As China Talks of Change, Fear Rises on Risks BEIJING - A heavyweight crowd gathered last October for a banquet at the five-star hotel in Beijing's tallest skyscraper. The son of Mao Zedong's immediate successor was there, as was the daughter of the country's No. 2 military official for nearly three decades, along with the half sister of China's president-in-waiting, and many more. Alfred Jin/Reuters President Hu Jintao, left, of China, with his successor, Vice President Xi Jinping, whose political views are largely a mystery. Gridlock at the Top Articles in this series will examine the implications for China and the rest of the world of the coming changes in the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. "All you had to do," said one attendee, Zhang Lifan, "was look at the number of luxury cars and the low numbers on the plates." Most surprising, though, was why the meeting took place. A small coterie of children of China's founding elites who favor deeper political and economic change had come to debate the need for a new direction under the next generation of Communist Party leaders, who are set to take power in a once-a-decade changeover scheduled to get under way this year. And it was not the only time: many had met the previous August, and would meet again in February. The private gatherings are a telling indicator of how even some in the elite are worried about the course the Communist Party is charting for China's future. And to advocates of political change, they offer hope that influential party members support the idea that tomorrow's China should give citizens more power to choose their leaders and seek redress for grievances, two longtime complaints about the current system. But the problem is that even as the tiny band of political reformers is attracting more influential adherents, it is splintered into factions that cannot agree on what "reform" would be, much less how to achieve it. The fundamental shifts that are crucial to their demands - a legal system beyond Communist Party control as well as elections with real rules and real choices among candidates - are seen even among the most radical as distant dreams, at best part of a second phase of reform. In addition, the political winds are not blowing in their favor. The spectacular fall this spring of Bo Xilai, the Politburo member who openly espoused a populist philosophy at odds with elite leaders, offered an object lesson in the dangers of challenging the status quo. And official silence surrounding his case underscores high-level fears that any public cracks in the leadership's facade of unity could lead its power to crumble. As a result, few people here expect the party to willingly refashion itself anytime soon. And even those within the elite prepared to discuss deeper changes, including the second-generation "princelings," as they are known, have a stake in protecting their own privileges. "Compare now to 1989; in "89, the reformers had the upper hand," said Zhang Lifan, a historian formerly associated with the government's Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, referring to the pro-democracy student protests that enjoyed the support of a number of important party leaders but were crushed in Tiananmen Square. Twenty years later, the reformers have grown weaker. Now there are so many vested interests that they'll be taken out if they touch anyone else's interests. To Mr. Zhang and others, this is the conundrum of China's rise: the autocracy that back-flipped on Marxist ideology to forge the world's second-largest economy seems incapable of embracing political changes that actually could prolong its own survival. Much as many Americans bemoan a gridlocked government split by a yawning partisan gap, Chinese advocates for change lament an all-powerful Communist Party they say is gridlocked by intersecting self-interests. None of the dominant players - a wealthy and commanding elite; rich and influential state industries; a vast, entrenched bureaucracy - stands to gain by ceding power to the broader public. Many who identify with the reform camp see change as inevitable anyway, but only, they say, because social upheaval will force it. In that view, discontent with growing inequality, corruption, pollution and other societal ills will inevitably lead to a more democratic society - or a sharp turn toward totalitarianism. An overriding worry is that unless change is carefully planned and executed, China risks another Cultural Revolution-style upheaval that could set it back decades. "The bureaucrats still don't have this sense of a crisis," one editor at a major Communist Party newspaper, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said in an interview this year. They think that they can continue to muddle through. And perhaps they can - at least for a while longer. Most Chinese credit the party for lifting hundreds of millions of citizens from poverty and creating a huge urbanized middle class, providing a foundation of support for the status quo. Sharon LaFraniere and Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting. Mia Li contributed research.