The preliminary work of the five-yearly congresses of the Chinese Communist Party is always conducted in great secrecy. Up to 15 years ago the world was not even told about a congress until after it was over.
Control of information about new policies and personnel changes is still considered of such paramount importance that the Xinhua (Chinese News Agency) editor who leaked the contents of the 1992 Congress speech of the General Secretary, Mr Jiang Zemin, to a Hong Kong newspaper rots in jail to this day.
This time we were told two weeks in advance that the congress starts today, and the party media have flagged heavily the leadership's plan to streamline the economy by selling off, merging or closing down thousands of bankrupt state enterprises. What is still a closely-guarded secret, however, is who will rise and fall in a shakeup at the top which is more to do with personalities than policies.
President Jiang is secure at the top. But the number two in the party hierarchy, the Prime Minister, Mr Li Peng - associated in many people's minds with the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989, as it was he who made the declaration of martial law - must under the constitution step down next spring when his term of office expires.
Mr Li's successor is expected to be Mr Zhu Rongji, vice-premier in charge of economic reform, and sometimes called China's Alan Greenspan, because of his achievement of a soft landing after the economy overheated in 1993 and inflation soared above 20 per cent. The suave, English-speaking economic czar, who was imprisoned under Mao, brought inflation down to less than 5 per cent without punitive measures.
Mr Zhu (68) is currently ranked five in the leadership, and has some charisma - he is good at small talk at cocktail parties - in contrast to some of his more wooden colleagues, and he has been called China's Gorbachev, but this is misleading as he is by no means a radical reformer.
In the run-up to the congress the party-controlled media have heaped praise on Mr Jiang, Mr Li and Mr Zhu for "five glorious years" of economic, political and social success - the best five years, some editorial writers claim, in Chinese history. The message to the 2,048 congress delegates is clear. The trio is China's power centre, and with them at the helm the country is in safe and stable hands as it makes the transition to the 21st century.
Mr Jiang will preside at the top, with powerful political support from the conservative Mr Li, and the more liberal Mr Zhu will run the government and the economy, with his western-trained economists forging the way ahead rather than the Soviet-trained officials whom Mr Li favoured.
But if these three are to run the country, what title will Mr Li - still vigorous at 68 - get when he loses the premiership in March, and what will happen to the present number three, Mr Qiao Shi, president of the National People's Congress, the Chinese parliament?
Mr Qiao (73) is being written off - possibly prematurely - as the big loser in the infighting. Mr Jiang's allies have put Mr Qiao under pressure to step down and give his job to Mr Li, allowing the outgoing Prime Minister to have a public position of continuing high status. It would also give Mr Jiang the edge in a long-standing rivalry with Mr Qiao, who would be relegated to number four in the 18member politburo, without any portfolio.
However it has not been as simple as Mr Jiang would like. There have been rumblings from members of the National People's Congress, who do not want to lose Mr Qiao as chairman as he has allowed them to become less of a rubber stamp and to experiment with some radical ideas. They feel Mr Li would be a conservative bureaucrat resistant to change, and that putting him in charge of parliament would signal that the President is not intent on pursuing political reform. (A contrary viewpoint, put forward by a Russian diplomat, is that precisely because he is a powerful bureaucrat, Mr Li would ensure any body he controlled would have teeth).
In any event, Mr Qiao is no pushover. He has a powerful support base in the intelligence services and the People's Armed Police, and is backed by important party veterans like the former president, Mr Yang Shangkun, and a former NPC chairman, Mr Wan Li. It is not in Mr Jiang's interests to humiliate a fellow Politburo member with such connections and a compromise might be worked out.
Mr Li might get instead the chairmanship of the Central Commission for Disciplinary Inspection, the party's important anti-corruption organ. This would avoid demoting him and sending an unintended signal that the post-Deng leadership feels some guilt about the events of 1989 - no one believes that a serious rethink is going on yet. Mr Li himself, it is said, would like to have the title of president, but Mr Jiang is not likely to give up that, even though he also holds the more powerful post of general secretary.
As Mr Jiang manoeuvres to ensure that he emerges as the undisputed "core" leader at the first congress after the death of Deng Xiaoping, he has been embarrassed by an unusual historical spat. A hard-line party propagandist who has been busy boosting Mr Jiang's image as successor to Deng and Mao was allegedly a member of the Nationalist Youth League when the Kuomintang ruled China before 1949.
Mr Ding Guangen (68), a former bridge partner of Deng Xiaoping, was expected to get promoted to the Politburo standing committee; now he is said to have been demoted.
None of this surfaced, of course, at a pre-congress press conference held yesterday in the Great Hall of the People. We should know who gets what at the end of the sevenday congress. A spokesman, Mr Xu Guangchun, did confirm that the future of China's failed state enterprises would be central to Mr Jiang's policy address at the opening session this morning, though he asked the foreign press to desist from calling the share-holding system "privatisation".
He also said the congress would continue to advance reform of the political system, adding: "It is our firm objective to build firm socialistic democratic politics." But such sentiments have been expressed before by the Chinese Communist Party and real political reform is unlikely to be on the agenda.