CHINA/ANALYSIS: Communist in name only, China's ruling elite operates like a right wing dictatorship, writes Jasper Becker
Surely the Chinese Communist Party cannot carry on like this for much longer? The secret conclaves, the self-congratulatory work reports and the bombastic propaganda about great victories?
President Jiang Zemin has led the party for 13 years, leaving it outwardly unchanged. But it is rotting away from within. No one is reading Marx or Mao any more, even if you can find their works in the shops.
The party has stopped its weekly study sessions. Even the Saturday afternoon cell meetings have been dropped. In some places, like universities, party members say they only meet once a year, if that.
It seems Mr Jiang has kept the party in power by destroying it, at least as an organisation driven by any recognisable ideology. It is remarkable that a communist party has survived here and has proved so effective at leading this backward country into explosive growth.
Yet the price is that Mr Jiang has had to move the party so far to the right that it often seems more Thatcherite than anything attempted by the Conservatives in Britain.
In just 10 years, he has pushed through many right-wing policies: the deregulation and break-up of government monopolies and the privatisation of state industries; mass lay-offs in old industrial heartlands; a wave of foreign investment; the cult of the entrepreneur - and even the introduction of undergraduate loans.
Just days before this week's congress began, the party announced it would sell off the majority shares the state still holds in the major strategic enterprises. It would even allow foreigners to buy stakes in what used to be known as "the commanding heights of the economy".
China already has lower taxes, less social welfare, a larger proportion of the economy in private hands - 60 percent by some counts - than many European countries. So many party officials or their families run private firms that admitting capitalists into the party is only a recognition that they are already there in large numbers.
Nothing on the economic front remains taboo, which is all the more striking given that Mr Jiang has overturned so many of the socialist policies which the party claimed to be defending when it sent in the tanks to Tiananmen Square in 1989.
At the congress, the party passed a resolution containing the revealing phrase that the definition of the party's nature accorded with its history and realities, and conformed to the "requirements of the times". Such slippery phrases liberate the incoming politburo, led by Mr Hu Jintao, from paying attention to any socialist doctrine.
The resolution is full of muddled and contradictory phrases. It explains that China is both well on its way to achieving communism but will venture further down the road of private ownership.
It believes in both "the rule of law" and what it quaintly calls "the rule of virtue", namely the individual rule by upright and just communist officials.
Mr Jiang somehow managed to push things forward although the politburo standing committee was riven by rivals like Mr Li Peng, who believed in central planning, and Mr Li Ruihuan, who wanted to take steps towards reform.
Mr Jiang staved them off and backed his own man, Mr Zhu Rongji, in his fight to break up state monopolies and join the World Trade Organisation on the tough terms set by the US. These terms dictate further economic reforms to be made in the next five years, such as introducing free and open competition between private, foreign and state companies.
Mr Jiang has put together a new standing committee leadership that harbours no such major differences of opinion. They are all there because they share his views on the economy and on the overriding importance of stability.
The one thing that has united the party around him has been a shared ruthless determination to stay in power.
Having seen the fate of fraternal parties in the Soviet bloc, they have doggedly rejected pressure to make political concessions.
Five years ago an American colleague arrived in China and quickly became perplexed. He wanted to prepare for the 15th party congress - but where was the party headquarters? It had no address. It was not listed in the telephone book, nor were there any membership lists. It both owns no property and owns everything in China. In fact, all over Beijing there are buildings without name plates and only recognisable as communist-owned because armed soldiers from the People's Liberation Army stand guard outside.
Party members still act as in an underground conspiracy, beholden to no one, and ready to win and hold power with the utmost violence. The party controls the government through a network of secretive cells. These receive instructions from above through a system which ignores official channels.
It is this paramilitary structure that has enabled a handful of old men to meet and decide in secrecy on almost everything. In the 1980s, not even members on the politburo standing committee voted on anything. The top leader, Mr Deng Xiaoping, just issued his commands.
In his first speech as general secretary, Mr Hu stressed that this was "a collective leadership". What this means is far from clear. Even the most experienced China-watchers only have the vaguest idea of how the party functions.
It worries many that China is a huge country with a fast-growing economy but is ruled as a dictatorship by such a small secretive elite. In many ways, the party operates like an extreme right-wing dictatorship.
The government favours big business and foreign investors. It breaks up independent unions, justifying such action with a nationalistic agenda. It no longer aspires to lead an inevitable worldwide revolution to propel humanity into Marxist Utopia.
Instead, the Chinese are taught to nurse a sense of grievance and resentment at their country's past humiliations. These are dated back to 1860, when Lord Elgin ordered his troops to burn the Summer Palace. Anything that makes China great is justified, and anyone who opposes the party and its leaders is a traitor.
Now that the party admits members from any class and has jettisoned its class warfare beliefs, it purports to represent all the conflicting interests of the nation, both capital and labour.
At the Central Party School where Mr Hu Jintao was president for the past five years, he asked his aides to scour the world for ideas on how to adapt the party to this state of affairs.
All kinds of left-wing philosophers and politicos have been invited to lecture to the elite, including British politicians like Mr Peter Mandelson and Mr Chris Patten, as well as officials from social democratic parties in Germany and Sweden.
"They really want to become a social democratic party but without the democracy," said one Western diplomat. Just when or how Mr Hu or other leaders move towards political reform is anyone's guess. No one here is holding their breath.