One side effect of the Dengist economic reforms that started to penetrate deeply in the 1980s was the transition from a ruling Communist Party that focused on class struggle and revolutionary aspiration under Mao Zedong , to one in which a new technocratic elite were in control.
In the words of Wang Hui, one of contemporary China's foremost public intellectuals, that shift meant that the party started fulfilling a more 'evaluative' function and became the sort of 'bureaucratic machine' that Mao had tried to prevent. While the economy grew and prospered, the party looked at its own internal governance. In short, it tried to professionalise itself.
Central to this task was the need to have a mechanism (mostly peer pressure) by which the top elite controlled themselves. There was no question of some entity, like the legal system or civil society, standing above the party and placing obligations and regulations upon it. But there was a sense that the party needed to tidy up its act, and that another messy leadership transition of the kind that had occurred between Mao and Deng Xiaoping (which took almost two years to achieve) was a luxury the party could no longer afford.
Party congresses, which had occurred sporadically before 1982, started to happen every five years. Time limits were set on those holding high office. By stealth rather than by stated aim, retirement ages were brought in. By 2002, when there was a transition from the third to the fourth generation of leadership - from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao - nervousness that this process would lead to infighting among factions in the party remained evident until some years into Hu's era.
The party congress set for next year is arousing all the speculation that the congress of 2002 did. The party has had a decade more to build its own internal governance and modernise its own structures. In the last few years it has practised what has been called 'intra-party democracy', attempting to make its processes more predictable and a little more transparent.
In a strategy of careful management, the likeliest successor to Hu next year, Vice-President Xi Jinping, looks to be following exactly the same path to the crucial position of party general secretary - elevation to the Standing Committee of the Politburo as vice-president (like Hu), and vice-chairmanship of the Central Military Commission, in charge of army affairs (like Hu).
A range of leaders around him are also being carefully groomed to slip into major leadership positions when the incumbents on the all-important Standing Committee of nine see seven of their members retire. So far, so good.