CHINA: China's Communist Party leaders meet this weekend for a closed plenum which will focus on economic matters, but will be closely watched to see if it will help answer the burning question of the day: is President Hu Jintao an ultra-conservative hardliner or a closet liberal reformer?
The annual plenum will be Mr Hu's first high-level meeting since he secured all the top party, military and state posts following the retirement of former leader Jiang Zemin as head of the army in March.
The main business of the gathering of the Communist Party's 354-member Central Committee will be to approve a draft of China's 11th five-year plan, a policy blueprint which analysts believe will continue to focus on encouraging rapid economic growth.
Mr Hu is expected to strengthen his power base at the plenum, which starts on Saturday and runs for four days, by appointing key allies into positions of power.
And there are other vital housekeeping matters to be dealt with - as the fourth generation of Chinese leadership, following Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping and Mr Jiang, Mr Hu is expected to underline continuity and could nominate an eventual successor for when he reaches 70 years of age in 2012.
It remains to be seen how successful Mr Hu has been in reining in Shanghai, China's biggest city and political stronghold of Mr Jiang, who still has a lot of influence despite stepping down.
Many China-watchers will be reading the tea leaves closely to see if any further clues to Mr Hu's true leanings emerge from proceedings.
Mr Hu (62) remains an enigma and the jury is still out on whether he truly is an ultra-conservative, with a hard line opposing democratic reforms, or a closet liberal, biding his time and consolidating power before introducing sweeping reforms.
The Communist Party in China has 70 million members, its influence is felt in every area of life and it has ruled with an iron fist since the 1949 Revolution.
Mr Hu has ruled out Western-style democratic reforms and is clamping down on popular protests to rule out the sort of revolutions that toppled the Soviets in 1989 and the post-Soviet leaders in Ukraine and Georgia.
At the same time, he is aware that the richer the society becomes, the more people demand a say in their own destiny, and he has introduced cosmetic democratic reforms, as well as efforts to make the government more transparent and accountable.
While he is keen to keep the economy simmering, he is acutely aware that the growing gap between rich and poor, between government officials and the people, and between corrupt and honest officials, provide challenges to party rule.
In the last year, there has been a crackdown on the internet, now seen as a potent threat to single-party rule, as well as a wave of firings at state publications which are reckoned not to toe the line with the Propaganda Ministry, such as chiefs at the Workers' Daily newspaper.
There has also been a new hard line at the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, which has seen foreign investors in media and film, such as Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, stonewalled.
Academics and non-governmental organisations have also suffered.
Suggestive of liberal credentials are Mr Hu's wide-ranging economic reforms, plus his efforts to combat local corruption.
His transparency following the Sars cover-up in 2003 sparked hopes that he might be a reformer.
Most remarkable was his recent decision to rehabilitate a reformist predecessor, Hu Yaobang, whose death sparked the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, at a ceremony in November.
This has been read as a positive sign. However, veteran sinologist Willy Lam believes any displays of liberal leanings are for show, aimed at helping repair strained relations with the US and the West in recent months.
"The way that the wily President Hu has choreographed the November remembrance of his erstwhile mentor will likely demonstrate that, like Mao, he has a Machiavellian knack for taking from the past - in this case the reservoir of goodwill that still surrounds the one person that made his rise to the top possible - whatever suits the expediency of the day," he wrote in a commentary in the Wall Street Journal.
Whatever happens at the plenum regarding the Communist Party's influence on earth, China is expected to celebrate the plenum, and the party's extraterrestrial success, with the launch of its second manned space flight the day after the plenum closes.