Hu said, without giving further details. "We will explore various ways to expand intra-party democracy at the grassroots level."
He added there would be stricter monitoring of the process of appointing cadres.
There has been much talk of legitimacy in the run-up to the congress - the party claims its right to rule from the revolution in 1949 that brought the communists to power.
However, that revolution took place nearly 60 years ago and the gradual opening up of China has meant that old hard-core socialist values look increasingly anachronistic in the modern era, which has forced the party to modernise to justify its position.
But reform does not mean democracy, as the party believes this could threaten its grip on power.
Most of the negotiations to cement his grip on the wheel of the party will take place behind closed doors during the week-long session but his speech was well received in the vast hall.
He focused on the economic benefits that socialism with Chinese characteristics has brought to China's 1.3 billion people, saying how per capita gross domestic product would quadruple between 2000 and 2020, and said there was still a lot to be done to narrow a widening wealth gap.
"The people's living conditions in general have reached the moderately prosperous level, but meanwhile the trend of widening income gaps has not been fundamentally reversed . . . it has become more difficult to accommodate different interests," he said.
Adopting a conciliatory tone towards the self-ruled island of Taiwan, which mainland China considers a renegade province, Hu offered to enter into negotiations to reach a peace agreement.
China has claimed sovereignty over Taiwan since Chiang Kai-shek's KMT nationalists fled there after losing to Mao Zedong's communists in the civil war in 1949.
There has never been a peace deal, even though trade, investment and tourism have blossomed since the late 1980s.
Hu avoided the traditional sabre-rattling that characterises public pronouncements on Taiwan. "We would like to make a solemn appeal: on the basis of the one-China principle, let us discuss a formal end to the state of hostility between the two sides [ and] reach a peace agreement," he said.
Talks hit deadlock in 1999, when Taiwanese leaders insisted that the island was a country in its own right. Taipei leaders said they were happy to meet but not as long as China was under one-party rule and while China insisted Taiwan was part of China.
There was a nod to the country's worsening environment when Hu said he wanted to create a "culture of conservation", which would encourage the efficient use of resources towards stronger economic growth, as well as greater environmental protection.