CONGRESS The Party Congress, the 18th since the party was founded by the fledgling Soviets in 1921, will anoint China's new generation of leaders in a week-long session beginning on November 8. Such congresses take place each five years and, according to convention, a full leadership transition takes place every 10 years. In theory, around 2200 delegates, representing 83 million party members, will ''elect'' 200 members and 170 alternate members to the new Central Committee, which will, in turn, convene its first plenum on November 15. They will then elect 25 members to the Politburo and, most crucially, an inner sanctum of (probably) seven men who will form the Politburo Standing Committee. The world won't be sure of their identities until they walk out in hierarchical order behind the new general secretary, Xi Jinping (see X). DISAPPEARED Disappeared is a word that has been given a new passive form in the satirical language of the Chinese internet - as in ''the artist Ai Weiwei has been disappeared'' - following an upsurge in extra-judicial abductions of dissidents and lawyers. In September, Xi Jinping managed to make himself disappear for a fortnight. His absence remains unexplained, with speculation ranging from health problems to political gamesmanship. ECONOMY

The Chinese economy - as well as turbo-charging the Australian economy - is seen as the key to the compact that has thus far led China's 1.3 billion people to accept the party's monopoly on political power. An average GDP growth rate of 10 per cent for 30 years remains unmatched by any country at any time. While the economy has been faltering of late, where else could you report that growth has just slowed to 7.4 per cent? The party is discovering that rapidly rising incomes tend to empower individual citizens and lead them to feel more assertive about their rights. FERRARIS Ferraris are the toy of choice for the children of Communist Party leaders, but they can be dangerous if not driven with care. When a black Ferrari Spider 458 smashed into a bridge near Tsinghua University on March 18, travelling so fast that it split in two and exploded in flames, propaganda authorities tightly censored the news. But China's online community immediately concluded that the son of a senior leader must have been behind the wheel (accompanied by two semi-clad women, in the two-seater car). Six months later, it turned out they were right. The driver was the son of Ling Jihua, the most important power broker and organiser in the Chinese bureaucracy. Ling was moved sideways from his job not for the implication of gross family corruption and hypocrisy - a charge few leaders are immune from - but for covering up the fact of his own son's death. GENERAL SECRETARY The position of General Secretary of the Communist Party is the first and most important leadership title that Xi Jinping will receive in the three-stage handover from Hu Jintao that begins on November 15. He will also take a second crucial title, as chairman of the Central Military Commission, although the timing is uncertain. Xi Jinping's third title - the presidency - is largely a symbolic one, which should be bestowed in March.

HU JINTAO Hu Jintao remains an enigma to analysts, the public and many of his peers, even after nearly a decade running the world's second most powerful country. His reign began with optimism that he would redress China's growing inequalities and liberalise the party's political controls. Now, senior officials are openly talking about the ''lost decade'' of the Hu-Wen administration. It seems paradoxical that Hu Jintao could steer China to a position of such sudden global importance and retire as something of a tragic figure, particularly after his own clean image was tarnished by the exploding Ferrari driven by the son of his right-hand man (see F). INTERNET The internet is being used by half a billion Chinese, including a quarter of a billion who use the powerful weibo or microblog platforms. For the first time, citizens are able to form vast communities of like-minded people and see their personal and local grievances as part of a national and systemic problem. The ascendancy of weibo, despite enormous efforts to control and patrol it, has exposed countless abuses of power and also coincided with a surge of cynicism towards the party-state. Chinese society is finding new ways to participate in politics, whether the party likes it or not. JAPAN

Japan has been the subject of fierce propaganda in the Chinese media and mass protests across China since Tokyo announced it would nationalise the disputed Diaoyu Islands (Senkaku in Japanese) in early September. The protests, many of which were explicitly racist and violent, are perhaps the clearest example of a rising tide of state-sponsored nationalism that is unsettling China's neighbours. KISSINGER Henry Kissinger is everywhere in China. For decades he has been feted by Chinese leaders, advising international statesmen and profiting from multinational companies seeking access. Now his tome On China has been translated into Chinese and is prominent in local book stores, although his image has been dented by YouTube footage of him endorsing a mass red-singing rally of Bo Xilai's (see B). LI KEQIANG Li Keqiang is the vice-premier who is in line to become premier in March. In the early 1980s he was a respected student leader at Peking University, where he studied law and economics and translated a tome on constitutional law. It is difficult to judge his record over 25 years in government, given the party's insistence on collective decision-making and secrecy (see C).

MILITARY The military remains a powerful political force, despite being riddled with corruption and having few channels to co-ordinate with the civilian side of the party. A series of appointments in the People's Liberation Army will provide clues on whether and how quickly Xi Jinping can consolidate power. The most important question is whether President Hu hands over the chairmanship of the (11-member) Central Military Commission at the same time as he relinquishes the keys to the party apparatus. As Chairman Mao famously put it: ''Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.'' NATIONAL PEOPLE'S CONGRESS The National People's Congress, held for 10 days in March each year, is a legislature which in theory oversees the State Council, including the premier, in China's party-government divide. The NPC is the only opportunity for Chinese and foreign journalists to mix and ask questions of senior Chinese leaders. Cynics sometimes call the NPC a rubber-stamp parliament because it has never rejected a bill before it. It is often confused with the five-yearly Party Congress and also the Chinese People's Consultative Conference, which convenes at the same time in March, but whose members are appointed by the United Front Work Department to advise policy makers.

