IT’S NOT quite on the same scale as the planetary alignment heralded by some as the great “harmonic convergence”. But with an unusual alignment of political calendars in America and China, there sure is a lot of important politicking going on this week. A mere two days after Barack Obama’s victory in an acrimonious presidential election (one day, really, if you account for time zones), China will throw open the curtain on November 8th on the Communist Party’s 18th National Congress. This set-piece of political theatre marks the formal start of China’s once-a-decade leadership transition process. Behind the curtain, China’s process has been seething along—apparently for about as long, and with about as much vitriol—as the American electoral campaigns were. And in very different ways, people in China have been paying attention to both. For Chinese observers, there was not only great interest in the American candidates themselves, and the potential impact that either’s election might have had on Sino-American relations, but also in the nature of the process itself, and the ways in which it differs from China’s method of selecting leaders. As in other recent American presidential races, China had become a significant campaign issue. The Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, accused Barack Obama of being soft on China and promised, should he have won, to label China a currency manipulator on the first day of his administration. For its part, Mr Obama’s campaign focused on the number of American jobs it says Mr Romney helped send to China over the course of his long and lucrative career in business.

One leading Chinese scholar of American affairs, Shen Dingli, director of the Centre for American Studies at Fudan University, argued recently that “China wants Mitt Romney to win”. Mr Romney’s support of free trade, free enterprise and less regulation, he said, would be more favourable to China.

He was hardly bothered by Mr Romney’s harsh rhetoric about what he characterises as Chinese cheating on trade and currency issues, or his threat to take swift action about it. “Would a President Romney really honour his threat, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of US jobs?” Mr Shen asked. Answering his own question, Mr Shen noted that Mr Obama made similar noises prior to his first election, and backed down shortly after. This is a pattern China knows well, and it informs the predominant view among Chinese analysts and officials: American politicians always bash China during their campaigns, and upon taking office come to understand they have no real alternatives to engagement.

This is “the kind of rhetoric that Beijing has grown accustomed to and no longer fears,” writes Michael Anti, a Chinese blogger.

“Whoever sits in the White House next year, China will keep the same negotiating posture toward the United States that it has had over the last decade,” he predicted.

It is this logic that led some Chinese officials to prefer the devil they know, if only to spare themselves having to wait for what would have been a new incumbent, learning to tiptoe his way from the hardline of the campaign trail to a pragmatic basis for governing.

If the contrast between the American candidates remained somewhat fuzzy in Chinese eyes, the contrast between America’s electoral process and China’s one-party system could hardly be sharper. The open antagonism on display in America’s partisan media outlets, campaign speeches and televised debates between the candidates themselves has been a far cry from the quiet wheeling and dealing carried out in China by supremely powerful figures, about whom ordinary people know very little.

Information inevitably seeps back into China when foreign media score the occasional investigative triumph on the lives and business dealings of top Chinese leaders, and Chinese social media buzz constantly with non-official news and views of varying coherence or credibility. But to a remarkable extent, Chinese leaders manage to keep the substance of their political debates and personal power struggles out of view.

According to Kerry Brown, the director of the China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney and the author of a recent biography of Hu Jintao, some of the most basic details of the outgoing leader’s life, even after his ten years in power, remain elusive. Mr Kerry said there is only self-contradictory information to be found about the place of Mr Hu’s birth, and no information at all about the date of his father’s death.

Mr Kerry dares to see signs of greater openness in the fact that official media are providing a fuller personal narrative about the life and background of Mr Hu’s presumptive successor, Xi Jinping. But when it comes to understanding what the top leaders believe, with which other leaders they are allied, and what they intend to do with their power, China is still a very much a closed book. This preserves the reading of tea-leaves as a vital skill.

There are tea-leaf readers in the American system too, of course. In recent days, for example, several top strategists in Mr Romney’s Republican party settled on remarkably similar language to suggest that the superstorm, Sandy, had robbed Mr Romney of momentum and tipped the election for Mr Obama. Might this be a sign that the Republican Party’s most savvy strategists already knew their cause was lost?

In another story that attracted a lot of attention from would-be practitioners of American Kremlinology, some of the “biggest boosters” and “closest allies” of the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Paul Ryan, saw fit to reveal (anonymously) the “private proposals they were preparing for him” in the event his ticket loses. Ideas included teaching at a university, earning some serious money as a lobbyist, or biding his time until the 2016 election at a think-tank. Does all this suggest that Mr Ryan’s private assessment of the election’s likely outcome was at odds with the public optimism of the Romney team during the waning days of the campaign?

When speculation of this sort swirls in the American system, it is only around the edges. For voters willing to pay attention, the process affords a genuine chance to learn a great deal about their candidates. True, they need to wade through distressing amounts of obfuscation, exaggeration, demagoguery and pettifoggery in order to do it. But over the long haul of a campaign that can at times resemble a clown show, observers are able to gain a rough sense of what the candidates say, what they really mean, who stands behind them, and to whom they’ll be indebted.

Not everyone in China is impressed with the system. A People’s Daily journalist, Ding Gang, wrote in the Global Times (in Chinese and in English) that the regular vilification of China by American candidates highlights the flaws of electoral politics. The system encourages politicians to seek scapegoats, Mr Ding wrote, and those who do it are either stupid or weak. History shows clearly, he says, that the more a political system relies on voting, the more mediocre it will be.

After enduring inordinate amounts of attention from pollsters, advertisers and the candidates, campaign-weary voters in places like Ohio and Nevada might well be sympathetic to such a view of the American system, now that it is at last over. On the other hand, there are plenty of people in China who have gripes of their own with the black-box style of a one-party system, and who might just like to give popular voting, or even its electoral-college cousin, a try.

Updated: At 6:40 GMT, to reflect Mr Obama's re-election

(Picture credit: Wikimedia Commons)