In 2003, when Hu Jintao became president of China and, more important, head of the last major Communist party in power, there was some speculation that he might turnout to be a political reformer. Optimists trawled through the work done at his power base, the Party School, in search of indications that he would prove the political moderniser China so badly needs to complement its economic development. Hu has thoroughly disappointed any such hopes, showing his colours recently with a stern crackdown on dissent and muzzling of the media.
But this week has seen a significant move by the president, which, if carried through, could betoken a major change in the way China operates. It has nothing to do with political reform, democracy or the rule of law or accountability. It is high-level politics in its crudest form, designed to redress relations within the power structure.
By detaining the party boss in Shanghai, Chen Liangyu, the president may have fired the opening shot in a campaign to bolster central authority round himself and his colleagues. This is not simply a question of building up the status of the new generation leadership - important part of the process thought that is. What Beijing seems to be after is to combat the fragmentation of authority from the centre to the provinces before next year's major party congress.
The fragmentation is a process that began 150 years ago as the later Qing emperors were forced to devolve power to provincial gentry leaders to fight the huge rebellions of the mid-19th century, It continued under the warlords and the Nationalist Republic in the first of the 20th century and, after a period of centralisation under Mao, re-asserted itself from the 1980s as provinces raced ahead to take advantage of market-led reform with scant concern for what Beijing said.
Now, Hu appears to have decided that it is time to try to turn back the tide of the last decades which have seen provinces going their own way, building steel mills and industrial plants without permission and cocking a snoot at recent calls to slow down investment. Chen's dismissal on corruption charges is the climax of a specific fight - between Beijing and the "Shanghai faction" which ran China under Hu's predecessor, Jiang Zemin, and his prime minister, Zhu Rongji, both former mayors of the country's biggest city.
Since Jiang was elbowed out of his last major post as chairman of the Military Commission last year, his group has been on the slide though it was still influential enough to block a planned move against Chen last year. Now one of the ex-president's close associates appears to have allied with the new leadership and another has been sidelined by cancer.
So Chen became vulnerable. Though a stop-gap has been put in, Hu will almost certainly name one of his trusties to take over the city which has been made into the beacon of China's economic growth and opening to the world.
The fight against corruption is a real necessity in today's China, but it also serves as a convenient way of settling political scores - officials no longer get fired for ideological divergences but for more market-minded crimes. A warning shot was fired at Shanghai with the arrest of a leading developer who had traded on his contacts with the city government, and then, this summer, an investigation team was sent in. As a result, Chen is accused of complicity in the funnelling off of large parts of the assets of the city's billion-dollar pension and welfare fund.
He is the first serving Politburo member to have been pursued in this way for a decade. By going for such a high-profile target, Hu is serving a warning to other independent-minded provincial leaders - a crack down has also been reported in Henan and may be on the cards elsewhere. As the saying goes, when the tree falls, the monkeys scatter.
Hu and his administration know that, for all its bounding economic statistics, the mainland faces huge problems - in sustaining growth, dealing with wealth disparities and the urban-rural divide, pacifying dissent that produces 70,000 protests a year involving more than 100 people, environmental catastrophes, the bad debts of the state banks, runaway money supply, over-investment, too high savings and too low consumption, and yes, corruption - but, above all, in the lack of legitimacy for a threadbare party that claims a monopoly on power based on historical myths and use of force.
In that vortex,
Hu cannot allow leading figures like Chen to cock a snoot at the central government in its effort to bring order to today's China. A quarter-of-a-century ago Deng Xiaoping launched the move to the market to try to save the Communist Party. Today, the brake has to be applied to rein in the political and social effects of break-neck growth, Otherwise, the Communist party's hold on power will be compromised by the very success of Deng's experiment.
As a cautious, managerial leader, Hu may yet pull back in the face of the entrenched opposition in the nexus of provincial-official power. Next year's party congress will be the testing time. But if he sticks to his guns, and the move against Chen proves a sign of things to come, the Chinese paradigm is in for a shaking which could make or break the leadership.