Today we begin a four-day series coinciding with this week's Communist Party central committee meeting, looking at the issues and personalities likely to dominate in the run-up to the 17th party congress next year. Wang Xiangwei charts the direction President Hu Jintao is taking
As more than 300 members of the Communist Party's elite central committee began their annual, four-day, closed-door session in Beijing yesterday, their main agenda was, as had been announced, to discuss ways of 'building a harmonious socialist society'.
This benign-sounding subject belies heavy political undertones and far-reaching implications for the leadership of President Hu Jintao and the future direction of the Communist Party as well as the mainland's growth pattern.
The meeting is crucial to Mr Hu's leadership and his place in history as he moulds his legacy less than two years after gaining absolute power.
The officials, huddling in the military-run Jingxi Hotel in Beijing's western suburbs, are expected to approve a policy blueprint elevating Mr Hu's 'harmonious society' slogan to official theory.
The new doctrine will boost Mr Hu's authority and herald another drive to shore up the Communist Party's claim to legitimacy, which has been greatly undermined by the collapse of Marxist ideology and the emergence of murkier aspects of the economy marked by rampant official corruption, a widening wealth gap and simmering public unrest.
At the meeting Mr Hu will face minimal resistance in pushing through his policy agenda and setting a new direction for party policy, particularly after his recent decision to sack Chen Liangyu, the powerful party boss in Shanghai. That dealt a crushing blow to his main political rivals, the Shanghai clique led by his predecessor Jiang Zemin, of which Mr Chen was a key member.
