High hopes for reform from new generation of leaders in China

High hopes have been placed on the country's so-called fifth generation leaders, set to be handed the keys to power at the 18th Communist Party Congress next month.

The Chinese say that a person must first know a bitter taste before they understand sweet, and no generation in modern China knows this better than this group, now aged in their 50s and 60s. Many were just teenagers during the brutal chaos of the Cultural Revolution, who were Red Guards and later became "sent-down youth" packed off to the countryside to live in poverty and "learn from the peasants".

Nearly all went on to experience the heady, intellectual spring at Chinese universities in the 1970s and 1980s. Tiananmen was a watershed - for some it meant jail and exile, while others survived to ascend the ranks of the party bureaucracy to witness, and enjoy the fruits of modernisation. Given their background, it's not surprising that many Chinese regard the incoming leadership as the brightest to date - compassionate yet practical, visionary yet resilient.

Take, for example, Li Keqiang , most likely to be the next premier. He was remembered by contemporaries at Peking University as a quick-witted and outspoken law student who excelled in debates amid the liberal campus atmosphere at the time. "He was sharp, passionate and an independent thinker," recalled Dr Wang Juntao, a fellow student who nominated him to the post of student federation chairman.

Three decades on, their fates could not be more different. Li is the country's highest-ranking vice-premier and is poised to become the country's second most powerful leader at the party congress next month.

Wang, the chairman of the US-based China Democracy Party, is living in exile after having been jailed for being the "black hand" of the 1989 Tiananmen pro-democracy movement.