As the world watched with suspense to see who the next leaders of China would be, it was somehow fitting that the names of the new members of the Politburo Standing Committee – China’s top leadership team – were first announced not on TV, nor on a website, but on Twitter and its Chinese equivalent, Weibo.

China’s new leaders were expected to walk onstage at 11am on Thursday morning. But they were nearly an hour late, leaving online users of Twitter and Weibo, China’s largest microblogging platform, aflutter with speculation. Read more

Wednesday marks the official end of the Chinese Communist party’s 18th Congress, a conclave that gathered more than 2,000 party members from across the country to select new leaders who will steer the world’s second-largest economy for the next 10 years.

The new members of the party’s most powerful inner circle—the Politburo Standing Committee—will be announced on Thursday and give a press conference. But what exactly has been going on inside the Great Hall of the People over the past week? Read more

Hu Jintao, China’s president, delivered the keynote speech for the opening of the 18th Party Congress in Beijing on Thursday morning, in which he laid out his vision of the policies that should guide the world’s second-largest economy.

Here’s a rundown of 8 key themes from his address likely to shape the priorities for China’s next rulers, who will be unveiled next week. Read more

China’s 18th Party Congress kicked off with the national anthem—and a moment of mourning for the “revolutionaries” who have passed away, including Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping.

But the revolutionary star of the show was clearly Jiang Zemin, who led China during the rapid growth of the 1990s, and who was given the prime seating spot at the Congress. Read more