Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Patrick Lane,

filling in for Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events

shaping your world. Africans are migrating in ever larger numbers, but not as you might

suppose to Europe. The large majority move to countries within their own continent, the

warmth of their welcome varies. And Hollywood has always loved to tell its own story. Films

about Tinseltown have tended to have a cozy, warm glow. But in the Me Too era, the movie

industry is a little less eager to flatter itself.

Today, China's political and military elite are meeting in Beijing. The annual gathering

of the Communist Party's Central Committee will take place over the next four days behind

closed doors. Only one agenda item has been made public, a stock take of the party's

100 years of history. That record is written around transformative leaders who spent many

years in power. Mao Zedong, the revolutionary founding father of Communist China, and

Deng Xiaoping, who opened the country's economy to the world in the 1970s and 1980s. At

this week's Conclave, President Xi Jinping will assert his place alongside these two

giant figures. This is a crucial stage in Xi Jinping's career. James Mild is the economist

China editor. He's preparing for a party congress at the end of next year, at which he apparently

hopes to get approval for another five years in office in defiance of the normal convention.

This party's Central Committee meeting is about history and Xi Jinping writing history in

his style as crucial as a way of justifying his next period in power.

So what will happen at the meeting? What's it for exactly?

Typically, they give very little away in advance of these meetings. They're held behind closed

doors in a military run hotel in western Beijing. The only item on the agenda that they've

...