President Jiang Zemin has failed to answer convincingly the crucial question of the 15th Chinese Communist Party Congress: is the CCP fit to rule in the 21st century? This is despite claims in his congress report last Friday that the 76-year-old party is set to sail on to new triumphs in the coming decades.
Statements by Mr Jiang and senior officials over the past few days have shown the party being torn by conflicting impulses of innovation and stagnation.
While it has taken relatively bold steps towards self-renewal, it has stopped short of radical surgery. And the effectiveness of the reforms could be hurt by cadres' obsession with safeguarding elements of communist orthodoxy.
Jiang & Co have wisely revived a basic tenet of Deng Xiaoping and radical lieutenants such as Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang: less is more.
Much of the economic policy endorsed by the congress is about cutting and chopping: dead wood accumulated through decades of party and state mismanagement is to be lopped off.
The great majority of the 370,000 state-owned enterprises (SOEs) will be retooled through bankruptcies, mergers, the sale of assets or transformation into shareholding concerns.