China's party politics remain shrouded in mystery

BEIJING -- If drinking tea is China's favorite activity, then reading the leaves may come in second.

That propensity was on display last week after the ruling communists finally announced, after much delay, that they would convene their party congress Nov. 8 -- a highly anticipated event that could see the first orderly turnover of power in modern Chinese history.

Instead of quashing all the political speculation triggered by the delay, setting the date has pushed the rumor mill here into overdrive.

Observers tried to divine the reason for the relatively late start of the congress, which is held only once every five years.

Some deduced that President Jiang Zemin had succeeded in a last-minute backstage bid to stay on as party chief, rather than cede the spotlight as expected to a new generation of leaders. Others were sure it meant exactly the opposite.

In truth, only Jiang himself and the tiny inner circle of China's top leaders know what the prescripted outcome of the 16th Party Congress will be.

And that, perhaps, points to the real lesson to emerge from all the conjecture: Despite two decades of monumental social and economic change, with China opening up to the likes of Ikea, the Internet and international investment, politics at the very top remains stuck in time. Today's party machinations are as shrouded in mystery as the palace intrigue of the country's imperial past, impervious to concepts of public accountability and transparency.

"This is a dangerous way to deliberate a nation's future," said Orville Schell, a veteran Sinologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and "is the reason why it is difficult to imagine how China can continue to make progress into the modern world, much less the democratic world."

At the pinnacle of power, the days of Mao Tse-tung and Deng Xiaoping, men who could spark mass movements or set policy with a single phrase or speech, are over. Jiang, albeit China's No. 1 leader, belongs to a collective of seven senior officials who rule by consensus as the standing committee of the Politburo.

But their workings -- which determine the domestic agenda and foreign policy of the world's most populous nation -- still take place in secret.

No free press or public watchdog group tries to uncover what goes on in Zhongnanhai, the government compound in the center of Beijing. There was a flicker of greater openness in the late 1980s, but it was extinguished by the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Right after that traumatic event, Jiang became the party's general secretary, then cemented his position as top dog after Deng's death in 1997 by engineering the removal of two rivals at the 15th Party Congress that year.

This November's conclave was to be the 76-year-old's swan song as party chief and was meant to usher in China's so-called "fourth generation" of leaders, including the man widely believed to be in line to take over, Vice President Hu Jintao.

That the succession may not be proceeding so smoothly as originally hoped could stem partly from the fact that there is no blueprint for such a major, orderly transfer of power in the 53-year history of the People's Republic.

As long as the dealings of China's top leaders remain wrapped in a tight cloak of secrecy, nothing definite can be known about the upcoming potential leadership reshuffle until the party congress closes and the new lineup is announced.

"As the big leaders slug it out in the back room," Schell said, "the public is left to listen to rumors and to wonder.

"This is why opposite rumors and scenarios for the future are almost equally plausible," he said. "Or equally incredible."