OPENING ''Opening and Reform'', the guiding slogan behind China's modern transformation, is being challenged by conservative ideologues and vested interests. Premier Wen Jiabao summed up the predicament in March this year: ''Reform has reached a critical stage. Without successful political structural reform, it is impossible for us to fully institute economic structural reform and the gains we have made in this area may be lost.'' PRINCELINGS Princelings are the children of revolutionary leaders who enjoy inherited prestige and power today. Many have made themselves fabulously rich by working the margins between political power and the market (see page 14). The incoming leadership group will be packed with princelings, led by Xi Jinping, although the Bo Xilai implosion has badly hurt the brand. QIAN

Qian, Chinese for money, is fast becoming the currency of Chinese politics. So much so that the phrase ''mai guan'' - the auctioning of official positions - has now entered mainstream Chinese dictionaries. Just as politicians are increasingly engaging in business, business people are being invited into the realms of politics. This year Bloomberg reported that the top 70 members of the National People's Congress are worth a cool $90 billion. RANK Rank has always been crucial to understanding the workings of China's extraordinarily hierarchical and minutely stratified Communist Party. The problem, for visiting dignitaries and executives, is that those rankings are not publicly disclosed. The hierarchy of the Politburo Standing Committee can be discerned by the order in which they appear on television. Lower levels are more confusing. Visiting trade ministers seldom realise, for example, that Commerce Minister Chen Deming is not one of China's top 203 officials, as he does not have a seat on the Central Committee. STATE-OWNED

State-owned enterprises command the strategic heights of the Chinese economy and they are subsidised by cheap capital, land and myriad regulatory concessions. They also possess great political power, beginning with the 23 SOE chairmen who have seats as members or alternate members of the Central Committee. One of the key tests of the new leadership is whether it can limit SOE privileges and thereby create more room for market-driven entrepreneurs (see Q). TIBET Tibet and Xinjiang, which together make up Western China, have been swept by unrest and blanketed by security forces since the March riots in Tibet in 2008 and the Xinjiang riots of July 2009. Many urban centres are effectively under military occupation. Since 2009 as many as 58 Tibetans have set themselves on fire in protest, according to the International Campaign for Tibet. Most have died. While many pressing political questions are being debated on the internet and in parts of the mainstream media ahead of the leadership transition, the concerns of ethnic Tibetans and Uighurs are out of bounds. UNITY Unity is the closest thing that China has to an official religion, according to David Kelly, research director at China Policy. This helps to explain why Chinese leaders must be seen to be uncompromising on sovereignty issues involving Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan and also the uninhabited islands in the East and South China seas. ''In Chinese political history, the heroes are those who unite the Chinese empire,'' says one veteran China watcher, Kevin Rudd. ''The villains are those who allow it to fall apart, or else make it vulnerable to foreign invasion.''

VESTED Vested interests - liyi in Chinese - are always alluded to but rarely defined when intellectuals and policy advisers debate obstacles to reform. The ''interests'' that gain from the current admixture of political and market power include real estate developers, state-owned corporations, bureaucratic empires and, of course, the Communist Party itself. WEN JIABAO China's Premier is the sole public advocate for political reform in the Politburo Standing Committee. Since 2008 he has spoken in increasingly urgent terms of the need to make officials more accountable to the people. What colleagues make of his lone crusade can be deduced from the censorship of such comments by state-run media. Wen Jiabao's most strident plea came in his final press conference, in March, in which he foreshadowed the demise of Bo Xilai and zeroed in on the urgent need for ''reform in the leadership system of our party and country''. XI JINPING

Xi Jinping (left), vice-president and leader-in-waiting, is not known for any significant achievements or egregious mistakes. He is the ultimate compromise candidate who has managed to straddle factional, ideological and bureaucratic divides. From November 15, he will have to show the character and political acuity that many of his close friends believe he has and lead China into the modern era. One great advantage Xi Jinping has is that his father was a respected revolutionary hero. The exclusive princeling network he grew up within now reaches across the heights of the party, military and business. YAN'AN Yan'an on the Loess Plateau of north-west China, is the sanctuary Xi Jinping's father helped to establish and which saved Mao's bedraggled Long March survivors in 1935. Yan'an, as the local museum puts it, ''is the holy land of the Chinese revolution'' and ''birthplace of New China''. ZENG QINGHONG Zeng Qinghong is the princeling power broker whose son, Zeng Wei, purchased a $31 million house at Point Piper immediately after the 17th Party Congress. Zeng senior had just brokered the deal that installed Xi Jinping as leader-in-waiting. In the lead-up to the 18th Party Congress, friends say he has confined himself to advising his patron, former president Jiang Zemin.