The Chinese Communist Party will select this week a new generation of Party’s leaders through the 17th National Party Congress, to be followed by a selection of key state leaders.

Although Chairman and President Hu Jintao and Politburo standing member and Premier Wen Jiaobao will continue to play top leadership roles, a significant portion of the next leadership will be filled by a number of younger competent technocrats who have had extensive administrative experience as well as solid academic training in jurisprudence or the social sciences.

In spite of Hu Jintao’s statement on the opening day of the 17th Party Congress that China would never adopt a Western political system, the new leadership should tackle, rather than ignore, the real agenda for reform. This includes not only the issues concerning the rule of law, political participation, and free and fair competition for leadership positions, but crucuially, the decentralisation of power.

The fact that such a transition can be expected attests to a notable improvement in China’s domestic stability and institutionalisation of a leadership succession mechanism. The current state of affairs is in sharp contrast to the brutal factional struggles and unpredictable successions that resulted in periods of protracted domestic instability, as exemplified by the Cultural Revolution.

Yet, the coming leadership change will only marginally enhance the Communist regime’s capacity to govern China’s super-sized territory and population from a single political centre in Beijing. China’s economy and society, once fairly uni-dimensional under Mao, has become increasingly convoluted as a result of Dengist reforms.

The regime is now overwhelmed by wide-ranging complexities because it is trying to manage snowballing socio-political contradictions that have resulted from rapid industrialisation, unbalanced socio-economic development, and a grave dearth of democratic remedies under Communist dictatorship.

One way that a state seeks to govern a large, increasingly complex society is to improve infrastructure capacity - especially the means of nationwide communication, transportation, and other lifelines, as are necessary for political, economic, and cultural integration. It is comparatively simpler to govern a small country since its geographic, topographic and climatic conditions vary less than those of a huge country.

With a highly developed infrastructure, however, the United States continues to be basically free from serious governability deficits, even though its territory covers not only a significant portion of the vast North American continent but also many Pacific and Caribbean islands. China’s territory is as large as the continental US and arguably far more diverse, yet lacks adequate infrastructure for national integration - and this will remain so for the foreseeable future.

China’s population of 1.3 billion (over four times that of the US) also poses a severe governability problem. The dilemma is particularly acute because China possesses not only significant ethnic minorities, such as Tibetans and Uigurs, but the majority Han Chinese have diverse local identities. China lacks a strong sense of national unity unlike the US with its commitment to freedom and democracy.

Human wisdom dictates that, when a problem is formidably large, it needs to be broken down into manageable pieces. A super-sized country will become manageable when it adopts a decentralised political system. The Indian case is noteworthy because the country’s federal system functions well to govern the similar super-size, comparably constrained by poor infrastructure.

Unfortunately, China is locked in a centralised political system. The current regime remains under all-out authoritarian rule, in spite of having abandoned the substantial Marxist-Leninist ideology in the pursuit of capitalist development. Rather, the regime has striven to maintain its legitimacy by resorting to popular nationalistic sentiment involving the image of a super-sized, unified, and strong China as the motherland.

Hence, the regime’s leaders cannot give up China’s super-size as an essential source of the country’s “greatness,” inhibiting them from transforming the current regime to a federal system. The durability of China’s super-size is firmly embedded in the prevailing Chinese political culture pivoted around the sense of “correct” political orderliness in favor of unification and centralisation.

Without effective decentralisation, Chinese leaders will not be able to formulate and implement effective public policies to match diverse local needs across the huge country. Not being omniscient, they cannot but adopt highly uniform policies that are insensitive to diverse, unique, and rapidly shifting local conditions.

Instead, China’s public policies from a single political center will necessarily remain heavy-handed and coercive, lacking avenues for democratic remedy. However the regime may well evolve, although its leaders will face ever-growing governability deficits. In this light, Beijing’s newly proclaimed “harmonious society” approach will most likely end up as a one-size-fits-all policy on a variety of issues, destined to be not only inefficient but also ineffectual in easing regime-debilitating contradictions.