Chinese President Hu Jintao, third from left, shakes hands with Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping, front left, as Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, right in the back, follows after the opening session of the 18th Communist Party Congress held at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, Thursday, Nov. 8, 2012. Preparing to hand over power after a decade in office, China's President Hu called Thursday for sterner measures to combat official corruption that has stoked public anger while urging the Communist Party to maintain firm political control. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)
Chinese President Hu Jintao, third from left, shakes hands with Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping, front left, as Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, right in the back, follows after the opening session of the 18th Communist Party Congress held at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, Thursday, Nov. 8, 2012. Preparing to hand over power after a decade in office, China's President Hu called Thursday for sterner measures to combat official corruption that has stoked public anger while urging the Communist Party to maintain firm political control. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)
A man walks past an official propaganda to welcome the Chinese Communist Party's 18th Congress which held in Beijing, at a bookstore in Shanghai, China, Thursday Nov. 8, 2012. China's ruling Communist Party opened a congress Thursday to usher in a new group of younger leaders faced with the challenging tasks of righting a flagging economy and meeting public calls for better government. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)
Journalists, firemen, buses, and red flags on Tiananmen are reflected in a glass door of the Great Hall of the People, where opening ceremony of the 18th Communist Party Congress is held, while a soldier dressed as an usher, seen through the glass, keeps watching in Beijing, Thursday, Nov. 8, 2012. China's ruling Communist Party opened a congress Thursday to usher in a new group of younger leaders faced with the challenging tasks of righting a flagging economy and meeting public calls for better government. (AP Photo/Alexander F. Yuan)
China's communist leaders bow in silence in remembrance of the late leaders during the opening session of the 18th Communist Party Congress held at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, Thursday, Nov. 8, 2012. Preparing to hand over power after a decade in office, China's President Hu Jintao called Thursday for sterner measures to combat official corruption that has stoked public anger while urging the Communist Party to maintain firm political control. Front row from left to right, Li Peng, former Chinese Premier, He Guoqiang, head of Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, Xi Jinping, Chinese Vice President, Jia Qinglin, Chairman of Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, Wu Bangguo, Chairman of National People's Congress, Hu Jintao, Chinese President and Communist Party chief, Jiang Zemin, former Chinese President and the party chief, and Wen Jiabao, Chinese premier. (AP Photo/Alexander F. Yuan)
A woman, center, yells after she threw protest papers on Tiananmen Square after a flag raising ceremony while a plainclothes security person, in red, stops a journalist, right, from taking videos, near the Great Hall of the People, where the 18th Communist Party Congress will be held later in the morning, in Beijing, China, Thursday Nov. 8, 2012. (AP Photo/Alexander F. Yuan)
BEIJING (AP) ? China's ruling communists opened a pivotal congress to initiate a power handover by giving a nod to their revolutionary past and broadly promising cleaner government while keeping off-stage the main event ? the bargaining over seats in the new leadership.
All the main players were arrayed on the stage in the Great Hall of the People: President Hu Jintao, his successor Xi Jinping and a collection of retired party insiders. A golden hammer and sickle, the Communist Party's symbol, hung on the back wall. Yet in a nearly two-hour opening ceremony Thursday, scant mention was made of the transition or that in a week Hu will step down as party chief in favor of Xi in what would be only the second orderly transfer of power in 63 years of communist rule.
The congress is writ small the state of Chinese politics today. It's a largely ceremonial gathering of 2,200-plus delegates who meet while the real deal-making is done behind-the-scenes by the true power-holders.
The centerpiece event of the opening of the weeklong congress ? a 90-minute speech by Hu ? served politics, allowing him to define his legacy after a decade in office, while marshaling his clout to install his allies in the collective leadership that Xi will head.
"An important thing for him is to make sure that there's no critical, no negative summary judgment of the past 10 years," said Ding Xueliang, a Chinese politics expert at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Still, Ding said, "90 percent of the effort is on putting your people in place."
The party's public silence on a leadership transition that everyone knows is taking place and that politically minded Chinese have been discussing has deepened a palpable sense of public unease. Many Chinese feel the country is at a turning point, in need of new ideas to handle a slowing economy, growing piles of debt and rising public demands for more accountable, transparent government, if not democracy.
In signs of the public disquiet, at least five ethnic Tibetans in western China set themselves on fire Wednesday or Thursday in protests against Chinese rule of Tibetan areas, according to overseas Tibet support groups and the Tibetan government-in-exile in India.
At dawn in Tiananmen Square, next to the congress venue, a woman in her 30s threw pieces of torn paper into the air and shouted "bandits and robbers!" ? a curse often leveled at corrupt local officials. She was taken away by the security forces, which have smothered all of Beijing for the congress.
In his speech, Hu cited many of the challenges China faces ? a rich-poor gap, environmentally ruinous growth and imbalanced development between prosperous cities and a struggling countryside. Yet he offered little fresh thinking to address them and said restoring a relatively high growth would be the best way to deal with public expectations.
Only on tackling rampant corruption did Hu sound the alarm. He called on party members to be ethical and rein in their family members whose often showy displays of wealth have stoked public anger.
"Nobody is above the law," Hu said to the applause of the 2,309 delegates and invited guests, with Xi and other party notables on the dais behind him. He later said, "If we fail to handle this issue well, it could prove fatal to the party, and even cause the collapse of the party and the fall of the state."
Always an occasion for divisive bargaining, the leadership transition has been made more fraught by scandals that have fueled already high public cynicism that Chinese leaders are more concerned with power and wealth than government.
In recent months, one top leader, Bo Xilai, has been purged after his wife murdered a British businessman; a top aide to Hu was sidelined after his son crashed a Ferrari he shouldn't have been able to afford and foreign media reported that relatives of Xi and outgoing Premier Wen Jiabao had traded on their proximity to power to amass vast fortunes.
Public image aside, the scandals have especially weakened Hu, on whose watch they occurred, in the power-broking over the next leadership. In recent decades, the leadership line-ups have sought to balance different factions within the party. Who has prevailed won't be apparent until next Thursday, a day after the congress, when the members of the Politburo Standing Committee appear before the media.
On stage with Hu appeared one of his nemeses, his predecessor Jiang Zemin, who has supported Xi and is angling to fill many of the seats in the leadership with his allies. Nearby, dressed in a Mao jacket, sat 95-year-old Song Ping, a veteran of the revolution and party insider who was Hu's earliest political mentor.
Hu drew the line on political reform, a catchphrase for everything from greater transparency to democracy, even though retired party members, media commentators and government think tanks have called it an urgent need.
Hu's signature policy ? a grab-bag of ideas meant to promote more balanced growth and stronger party rule that goes under the clunky phrase "the Scientific Outlook on Development" ? has already been adopted in the party constitution. Hu's report to the congress called it "a powerful theoretical weapon" to guide the party.
"Even though this congress is about rejuvenation, passing the power to the young, what we see is the opposite," said Willy Lam of Chinese University of Hong Kong.
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Associated Press writers Gillian Wong, Christopher Bodeen, Didi Tang and Louise Watt contributed to this report.
Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2012-11-08-AS-China-Congress/id-2f2e30e3b81e400c8cd98c249186d3fd
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