Standing with an accountant's demeanour as he delivered the opening speech to the ruling Communist Party's five yearly Congress, Hu was a model of caution as he touched on the hot-button issue of democracy -- and with good reason.

"They're going to be very careful to make sure that whatever they do is going to be effective and is not going to make trouble," said Sidney Rittenberg, an American scholar who has had ties with China since the 1940s.

"They know they have to do it, experiment, to find out how they should go about it. They're making lots of experiments in local places.

"(But) China is a country with a lot of potential for trouble. You have got so many unemployed and so many migrating from country to the city. The tendency is to be very cautious."

Hu announced a bolder growth target -- a quadrupling of the gross domestic product per capita by 2020 compared with 2000 -- while reassuring his audience of more than 2,200 cadres that the party would remain firmly in command.

He also called for "scientific development," which takes into account the hidden social and environmental costs of rapid growth, but that, too, was no surprise, as the concept has been associated with Hu since early this decade.

It was towards the end of his 150-minute report that Hu then turned to the need to boost democracy, not in society as a whole, but within the Communist Party's own ranks.

Although Hu's predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Deng Xiaoping, had also talked about Chinese-style democratic reforms, some analysts said Hu had opened the door to taking things further.

"Potentially it can lead to the most drastic change for how the party makes decisions since the 13th Party Congress (in 1987)," said Victor Shih, an expert on Chinese politics at Illinois' Northwestern University.

"Potentially -- because this is merely saying we would like to see more experimentation in these things, which is in itself a pretty strong signal, but it's far from making it policy."

Hu called specifically for grassroots Communist Party congresses to meet more frequently -- once or twice a year, rather than once every five years, potentially making them embryonic parliaments.

He also called, albeit in rather vague terms, for candidates for leadership positions to be nominated in a more open manner.

"Democracy was greatly stressed in the speech," said Sun Yingshuai, a Marxism researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the nation's top think tank.

"It is impossible to have a fast-growing economy if there is no sound political system to support it."

But Hu did not signal overnight change, and in fact he talked about reforms taking "a dozen or even dozens of generations."

Still Shih said the speech was significant because it sent a message to reform-minded officials at the grassroots that experiments were permitted -- but that those changes may be hard to roll back.

"I guess in a way the genie is out of the bottle, because a lot of local officials are enthusiastic about trying these things," said Shih.

"But they have been very hesitant, because they weren't sure what attitude the central government has."

However for some dissidents who have seen previous pledges of more openness and democracy from China's leaders amount to nothing, Hu's comments offered no fresh cause for hope.

"There is nothing new here in terms of the policies. The only thing that will be new out of this are the personnel changes we will see," said Liu Xiaobo, a prominent dissident writer.

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