China's Communist Party congress, meeting this week for the 17th time, has two broad purposes: to choose leaders and set out broad policies for the next five years. These are daunting tasks for the 2,200 delegates representing 73 million members in a country with one-fifth of the world's population.
China's runaway economic growth, widening inequalities, widespread corruption and environmental degradation belie the party leadership's invocation of harmonious development and will undermine its capacity to govern unless tackled directly between now and the next congress in 2012.
This is easier said than done. Such momentous changes create their own special interests and contradictory demands, reflected within the ruling party which has a monopoly on power. Despite the legendary opacity of party decision-making there are clear tensions between the desire of state centralists in Beijing to moderate growth so as to redistribute resources more fairly, and resistance to this by key provinces and cities like Shanghai which gain from present policies. There are similar tensions between the rich coastal regions and the huge - and much poorer - interior where 800 million people live.
The party membership itself reflects these contrasts and has become much more representative of the new property-owning middle class which benefits most from these changes. This year there has been much talk of intra-party democracy to emphasise that Western-style party competition outside it is firmly off the agenda. So expectations of reform and greater responsiveness to a changing society require the party to be more flexible and disciplined at the same time. It is a tall order. Far too often state and party respond with crude repression to escalating social protests against corruption and pollution. And there is little evidence that calls by party president Hu Jintao for greater social and environmental responsibility and more expenditure on health and education are heeded by party cadres.
A great deal is at stake for China and the rest of the world if China is misgoverned. A top-down nationalism was encouraged by party leaders after the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown to provide a legitimating social glue as communist ideals faded in the 1990s. It was then taken up in an unanticipated and unwanted popular movement directed against Japan, in a good example of how protest can go outside party control.
A new vision of inclusive development and welfare is needed if China is to avoid an accumulation of social problems and grievances that could culminate in a political and economic crisis. It has not been articulated so far at this congress. Extensive reforms in the justice system, greater recognition of human rights, more media openness for public debate and, above all, better harnessing of economic growth to social welfare should be its ingredients over the next five years if such a crisis is to be avoided.