UNLIKE attention-seeking politicians elsewhere, senior Communist cadres in China like to keep their ambitions hidden. If anything, they signal grey conservatism, stressing how little they wish to change things. But as the country awaits a change of its leadership late next year, some high officials are up for a bit of self-promotion. In Guangdong province in the south the Communist Party chief, Wang Yang, is dropping hints that his more liberal style of governing might offer a better way for running the country.

Guangdong has long been the most vibrant and economically liberal province in China. Now the idea that economic liberalism might be matched by greater political openness has come to be called the “Guangdong model”. A prominent supporter is Xiao Bin of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, the provincial capital. On the blackboard, he draws a picture of an egg. He makes chalk marks on the white to show how changes can be made in the way the party rules, while leaving the yolk—for which read a Communist Party monopoly on power—unmarked.

Mr Wang, who is 56, has been a member of the ruling Politburo since 2007. He knows well how to keep within the party's bounds. He rarely talks of the Guangdong model, which would sound like a slap at others. But among academics and online commentators, the term has blossomed. Guangdong newspapers occasionally talk about it.

Fans of the model fiercely defend it against advocates of its rival promoted by the party chief of Chongqing deep inland, Bo Xilai, who has a flair for publicity. Both Mr Wang and Mr Bo may join the Politburo's standing committee next year, when seven of nine members, including President Hu Jintao and the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, will step down. Mr Bo trumpets the importance of state-owned enterprises, traditional socialist values and the inspirational power of Mao-era songs—while getting tough on organised crime. Maoist websites lionise Mr Bo; the Chongqing model is held up in shining contrast to that of Guangdong and its “capitalist roaders”. Six decades of Communist rule have been punctuated by battles between the left (as Mr Bo's supporters are proud to call themselves) and the right (a label that carries a stigma to this day). This battle is exceptional, however. It is being fought out not in arcane commentaries in party newspapers but in open debate. Both camps hold symposiums about their respective models. A book is out about the Chongqing model. In literary terms, Mr Xiao admits that the Guangdong camp is lagging somewhat. Perhaps the debate generates more heat in public than it does in the Communist Party itself. A researcher at Guangdong's party school says Guangdong and Chongqing are not in opposition. Both regions, he says, are learning from each other. For example, Chongqing is building the development zones to attract investors that Guangdong pioneered in the 1980s. Guangdong, he says, could learn from Chongqing's efforts to absorb migrants from the countryside into city life. Guangdong academics have studied Chongqing's experiments in creating markets for rural land, where powerful restrictions apply even in “liberal” Guangdong. In the political realm, however, Mr Wang's supporters point to changes which, they say, are distinctive. One concerns the role of trade unions, a rather sensitive area for a party that is still unnerved by the role that Solidarity played in Poland in the 1980s to bring down Communist power.

Mr Wang's rethink was triggered by a spate of 200-odd strikes last year in the Pearl River delta that began in May with workers downing tools at a Honda car-parts factory in Foshan, near Guangzhou. Mr Wang, says an academic, chose not to see the strikes as a threat to political stability. Indeed he expressed sympathy with the workers' demands (which is perhaps easier to do at companies owned by foreigners). Elsewhere in China ringleaders are commonly rounded up once strikes have been settled, but those in Guangdong were not. All the incidents, the academic says, had “happy endings”, with pay increases of 30-40%.

Buying off strikers is common enough in China. But Mr Wang went further, encouraging state-affiliated trade unions (there are no independent ones) to be more active in representing workers' interests. Trade unions in China are normally little more than creatures of management, run by party cadres. Prodded by Mr Wang, Guangdong's unions began encouraging collective bargaining, a practice officially authorised but widely disliked by local officials who fear worker activism and upward wage pressures. Mr Wang's views did not strike an instant chord with his subordinates. Most participants at one meeting on how to handle the strikes “didn't get it” when he called for a hands-off approach, says someone with knowledge of the proceedings.

By contrast, during a large-scale taxi strike in Chongqing in 2008, Mr Bo was more interventionist. He held an unusual televised meeting with drivers, but later launched a sweeping anti-mafia campaign that resulted in a wealthy businessman accused of organising the strike being sentenced to 20 years in prison for gangsterism and disrupting transport.

Supporters of the Guangdong model also point to the greater leeway Mr Wang has given NGOs, which are heavily circumscribed in China. Their registration in Guangdong, and especially in Shenzhen, a trailblazing economic zone bordering Hong Kong, involves fewer hoops. Mr Wang has been credited with promoting more open access to information about government spending. In 2009 Guangzhou became the first Chinese city to publish all its budgets.

It is never entirely clear how much of these initiatives have been taken by Mr Wang himself. Guangdong in general and Shenzhen in particular have long enjoyed unusual freedom to experiment. This year Mr Wang has been promoting the goal of a “happy Guangdong” (the pursuit of which is enshrined in the province's new five-year plan). Public happiness, assessed by opinion polls, is being introduced as a new criterion for judging local leaders' suitability for promotion.

Yet unhappiness remains rife, and in this Guangdong is no exception. Dissatisfaction is widespread among the more than 36m migrants in Guangdong, one-third of the provincial population, many of whom work in harsh conditions.

Protests, sometimes violent, are common. In Dadun village, on the edge of one of Guangzhou's satellite towns, a notice outside the government headquarters promises rewards of up to 10,000 yuan ($1,600) for turning in “criminals” involved in large riots in June triggered by security guards roughing up a street hawker. The rioters were migrants who work in countless small jeans factories, one even in a temple courtyard, trimming threads and stamping on studs.

Nor does the Guangdong model extend to free and fair elections. In September Dadun held a ballot for seats in the local legislature. But only its fewer than 7,000 Cantonese inhabitants were allowed to vote, and not the 60,000-odd sweatshop labourers from other provinces. In a village near Foshan, residents elected an independent candidate, ie one who did not have party backing. Plainclothes goons now keep watch on his home. A villager confides her support for the new legislator only in a hushed tone. Mr Wang's egg-yolk remains inviolate.