ANDREW WONG/REUTERS MAO NOW: A reform- minded generation of the Communist Party is seeking to exercise more clout

As the 16th congress of the Chinese Communist Party kicks off this week, few doubt that "fourth-generation" leader Hu Jintao will rise to the country's highest post, replacing Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin. Yet behind the scenes, in a development just as important to the Party's future, a fledgling generation of liberal political reformers is quietly gathering power and beginning to push for change. Though they are loyal Party members, they inherit a legacy that began when dissidents posted essays on Democracy Wall in 1978, and they share in the spirit of the students who invaded Tiananmen Square 11 years later. Unlike agitators who came before and failed, they want to remake the Party from within.

That may sound naive, but the Party's own propaganda is already trying to achieve one of the reformers' main goals: bridging the gap between China's élite and those they govern. Some of their ideas—once considered radical—have already been adopted, such as allowing entrepreneurs into the Party's ranks. And the reformers will press the new leadership to move on other changes, such as broadening the scope of competitive elections. Nobody is talking full democracy. Yet if the reformers succeed, they could lead China to a softer authoritarianism—like Singapore, but with a population 300 times bigger. But even that is a long way off, and the pursuit of these goals remains perilous. "They're up against the weight of history," says the top political watcher at a Western embassy in Beijing. "Every Communist Party that has tried to reform itself from within has collapsed."

Understanding the motivation of these reformers requires a look at their ancestry. They retain some dna from the likes of a Beijing electrician now in exile, Wei Jingsheng, whose 1978 essay "The Fifth Modernization" demanded immediate democracy—and cost him 15 years in prison. They share the ambitions, if not the urgency, of the 1989 students who died in Beijing during the military crackdown. Some of the reformers went public with their views after Deng Xiaoping's death in 1997, and are now well positioned within the Party's bureaucracy. "There are a lot of us in our 40s who expect our chance to push reforms in the next few years," says one Party intellectual.

They'll have a lot to push against, as the run-up to the 16th Party Congress shows. Many people believe Li Ruihuan—widely regarded as the most liberal member of the Party's leadership and as a nemesis to Jiang Zemin—might be forced into retirement. Such black box maneuvering is just what the reformists want to clean up—as is the time-honored method of weakening political opponents by sticking corruption probes in their backs. Right now, such intrigues are perceived to be running at high intensity. Police are investigating Gao Yan, an ally of the Party's No. 2, Li Peng. (Gao has reportedly fled to Australia.) They have also detained a colleague of the son of Zeng Qinghong, who is Jiang Zemin's top adviser. And last month a Beijing court sentenced banker Zhu Xiaohua, a comrade of Premier Zhu Rongji, to 15 years in prison for corruption. Official malfeasance is well worth fighting against, but some, including a well-connected law professor from Beijing, suspect these investigations are politically motivated.

Even during this infighting, however, Party liberals are experimenting with democracy in remote areas without the explicit imprimatur of Beijing. It is estimated that tens of thousands of villages in the countryside have held elections not only for village leaders—something that has gone on for more than a decade—but for village Party secretaries, the real power brokers in rural communities. Beijing bans media coverage of these elections, but otherwise it looks the other way. "It might take 50 years before we can elect our Premier," says a professor at the Communist Party School who sees himself as part of the new reform movement. "But we need to move in that direction."

Many in the Party are pushing faster. This year the leaders of two townships in Sichuan province that held elections for Party secretaries were invited to Beijing to receive an "innovation award" for creating what the judges called "effective and realistic new channels of participation." Two liberal Party enclaves in Beijing issued the award: a research center under the Party's translation department, and the comparative politics department of the Communist Party School. Jiang Zemin himself recently coined a phrase interpreted as a code word for political reform that could make such experiments easier. In a May 31 speech, he called for creating a "political civilization." The editor of a Party newspaper observes, "He couldn't say political reform because that implies demonstrators on the streets, but that's what it means."

In a Party infamous for censorship and narrow-mindedness, once intolerable ideas are getting a hearing at the most exalted levels. A professor from Beijing warned this year that without reforms, the growth of polarizing class differences could force China's disenfranchised poor to protest. China's "suitable way is American," he wrote, with "comparatively full democracy for society." He had friends distribute the essay to members of the all-powerful politburo. A few years ago his ideas might have been labeled as counterrevolutionary. "Now these kinds of ideas are reaching them," he says.

And some Party officials are reaching back with ideas of their own. Over the past year Shanghai, Guangzhou and other cities began public hearings to solicit input on proposed laws. A recent notification in a Shanghai newspaper, for example, invited readers to offer opinions on draft legislation to protect the city's decaying old buildings. "It's not just window dressing," says Phyllis Chang, a Beijing lawyer specializing in legal reform. "Many in the Party now believe in participation. They want the system to be transparent."

The biggest risk is that Chinese outside the Party system will push for changes faster than the new reformers feel is safe. That happened in the spring of 1998 when the country enjoyed a small flowering of political debate about democracy among intellectuals inside and outside the Party. Encouraged, a group of dissidents from around the country organized the Chinese Democratic Party (CDP). That autumn, the Communist Party crushed the movement as quickly as it began, sentencing three top cdp leaders to more than a decade in prison each.

Nobody believes that senior Party leaders are anywhere close to permitting the decade-long experiment in grassroots democracy to be replicated at higher levels, or that ordinary citizens will exert much influence over the political process anytime soon. But, says the newspaper editor, "eventually someone will write an article asking why the Party gets to have democracy but no one else does." And maybe the answer will come back that the rest of the country deserves it too.