Corruption remains the hardest nut to crack. In recent years, family members of some party leaders have used their political influence to build up large networks of commercial interests. Cronyism is spreading from the top down, which could eventually threaten the party's rule. The CCP has articulated a three-pronged strategy to attack the problem, which the new leadership will carry out. The most important institution for containing corruption is the CCP's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. Its leader usually sits on the Standing Committee of the Politburo and has more power than the state judiciary. This person can detain and interrogate party members suspected of corruption without legal limits. In recent years, the commission has been very aggressive. In 2011, it conducted formal investigations into 137,859 cases that resulted in disciplinary actions or legal convictions against party officials. This number represents a nearly fourfold increase since the years before 1989, when corruption was one of the main issues that drove the Tiananmen protests. One sign to watch in the next administration is whether the commission is authorized to investigate wrongdoing within the inner sanctum of the party leadership, where corruption can be the most detrimental to the party's credibility.

Complementing the party's own antigraft efforts is the increasing independence of media outlets, both state- and privately owned. News organizations have already exposed cases of official corruption and disseminated their findings on the Internet. The CCP has responded by pursuing some of the cases that the media have brought to light. Of course, this system is not perfect, and some media outlets are themselves corrupt. Illicit payments to journalists and fabricated stories are commonplace. If these problems are not corrected quickly, Chinese media will lose what little credibility they have gained.

Accordingly, the next administration might develop more sophisticated political regulations and legal constraints on journalists to provide space for the sector to mature. Officials have already discussed instituting a press law that would protect legitimate, factual reporting and penalize acts of libel and misrepresentation. Some might view the initiative as the government reining in journalists, but the larger impact would be to make the media more credible in the eyes of the Chinese public. Journalists who take bribes or invent rumors to attract readers can hardly check government corruption.

Also to tackle corruption, the party plans to increase open competition within its own ranks, inspired by the efforts of officials such as Qiu. The hope is that such competition will air dirty laundry and discourage unseemly behavior. The Hu administration initiated an "intraparty democracy" program to facilitate direct competition for seats on party committees, an idea that received high praise at the 18th Congress.

HISTORY'S RESTART

Should the 18th Party Congress' initiatives succeed, 2012 might one day be seen as marking the end of the idea that electoral democracy is the only legitimate and effective system of political governance. While China's might grows, the West's ills multiply: since winning the Cold War, the United States has, in one generation, allowed its middle class to disintegrate. Its infrastructure languishes in disrepair, and its politics, both electoral and legislative, have fallen captive to money and special interests. Its future generations will be so heavily indebted that a sustained decline in average living standards is all but certain. In Europe, too, monumental political, economic, and social distress has caused the European project to run aground. Meanwhile, during the same period, China has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and is now a leading industrial powerhouse.

The West's woes are self-inflicted. Claims that Western electoral systems are infallible have hampered self-correction. Elections are seen as ends in themselves, not merely means to good governance. Instead of producing capable leaders, electoral politics have made it very difficult for good leaders to gain power. And in the few cases when they do, they are paralyzed by their own political and legal systems. As U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton travels around the world extolling electoral democracy, the legitimacy of nearly all U.S. political institutions is crumbling. The approval rating of the U.S. Congress among the American people stood at 18 percent in November. The president was performing somewhat better, with ratings in the 50s. And even support for the politically independent Supreme Court had fallen below 50 percent.