The Guangdong model

UNLIKE attention-seeking politicians elsewhere, senior Communist cadres in China like to keep their ambitions hidden. If anything, they signal grey conservatism, stressing how little they wish to change things. But as the country awaits a change of its leadership late next year, some high officials are up for a bit of self-promotion. In Guangdong province in the south the Communist Party chief, Wang Yang, is dropping hints that his more liberal style of governing might offer a better way for running the country.

Guangdong has long been the most vibrant and economically liberal province in China. Now the idea that economic liberalism might be matched by greater political openness has come to be called the “Guangdong model”. A prominent supporter is Xiao Bin of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, the provincial capital. On the blackboard, he draws a picture of an egg. He makes chalk marks on the white to show how changes can be made in the way the party rules, while leaving the yolk—for which read a Communist Party monopoly on power—unmarked.