Politicial system reform has always been a sensitive issue, revolving around the redistribution of power and vested interests of government.

Rather than copying the prevalent multi-party system in the West, China aims to blaze a different trail by expanding democracy and autonomy for its 1.3 billion people based on existing political framework.

The reform is aimed at securing the governing party status of the Communist Party of China (CPC), under whose leadership other parties jointly participate in state affairs through political consultation.

The National People's Congress functions as the parliament, supervising the State Council, the goverment's administrative arm, while the Party's leadership is prevailing under the most senior decision-making body, the CPC Central Committee.

This framework, established shortly after the New China was founded in 1949, is viewed by the CPC Party authorities as the precondition to realizing a "Socialist democracy".

The core of the reform is to optimize rather than topple then rebuild, to political restructuring in China has appeared less exhilarating than economic reform, which brought world-shaking changes from a planned shortage economy to robust market economy.

Tan Gang, vice president of the Party School of the Shenzhen Municipal Committee of the CPC, however, insists political reform is breath-taking in a different way.

"Every nudge toward more extensive democracy will require reformers to have enormous political courage to not fear making mistakes. But without support from and tolerance by higher authorities, reformers will get hardly anywhere with their experiments," he says.

PREMIER'S WARNING

The latest comfort to reformers came from Premier Wen Jiabao who reiterated the difficulties and significance of optimizing the Socialist system during a tour of Shenzhen, China's first economic zone, this month.

Wen said China should push forward not only economic reform, but also political restructuring.

"Without safeguarding political restructuring, China may lose what it has already achieved through economic restructuring and the targets of its modernization drive might not be reached," he warned.

Wen made it clear that the Chinese must be mobilized and organized, in accordance with the law, to deal with state, economic, social and cultural affairs while democratic and legitimate rights must be guaranteed.

He said the government should create conditions to allow the people to criticize and supervise.

The remarks came right before the 30th anniversary of the establishment of economic zones -- a "significant signal" that the CPC expects Shenzhen to continue spearheading the reform by advancing political system reforms, says Zhao Zhikui, a researcher with the Marxism Research Institute of the China Academy of Social Sciences.

"If China wants to seek a bigger role in the global arena, it must get stronger by expanding democracy and automony to better address thorny domestic concerns and to close the ties between the government and the people," says Zhao.

CONSTRAINING AUTHORITY

A closer look at Shenzhen, bordering Hong Kong, highlights political system reform involving the Party, the administration and the public.

Lai Yukun, deputy chief of the organization department of the Shenzhen Municipal Commitee of the CPC, said one innovative reform was to adopt increasingly competitive elections for leadership positions.

The city's Fifth Congress of the Party Representatives in May decided that leading officials will be nominated more by public recommendation and decided more by public election rather than higher authority appointments.

By 2015, at least half of Shenzhen's new promotions for leadership positions below bureau level will be decided through competitive election.

In descending order, the ranks of China's civilian official echelon are state leaders, ministers, bureau chiefs, division chiefs and section heads.

Official figures show that more than 3,000 people have taken up Shenzhen leadership posts at or below division level through competition since 2005.

The experiment was expanded to the higher bureau-chief level in June when more than 219 people joined in public competition for the city's eight bureau-level leadership positions.

Feng Xianxue, 45, was a dark horse who beat 43 older competitors to win the post of director of the Pingshan New District Management Committee after standing on a soap box to volunteer at an enlarged meeting of the Municipal Party Committee.

Professor Wang Yukai, of the Chinese Academy of Governance, said reform of the selection mechanism for officials was an institutional solution to the problem of over-concentrated power with ineffective supervision.

From this year, the city authority is also ending life-long employment for all new government employees and plans, over the next 30 years, to transfer the city's 40,000 government officials in service from de facto life-long employment to labor contracts.

This is the breaking of the "iron rice bowl," a legacy of the planned economy now reserved mainly for civil servants, and a relic of the past mind-set that civil service employment meant official authority.

EMPOWERING PEOPLE

Non-government social organizations have been encouraged to grow to improve the efficiency of public services and constrain the unnecessary sprawl of government affiliates by cutting ties between government departments and social organizations.

In 2004, when the reform began, 211 government and Party officials were forced to resign from posts in guilds and chambers of commerce, turning the latter into independent associations.

From this year, the creation of public institutions to do tasks that can be accomplished by social organizations is prohibited, says Liu Runhua, director of the Shenzhen Municipal Civil Affairs Department.

The city government has used a package of policies to quicken the growth of social organizations, including purchasing public services from social organizations and providing training services to fledging societies.

Nineteen full-time social organization workers were elected this year to the city's Party Congress, People's Congress and People's Political Consultative Conference, more than double the figure the previous term.

Another Shenzhen reform has been the transformation of neighbourhood committees from defacto inferiors of governments to autonomous residents' organizations responsible for reporting the needs of local people to the government and urging authorities to make timely responses.

Community Work Stations were esblished instead as an agency of the city government to take over the tasks previously performed by neighbourhood committees, such as maintaining social order, family planning and administration for retired workers.

The city has so far established 632 community work stations and 800 neighbourhood committees.

An ardent advocator of China's political system reform, Liu Runhua says that for a long time neighbourhood committees had eroded self-governance by urban residents.

"Now they should play a supervising role over governments and let the government know local residents feel unsatisfied and why," he says.

In an effort to further expand grass-roots democracy, Liu says, the city is considering allowing migrant workers join direct elections of neighbourhood committees next year.

Liu says China has two main paths to expand the Socialist democracy -- one concerning democracy within the Party, and the other grass-roots democracy.

"Although there is still a long way to go and hurdles ahead, I've seen a motivated government bravely striking forward for the good of the people," he says.