The 12th Five-Year Plan and the previous NPC session also looked at social management. Expenditure on public security like police is high, with the costs of arbitration between different contesting groups rising as their claims on land, or public goods, or other material assets increase. Investment in social infrastructure and ways of delivering social cohesion will need to continue. The creation of a stakeholder society where people are able to take responsibility increasingly for their affairs is part of the journey toward middle-income status for the country and a doubling of per-capita GDP by 2020.

But having systems in society that can mediate between different income groups and create harmony among them is something that takes time. In particular, the discussions this NPC has about increasing land rights, pensions or household registration reforms will be important. Each of these poses major policy challenges, which have been heavily discussed in the past. The main issue now is to get some sense of where the new leadership might wish to go with these reforms and how they build on the legacy of the last group of leaders.

Austerity politics

One of the moves made by the new leadership in the Standing Committee of the CPC Central Committee Political Bureau since last November is to cut down on official expenditure. Officials have been told to restrict how much they spend on entertainment and banquets. They have been told to economize on travel, domestically and overseas.

Diners bag their leftovers at a restaurant in Shanghai on February 6 [Photo/Fan Jun]

Austerity politics have been in existence in Europe and North America now for over five years. Here, governments, whatever their political complexion, have a common problem. In the United States, fights are looming over the deficit between the president and Congress, with the government due to spend over $3.5 trillion, and revenues from tax and other income sources only coming in at $1 trillion less than this. Funding this massive shortfall has become a political time bomb. In the UK, public spending continues to rise way beyond government predictions, with a $90-billion increase this year, at a time when tax revenues are going down.

The Chinese Government's finances are not in this position, but there is a sense in which a more frugal period is here and in which the government has to become more fiscally efficient and focused on economizing. What will be of most importance in the NPC for many observers therefore will be some idea of where resources and expenditure are likely to be committed in the coming year, in which areas there are likely to be increases, and in which (for instance capital investment) there are likely to be reductions, or at least a freeze. This is different this time because it will be seen as representative of what a new and still largely little understood leadership is aiming to do in the longer term.

Finally, there is the issue of how the new leadership in the NPC communicates both domestically and internationally. We are used to the ways in which those leaders now retiring spoke and the sorts of messages they conveyed in their public language. During the NPC we are likely to see, for the first time, the new leadership speaking at length about their ideas for the future and where China now needs to go, and see where these remain the same as the previous leadership and where there might be developments or differences of emphasis.

Presentation is often dismissed too easily, with people being keen to say how much they value substance. But at the end of the day, presentation does matter, in intellectually and, to some extent, cognitively persuading people to accept an argument or at least think about it. The ways in which the NPC shows us officials, leaders and influential figures prioritizing challenges, seeking new ways to approach issues and revealing something about their attitude toward policy innovation are important. After all, a lot has changed since last year, and this will be as good a chance as any to assess what has happened, where we all stand, and in which direction we, China and the world, are likely to go.

The author is an op-ed contributor to Beijing Review and executive director of the China Studies Center at the University of Sydney.