Over the last two weeks, China's state-run media have gone into overdrive to extol President and Communist Party chief Jiang Zemin's political legacy and particularly his theory of the 'Three Represents' which aims to broaden the Communist Party's base.

Front-page articles on all newspapers, from the 'People's Daily', the party's flagship, to the vernacular 'Beijing Youth Daily', have featured pronouncements and speeches by Jiang stressing the importance of his political influence over the stability of the country.

The all-out propaganda blast has fuelled burgeoning rumours that instead of relinquishing all his political and military titles at the 16th Party Congress in November, Jiang will stay in power for another five years before stepping down.

For many months it had been expected that 76-year-old Jiang would be replaced by Vice President Hu Jintao, 59, as head of the Communist Party and military commander-in-chief.

Other elderly leaders, including Li Peng and Zhu Rongji, currently the second and third in the Communist Party's Politburo, were expected to hand over their posts to younger leaders, forming the so-called " Fourth Generation" of China's leaders.

However, all references to the "Fourth Generation Leadership" have been omitted in recent months in the state media and editorials ubiquitously have stressed "political stability".

The notion of "political stability" in Chinese communist terminology suggests the continuity of a stable leadership under a government dominated by the Communist Party.

In the meantime, the fervour of the national propaganda machine in lauding Jiang Zemin's political legacy has been matched by an intensifying scrutiny of media and attempts to censor all news touching on sensitive issues.

In the past month, the authorities have blocked two major Internet search engines and tried to hush an outspoken AIDS activist. They have also issued orders that no troublesome or bad news be published, and that the social and political climate before the 16th Party Congress should be calm.

Wan Yanhai, China's most prominent AIDS activist, was detained late August and prevented from travelling to Canada, where he was due to receive a human rights award for his years of work to break the silence over a rapidly-growing epidemic in the country.

A week after Wan's disappearance on Aug. 24, Google and Altavista, two popular web tools in China where many other web outlets are already censored, became inaccessible to the country's surfers.

Analysts believe that the authorities are preparing for a long drawn out blackout on Google and Altavista because they contain information, deemed sensitive, from other websites already blocked in the country.

While the question of how long Jiang Zemin will cling to power has pre-occupied foreign media at length, average Chinese people get to read very little about the power struggles of their elite.

A dossier of top secret internal documents was spirited out of the country and passed to two American academics last week, but news about it on the Internet were quickly muzzled by the Chinese authorities.

The documents reportedly reveal that the succession process has been completed - with President Jiang losing the power struggle to his modernising heir apparent, Hu Jintao.

An anonymous insider in Chinese political corridors told the two American academics that at the Communist Party's Congress on Nov. 8, a triumphant Hu would emerge as party general secretary and chairman of the Central Military Commission.

Others poised to take over the supreme leadership in November, according to the Chinese source, are Jiang's long-time foe Li Ruihuan, as chairman of the National People's Congress or Parliament and number two in the Politburo, and Wen Jiabao, number three and a premier-in-waiting, who will succeed Zhu Rongji in March 2003.

Both American scholars -- Professor Andrew Nathan of Columbia University and Bruce Gilley, a doctoral candidate at Princeton University, are highly regarded China watchers with solid track records of years spent observing Chinese politics.

But Chinese politics are secretive and impervious to the outside world. Despite reports swirling around on the succession issue, Chinese academics inside the country as well as many diplomats in Beijing seem convinced that a rather different constellation of leaders will emerge from the upcoming party congress.

"The only one to go would be the reformer Zhu Rongji," said one Chinese academic. "All the other elder leaders, including Li Peng however unpopular, will stay for at least another five years."

Concerns within the leadership about stability, which emerged in a report published in the 'Strategy and Management' bi-monthly magazine, seem to point in the same direction.

"Stability will be the top priority and focus of the party congress," said Kang Xiaogang, a senior research fellow with the Centre for China Studies under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

"His (Jiang's) personal connection with the social elite has been consolidated and well developed," Kang wrote in the report. "If he withdraws all of a sudden and hands over all his powers to Hu Jintao, it will be difficult for Hu Jintao to steer the bureaucrats."

If Jiang decides to stay at helm for five more years, the ensuing stability would in fact hinder modest attempts by party liberals to introduce any substantial political reforms.

However, even if he steps down from the top party post and follows the political script so far, Jiang is likely to remain a supreme leader staying in the shadows, much as his predecessor, the late Deng Xiaoping, did.