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THE Communist Party in China exerts a big influence on political movements around the world that yearn for a nonwestern path to modernity. But China itself faces steep challenges. On the economic front, the party is unsure how to engineer a shift from investment-driven to consumer-led growth and from state-directed to private investment.

Equally complex political challenges confront the ruling elite. Party leaders are preoccupied with the declining legitimacy of the party. Citizens are increasingly unwilling to tolerate crony capitalism, corruption and the abuse of power by party officials. The party itself is changing. According to data from the organisation department, 20-million of its 85-million members are now "managers and professionals". This is no longer a party of "workers, farmers, fishermen, and herdsmen".

Intriguingly, Communist Party leaders are engaging with western political theory to address these challenges. Multiparty politics, of course, is simply off the table. But constitutionalism, while not embraced by party leaders, is widely discussed in the state-controlled media.

Even conservatives view constitutionalism and managed intraparty democracy as instruments for rebuilding Communist Party legitimacy. One former party intellectual recently observed: "When guns, pens and pocketbooks are no longer capable of controlling the nation, is there any other path than constitutionalism to win recognition and support from the people anew?"

Cai Xia, a professor at Beijing’s party school, observed in June that "if we continue refusing to push … for the building of constitutionalism and democracy, the worsening of social tensions will be such that the ruling party will lose the opportunity for reform altogether".

At an innovative dialogue hosted this week by the Communist Party’s Shanghai Administration Institute (party school), foreign academics were invited to discuss these issues with official intellectuals and members of the organisation department. Prof Tang Haijun from the central committee’s international liaison department observed that pressures from citizens armed with new social media have forced parties everywhere to consider new "modes of consultation". Tang described democracy as "an irresistible trend". But he claimed that its realisation must be "based on realities in the country" and should "not be allowed to undermine the unity of the party".

Party leaders’ willingness to embrace western principles, however, is at best uncertain. A recently leaked memo from the central committee observed that the advocacy of constitutionalism poses a threat to "socialism with Chinese characteristics". The title of one piece in the People’s Daily last month exemplifies a residual hostility to bourgeois ideas: "Doing constitutionalism in China can only be like catching fish in a tree, subverting the rule of socialism."

Constitutionalist lawyers and academics have meanwhile been subjected to harassment and websites deliberating the merits of legal reform have been closed down. China’s indigenous Weibo social media system already allows for the "passive surveillance" of discontented citizens. Conservatives, however, have no credible alternative. Party leader Xi Jinping called last month for an "ideological purification" campaign. An official "managed list" of key officials, including party members in the financial sector, will allegedly soon be subjected to "close supervision, monitoring and observation" by Beijing officials. Meanwhile, the wealth and circumstances of Communist Party leaders will ostensibly be disclosed to the public. Official websites will be set up to channel citizens’ complaints about their rulers — but such inputs will be "filtered" to avoid "rumour-mongering".

Xi claims the party will "cage the tigers as well as the flies" — it will pursue errant leaders as well as corrupt minor bureaucrats. But recent "selective prosecutions" in China and elsewhere are a reminder that party factions will inevitably abuse anticorruption initiatives in the absence of free news media and impartial legal institutions.

• Butler is visiting Shanghai as a guest of the Communist Party’s Shanghai Administration Institute and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation.