Following a decade of conservative leadership in Beijing under Hu Jintao, the country may be on the cusp of radical change, writes the BBC's world affairs editor

Under the new leadership of President Xi Jinping, a quiet process of reform is under way in China. If successful, it will transform the country's politics and the way it approaches the world.

Every leadership in the past two decades has altered and developed China's direction. Over the past 10 years Hu Jintao, the outgoing president, introduced a sterner, more conservative tone. The changes that had been the work of the witty, liberal-minded Zhu Rongji, premier from 1998 to 2003, were set aside. Hu clamped down on criticism and alternative approaches to government.

Now, Zhu's ideas are back in fashion. One dissident figure I interviewed for my Radio 5 Live documentary, to be broadcast on Monday, believes the next five to seven years will change everything. "I would expect to see a popularly elected parliament in that time," he said.

China is certainly changing. After three months when its relations with Britain were put into deep freeze because David Cameron had met the Dalai Lama, the Chinese government wanted to signal a return to normality. And it did so by giving a formal interview to the BBC: an organisation that it has also frozen out in the past.

The interview I recorded with the deputy director-general of the foreign ministry, Hong Lei, was the first political interview a senior figure had given to the BBC in Beijing for well over 20 years.

It was heavily wrapped in official-speak: this was China, after all. But later a senior official said in the clearest English: "We have a new start in our bilateral relationship."

It is part of a wider pattern. The new bosses in China want a new start in various ways. Last November I sat in the Great Hall of the People listening to Hu address the party congress. His speech drew a line under his years in office and introduced the incoming leadership of Xi. Delegates sat bolt upright in their identical black suits, white shirts and red ties, outfits obtained from official suppliers in Beijing as soon as they arrived for the congress.

On stage, the leaders were ranged in order of seniority, looking like waxworks. Each had his (they were almost, though not quite exclusively, male) hair dyed a startling raven black – in the current semiotics of Chinese Marxism-Leninism, grey or white hair denotes feebleness.

There was one solitary exception as my eye swept along the ranks. Zhu Rongji, the elder statesman whose ideas had encouraged China's epoch-making changes of the 1990s, sat in the front row, his hair an eye-catching grey, his tie a tasteful blue. It was a quiet defiance of Communist party norms; it also showed confidence. Zhu knew that, after 10 sombre years under Hu, things were swinging in his direction again.

I grew bored with Hu's speech. He had an irritating way of raising his voice when he came to key passages, copies of which were in the hands of every delegate. At the end of these passages, everyone was expected to applaud. They did, of course, at interminable length.

So I wandered out to the lobby of the hall and sat on a step of the splendid marble staircase to jot down my impressions. It was a minute or two before I remembered when and where I had done this before: in the Kremlin, during the Soviet Communist party conference of June 1988. Similarly bored with the predictability of it all, I had wandered out and sat on the steps to write my report for that evening's news.

The 1988 conference was the key moment in Mikhail Gorbachev's effort to wrench Soviet communism away from the old conservative Brezhnevite norms and open it to new political and economic thinking.

The 2012 Beijing conference also represented an important change of direction. Xi understands the pitfalls of reforming an old-fashioned autocracy: after the fall of Soviet communism, there were intensive official studies in China of what had gone wrong in Russia from 1989 to 1993 and how such mistakes could be avoided. And yet, as in the old Soviet Union, reform doesn't come exclusively from the massed ranks of the black-suited party delegates; it seeps into society through the tiny cracks that exist even in the strongest autocracy, and slowly begins to permeate society.

The day after Hu's keynote speech, I went to Zone 798, an area of Beijing that was once a closed suburb of weapons factories and has now been handed over to, of all things, the arts. In the halls where heavy guns were once produced, artists are free to show their work.

My colleagues and I filmed there, then headed for a nearby cafe to get something to eat. On the television at the end of the room, speakers at the congress droned on at the lectern and identical black suits clapped them dutifully.

I looked around. Not one of the artists or their customers paid the slightest attention: two parallel yet unconnected universes were passing each other. Again, I had the feeling I had been here before. In the Soviet bloc in 1988, most intellectuals felt divorced from the processes of formal Marxist-Leninist politics. And very soon the old, brittle system had cracked because of its utter lack of relevance to the lives of real people.

Can Xi reform the system, without – like Gorbachev – destroying it? He has advantages that Gorbachev lacked, so it's not absolutely impossible. But I suspect things have gone too far for traditional Marxism-Leninism to survive. The dissidents who talk enthusiastically about wholesale change during Xi's tenure may yet turn out to be right.