Click to play videoBeijing: China's ruling Communist Party is meeting in Beijing to draw up its next five-year plan for the economy.
The meeting comes amid renewed scrutiny of human rights in China. The agenda is secret but analysts say that instead of seeking a high rate of economic growth, China’s leaders want to close the gap between rich and poor and between coastal and inland areas.
Analysts will also be watching for signs of who will be China's next leader — due to take office in 2012.
The meeting comes amid renewed scrutiny of human rights in China.
Speculation has mounted that political reform could be a hot topic after Wen — widely viewed as more liberal-minded than Hu, who is party chairman — issued an unusually strong call for political reform.
On Friday, more than 100 Chinese scholars, activists and lawyers signed a letter calling for democracy, and the release of Nobel Prize Winner Liu Xiabo along with all other political prisoners.
The plenum of the roughly 300-member Central Committee in Beijing, which will run until Monday, is typically cloaked in great secrecy with details released only after it ends. Even its location is not publicly announced.
There is speculation that political reform will even be on the meeting's agenda, after Premier Wen Jiabao recently issued a call for openness.
Mr Wen told US broadcaster CNN earlier this month that calls for "democracy and freedom [in China] will become irresistible".
In August, he said: "Without political reform, China may lose what it has already achieved through economic restructuring."
But in a sign of possible resistance to those calls, China's state media did not report them domestically.
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