Important changes are not always revolutions. The one that has just taken place in China affects the highest level of leadership in that vast country of epic changes. But there is also a certain staged naturalness about the transition. Mr Jiang Zemin has stepped down from China?s top military post, the chairmanship of the central military commission and head of the People?s Liberation Army. The president of China, Mr Hu Jintao, is now head of the state, the Communist Party and the military. A plenum communiqu? issued by the party describes this as ?upholding the fundamental principle and system of the Party?s absolute leadership over the military?. Mr Jiang is almost eighty and is supposed to be ill. He has been phasing himself out of the leadership since 2002, when he handed over the post of party chief to Mr Hu, almost twenty years his junior, who then succeeded Mr Jiang as president the following year. As president from 1989 to 2003, Mr Jiang took the helm of the world?s most populous country in the wake of the Tiananmen Square killings. China was then a virtual pariah state. But by the time he had handed the presidency over to Mr Hu, China had become the fastest-growing economy in the world as well as a military power to be reckoned with ? not least by India, which Mr Jiang visited in 1996.

The ruthless suppression of dissent has always been an important priority for the Chinese Communist Party. Its latest move towards a centralized collective leadership fits this abiding preoccupation. Hong Kong seems to have been quelled ?peacefully?. But Taiwan might demand a different order of readiness and toughness from the Chinese army ? numerically the world?s biggest and with a rapidly progressing modernization campaign. For Mr Hu, maintaining Mr Jiang?s tough stand against Taiwan will also be a way of addressing the United States of America, which is treaty-bound to intervene on behalf of the rebel island. But Mr Hu?s greatest challenge would be to walk the razor?s edge between the consolidation of leadership (an inevitably conservative process founded on the identification of party and state), and the maintenance of China?s economic status, with its equally inevitable drive towards openness and reform. The SARS crisis was a crucial test, and Mr Hu did finally manage to salvage his country?s image in the eyes of the international community. Centralization and progress are difficult ideals to steer between.