BEIJING - The last time power changed hands at the top of China's Communist Party, the event was preceded by hundreds of thousands of students leading demonstrations in Beijing's Tiananmen Square and other cities demanding democratic reforms.
Thirteen years later, President Jiang Zemin, 76, is set to surrender his post as general secretary of the Communist Party to his anointed successor, Vice President Hu Jintao, 59, at the party congress that opens today. And China's young, bright minds are too busy having fun and planning careers to stop and take note.
Li Xue, a 20-year-old undergraduate law student, is sipping a cappuccino with her boyfriend at a Starbucks near People's University. Law student Xiang Jianguo is hurrying to play pingpong at Beijing University. Ren Yuan, a 20-year-old who just graduated into the working world, is munching on chicken wings at a McDonald's, dreaming of money.
The 2,114 delegates to the Communist Party's 16th National Congress, if all goes according to plan, will launch the nation's first stable, peaceful transition of power under Communist rule.
It's an intricately staged, profoundly undemocratic exercise of power in which state propaganda and the security apparatus play significant supporting roles. Virtually everyone in China knows the public has no say in who the next leader of China will be. But in sharp contrast to 1989, today's generation of students doesn't really care.
"I care about myself and the things around me," said Li, a student at a private college in the area. Her 18-year-old boyfriend was consumed with sending text messages on his $350 mobile phone. "I also care about things going on around the country, but the people aren't going to affect any decisions made by the government anyway. As long as the policies help improve people's standard of living, I'm going to support them."
Today's students, Xiang said, are different.
"As students, I think we are becoming more realistic," said Xiang, 25, who has hopes of becoming a judge. "I care about what kind of job I'm going to find after graduation, what kind of economic welfare I will enjoy."
Beginning with the bloody government crackdown at Tiananmen Square 13 years ago, a potent combination of tight political controls and rapid economic growth has transformed college campuses and the intellectual elite. To the deep disappointment of reform advocates and human rights activists, a vital constituency for political reform in China has all but disappeared.
"That sense of idealism is not really alive in today's campus in China," said Xiao Qiang, executive director of Human Rights in China, based in New York. "It's partly the government's successful strategy to buy off these intellectuals and also disarm them."
The student leaders and their sympathizers from 1989 have been imprisoned, hassled, denounced and exiled for their political views and activism. On the campuses they left behind, a once-freewheeling political environment has been supplanted by a more cautious, conservative academic atmosphere. And, most important, economic reform gave a new generation of students a more rewarding pursuit than political reform.
'They just want money'
"University students [are] materialists in comparison with those idealists in the 1980s," said Wu Guoguang, a professor of political science in Hong Kong and a former aide to Zhao Ziyang, the reformist general secretary of the Communist Party who was purged in favor of Jiang. "They just want money."
Such circumstances reflect how the party of Mao Zedong has managed to stabilize its grip on power in part by abandoning its socialist roots. The acceleration of liberal economic reforms under Jiang has swung wide the doors of opportunity - creating new wealth especially for the elite, well educated and well connected while leaving millions of laid-off workers and struggling farmers caught in a wrenching transition without much of a safety net.
At this national congress, an event held every five years, the party will further redefine socialism to a degree that would have confounded Marx, Lenin and Mao, officially welcoming capitalists into its ranks under the banner of an opaque theory of Jiang's called the "Three Represents," a plan to invite private businessmen into the party of peasants and workers.
While this might only deepen workers' and farmers' disillusionment with the party that was established to represent them, students are heeding the call to capitalism. If they ponder the Communist Party, it's often to consider joining for the connections to get ahead in the business world.
"Now young students ... hope they will join the elite in the future," said Wu. "In the past 13 years, even the intellectuals, the so-called intellectuals, they've had a big turn toward conservatism. Now they support the current regime. They think that political stability is more important than anything else."
If pressed on the subject of democracy, many students tend to parrot something close to the establishment line: The country, accustomed to countless centuries of autocratic rule, isn't ready to vote for its leaders, and should not move too quickly in that direction.
"I don't care whether I have the right to vote, because this is how things have been in this country for many years," said the recent college graduate Ren, a real estate saleswoman on a lunch break at a McDonald's in downtown Beijing, a couple of miles from Tiananmen Square.
Between sips of her cappuccino at a Starbucks in northwest Beijing, Li, the undergraduate law student, concluded that having the right to vote is "not so important." Too young to know much about the protests for democracy in 1989, she observed flatly, "China is not ready" for democracy.
Stifling atmosphere
Advocates of reform attribute such attitudes in part to an intellectual atmosphere that is stifling compared with that of the 1980s. Academics fear deviating too far from the official line, they say, and security forces clamp down on even embryonic attempts at activism.
"If there are people who try to organize in small groups or write articles on the Internet, [the authorities] are very effective at stamping it out before it becomes bigger on campus," said Xiao, citing the example of Yang Zili, a young software engineer who has been detained since March of last year. Yang and three friends, all in their 20s, were tried in September for plotting to overthrow the government after they held discussion groups at Beijing University and posted pro-democracy commentary on the Internet.
"The security forces," Xiao said, "are still very effective."
Such determined efforts to control dissent, combined with economic reforms, have paid off for Jiang and the Communist Party.
Jiang has not been an inspiring leader in the mold of his larger-than-life predecessors, the revolutionary heroes Mao and Deng Xiaoping, who represented the first and second generations of China's Communist leadership. But Jiang and the Third Generation of leaders have presided over an unprecedented era of political stability, culminating in a peaceful handover of power in the week-long meeting ahead.
Little is known about the leader of the Fourth Generation, Hu, other than his official resume of party posts. But with Jiang expected to continue to wield influence behind the scenes, little is expected to change in the next few years. For today's educated youth, that's no cause for protest.