The carefully staged political pageant that will play out next month in Beijing is not something that Jiang Wenhai, the 40-year old Communist party secretary of Silver Dragon village, spends a great deal of time thinking about.
In this remote part of the south-west province of Guizhou, officially the poorest part of China, the locals like to say that “the mountains are tall and the emperor is far away”. But Mr Jiang is more politically correct than that.
“The 18th [Communist party] Congress doesn’t have very much to do with Silver Dragon village; it’s not for us to ask who leads the nation,” Mr Jiang says. “But whoever is chosen I’m sure the Communist party will continue to improve the people’s lives.”