Reforms snub may rattle China's leaders

China's Communist Party has vowed ambitious changes on all fronts except the one - its vast power - that worried scholars, officials and even premier Wen Jiabao call the biggest threat to long-term growth and stability.

It is a choice that shows the ruling party's confidence that it holds the country's future surely in its grip; it is also an absence some warn could come back to rattle that grip.

Party leaders emerged from a four-day meeting on Monday to present their plan for transforming the world's second biggest economy over the next half-decade, focusing on boosting income and spending power for millions. Even for a policy wish list, the few words on reforming government were hazy.

"Political reform was never on the table," said Wu Jiaxiang, a former aide to Chinese central leaders.

"Wen Jiabao may favour political reform, but he's just the premier in charge of the economy. Political reform is something the Standing Committee would have to all agree on, and they're really not interested."

The Standing Committee is the Party's nine-member ruling inner circle, which includes Mr Wen and president Hu Jintao.

Yet quite a few of China's own officials and intellectuals fear something may go awry without firmer steps to rein in Party power.

Such warnings do not just come from foreigners. They see a dangerous complacency that could sap growth through unchecked power, and magnify public ire about official corruption and privilege and home evictions that sometimes erupt in protests, petitions and self-immolations.

"Without political reform the fruits of economic reform will be lost," Yu Jianrong, a social researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said in a recent talk in Beijing.

He urged changes starting at grassroots government and giving courts a measure of independence from local party bosses.

"China's rapid economic growth is like Latin America's in the past, when there was a failure there to establish government based on fairness and justice, democracy and rule of law, and the rapid growth ended in social turmoil and unrest," Mr Yu said.

Mr Wen, who survived the removal of his reformist boss Zhao Ziyang after the pro-democracy movement was crushed in 1989, sticks out as the one senior official who has echoed the warnings, even if he has not spelled out what changes he favours.

In a succession of comments, Wen has said the government must rein in abuses or risk sacrificing the gains of growth to "regression and stagnation".

Mr Wen is in the final stretch of his time in office, and he lacks a factional following in the elite that could give his calls a wider currency.

The emerging successors to Mr Wen and Mr Hu have kept their policy cards close to their chests.Mr Hu's likely successor, Xi Jinping, appears to favour more forthright leadership.

But it will take a crisis to jolt the ruling elite into thinking more seriously about deeper political reform, Xiao Han, a law professor in Beijing, told a weekend seminar.

"They dominate so many of the resources in society, so there's just no motive for them to reform," Mr Xiao said.

"Even if Mr Wen is calling for reform, that won't move the bureaucratic apparatus," he said.

Mr Wen's status as a figurehead of political reform has irked more conservative leaders and censors, worried above all else about snuffing out any potential challenges to party power.

Wen's final years in office up to early 2013 could bring more jousting.

"Defending Wen Jiabao is not defending just one man; it's defending demands for political reform, defending the forces of political reform," Du Daozheng, a retired former senior censor who advocates democratic reforms, told the Beijing-based magazine, China Through the Ages this month.