Analysis: Revolution comes full circle as China rings in the new

They don't read Mao or Marx any longer. But will the new leaders, with a modernising agenda, turn their backs on totalitarianism?

The current Party Congress in Beijing is designed to convince us that the Chinese Communist Party has changed. Eighty years on, we are supposed to believe that it is not the cruel and capricious beast whose violent internal struggles have caused the deaths of tens of millions of innocent bystanders but a perfectly normal house-trained pussycat.

After 13 years as general secretary of the party, President Jiang Zemin is stepping down and taking with him all the other septuagenarians on the politburo standing committee. They are moving aside, confident that a younger and better- educated generation can take control of the ship and steam towards the fabled lands of peace and plenty.

Unfortunately, just the same story has been put out at congress after congress, especially since that great helmsman Mao Zedong passed away after nearly wrecking the party in a 20-year internal civil war.

In that time, he had his closest comrade in arms – the country's president – murdered, put his neurotic wife in charge of the country, and according to his doctor spent his time with a harem of under-age girls.

This week one of the most daring broadsheets in China, Nanfang Zhoumou (Southern Weekend) ran an analysis of how this revolutionary party is metamorphosing into a conventional ruling party peopled by earnest men in dark suits who have a doctorate in steady state physics or a Harvard MBA.

Certainly this is the message Mr Jiang has put across this past week, and perhaps it is true. Yet even under the scientifically minded Mr Jiang some odd revelations have kept slipping out about life at the top.

Official reports of corruption show the antics of China's ruling classes continue to surpass the wildest imaginings. Just four years ago, when Mr Jiang had one of his rivals, Chen Xitong, sentenced on corruption charges, the party's investigative arm published a book alleging he, as the party secretary of Beijing, had held wild parties in a villa with mistresses who included a professional lion tamer with a whip.

Before Mr Chen's arrest, his right-hand man was found shot dead, allegedly by his own hand, after the pair of them had embezzled several billion US dollars of public funds.

More to point, no ruler in China has ever paid the slightest attention to the decisions of any party congress, let alone the party or the state constitution whose articles get changed faster and more frequently than any teenage fashion.

This congress passed a resolution containing the revealing phrase that "the definition of the party's nature accords with the history and realities of our party and conforms to the requirements of the times". Such slippery phrases as "the requirements of the times" do signify something though. They completely liberate the incoming politburo, led by Hu Jintao, from the heavy hand of socialist doctrine.

As the resolution explains, China is both well on the way to achieving Communism but will go further down the road of private ownership. It believes in both "the rule of law" and what it quaintly calls "the rule of virtue", namely the individual rule of just Communist officials.

Days before the Congress began, the party announced it was going to sell off the majority shares the state still holds in the major strategic enterprises and it was even going to allow foreigners to buy stakes on what used to be known as "the commanding heights of the economy". Nothing now is taboo in a country that has adopted the ideas of Thatcherism more ardently and more ruthlessly than was ever possible in Britain.

The extraordinary achievement of Mr Jiang is to have reversed so many of the socialist policies that the party claimed to be defending when it sent the tanks into Tiananmen Square in 1989.

By right, control of the party ought to have landed in the lap of Li Peng and the party committee of Beijing, led by Mr Chen, since they were the ones who advised the late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping about the students and implemented his instructions.

Yet Deng chose Mr Jiang, who for several years struggled to assert himself against Li Peng and the entire leftward tilt that followed. The party went far towards reimposing central planning until, in 1992, Deng swung into action and launched a new wave of reforms.

Mr Jiang was almost sacked but he managed to recover and was eventually able to dismiss some of the left-wing generals, seize control of the all-important People's Liberation Army and pour money into building his own internal security apparatus.

To his credit Mr Jiang has managed to keep the ship afloat despite the furious internal arguments over what exactly a "socialist market economy" can mean. Mr Li and his supporters have fought hard against the break-up of state monopolies and the decision to join the World Trade Organisation on the tough terms set by America.

The one thing that has united the party around Mr Jiang has been a shared and ruthless determination to stay in power. Having seen the fate of fraternal parties in the Soviet bloc, they have doggedly rejected pressure to make concessions on the political front but have abandoned all other inhibitions.

What has emerged cannot honestly be called reform. China already has lower taxes, less social welfare, a larger proportion of the economy in private hands – 60 per cent by some counts – than many European countries. So many party officials or their close family members now run private companies that admitting capitalists into the party is only a recognition that they are already there in large numbers.

Mr Jiang, despite being ruthless with internal dissent, has managed to persuade many suspicious Western visitors to trust him. Unlike the stock Communist dictator, he has courted them by singing Verdi or Elvis and dancing the foxtrot. Behind the black rimmed spectacles, a mischievous boy seems to lurk, surprising and delighting fellow heads of state who expected severe Confucian rituals. The heads of multinationals have been lured into transferring the latest technology and contributing to the $350bn of foreign investment that Mr Jiang has helped win for China with his unbridled admiration for the world's venture capitalists.

This is surely the mark of a much underrated politician. Yet at the same time he has unwittingly allowed the party itself to change if not outwardly, at least internally.

No one is reading Marx or Mao any more. The party has stopped its weekly study sessions, and in some places, such as universities, party members meet once a year, if that.

Mr Jiang seems to have saved the party, in effect by destroying it. Some Chinese even predict that this Party Congress will be the last to embrace the familiar Stalinist style of bombastic propaganda and meaningless votes.