In a little over a week, in one of the ornate rooms of the Great Hall of the People, a curtain will open to reveal the men who will run China for the next five years, and possibly for much longer.

Yet the process that appoints them to such prominence, just as China marches towards becoming a great power of the 21st century, remains cloaked in mystery. For all the skyscrapers, urban glitz and sheer modishness of the modern China that they inherit, their coming to power is more a throwback to the days of Mao jackets, bicycles and ration coupons.

The 2,213 delegates gather behind the stocky Stalinist pillars of the Great Hall this morning to hear President Hu Jintao’s report to the five-yearly gathering. It is a unique piece of theatre. The protagonists perform mainly off stage. The bit players stick to a prepared script. And the final act, when the curtain finally opens, shows a line-up of men chosen after much horse-trading among leaders of interest groups and factions. The congress retains much of the secrecy of the founding meeting, when 13 delegates, including Mao Zedong, met in a Shanghai back alley. They had to flee a police search and ended the session drifting in a boat on a nearby lake.

These days, however, the police are deployed in huge numbers to maintain security and to sequester or lock up any potential critic. Banned from the skies are such security threats as model aircraft and paragliders. A volunteer army of 824,000, identified by armbands in the style of the Red Guards, will patrol the streets to watch out for unsavoury behaviour.

This meeting bears scant resemblance to the party conferences in Blackpool or Bournemouth, where politicians jostle to appear on television and spend the evenings carousing and networking in pubs and clubs. Indeed, Beijing has closed 165 “bathhouses”, bars, karaoke houses and nightclubs, citing them as potential fire threats.

Even if the delegates had time for such frivolities, extracurricular outings are frowned upon by President Hu, who as party chief is on a campaign to stamp out corruption and “lewd behaviour”. The People’s Daily, the party mouthpiece, has lambasted officials who exchange power for sex and has cautioned that cadres are sinking into a morass of crime and disorder. Delegates are housed in state-run hotels that will, most likely, have switched off all the movie channels. The bars will be out of bounds. Many of the representatives of the Communist Party’s 73.3 million members will have only official documents to read.

Tracking down a participant from a previous congress to get the inside track is no easy task, especially since this year is the first time in the party’s history that it has published the names of delegates. Those few elders with congress experience who could be found were mostly too busy, “out of town” or found it inconvenient to talk.

The shroud of secrecy, and fear, still hangs heavy around party business, even though officials insist that this year’s pow-wow will be more open than ever before. The week will be spent studying President Hu’s speech, in which he will no doubt make pledges of the party’s love for the people, its commitment to socialism with distinctive Chinese features and his own slogan about creating a harmonious society. His words will be praised when comrades break into smaller sessions based on provincial affiliation.

They will pore over the list of candidates to be elected to the new Central Committee. They may find more names than final seats, a move by President Hu to introduce a modicum of intra-party democracy. One retired delegate cautioned against mistaking that innovation for Western-style democracy. He said: “Delegates know which names are to be chosen and few will dare to deviate from President Hu’s guidance.”

Compensations may be found in style if not substance. They can feast at nightly banquets, go out to see friends, attend arranged excursions to the Peking Opera or a movie or stay cloistered in hotels closed to the public for the duration. They will sweep through the streets in fleets of large black cars, peeping through tinted windows at ordinary people whose futures they will decide by their vote for a new Central Committee.

On the day after the congress closes, the newly appointed Central Committee will hold its first plenum to elect a new ruling Politburo and its all-powerful Standing Committee. The final line-up has already been decided at cabals of top leaders and elder statesmen but remains, in theory, the most tightly guarded of the many congress secrets.

When the new Standing Committee walks out, in order of seniority, from behind a curtain in the Great Hall of the People to end the mystery, delegates will know that their role in this latest five-yearly charade is complete.

Changing nation

2007
Population 1.30 billion
Life expectancy 72.1 years
Population density 136 people per square km
Gross national income per capita £857
Communist Party members 73 million
CO2 emissions 16% of global total

2002
Population 1.28 billion
Life expectancy 71.8 years
Population density 134 people per square km
Gross national income per capita: £616
Communist Party members 66 million
CO2 emissions 13.9% of global total

Source: UN, World Bank

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