A Communist Party gathering in China will test Xi Jinping’s power

CHINA’S elite have long had to keep their diaries clear for much of September, October and November, waiting for a date to be announced for a five-yearly congress of the ruling Communist Party. At last, it has been revealed. The red carpets will be rolled out and the skies turned blue (by shutting down factories and keeping cars off the roads) on October 18th. It will be the 19th such gathering since the party was founded in 1921. At the meeting, some 2,300 hand-picked delegates will choose a new Central Committee which will then hold its own conclave to reshuffle membership of the country’s most powerful decision-making bodies. The line-up has been largely settled during months of secretive horse-trading. Rumours abound about who has made the cut.

The president, party chief and supreme commander of the armed forces, Xi Jinping, certainly has. He has already served five years as the party’s general secretary. If he sticks to precedent, he has another five years to go (though some believe he wants to keep the job longer than the usual decade). This meeting will give Mr Xi his first chance to implement sweeping changes of personnel at the very top of the party—his predecessors selected the 25 members of the current Politburo at the previous congress in 2012. It is widely expected that this gathering will offer clues as to how effectively Mr Xi has consolidated his power since then and what he plans to do with it. The signals, however, will be hard to read.