"You had me at hello" is one of the most memorable and frequently reprised movie lines of the last decade or two. The movie was Jerry McGuire and another famous line from the movie is "Show me the money!" , one delivered by Jerry's client, football player Rod Tidwell, played to Oscar perfection by Cuba Gooding, Jr. But as we surely remember, for both Rod and Jerry life was about more than the money, they also wanted "the kwan." Rod described it with these words "love, respect, community... and the dollars too. The package. The kwan."

Fast forward from 1996 to 2008 and move the setting from Los Angeles to Beijing, and the kwan (or quan) is still the order of the day. The only difference is that it's the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that's giving the kwan to individuals rather than individuals like Rod and agents like Jerry (Rod's "ambassador of kwan") earning it in the marketplace.

A pointer to the shape of future changes came recently in the form of explicit remarks about "political reforms" by Zhang Chunxian, the CCP head of Hunan province. At a televised conference of Hunan officials on August 31 held to mobilize a province-wide campaign for further "emancipation of minds", Zhang said reforms in the past 30 years had focused on how "to return li [economic interests] to the people". The focus now would be on how "to return quan to the people" , with efforts devoted to "developing socialist democratic politics". The Chinese word quan has a double meaning and could refer to rights or (political) power or both. "To return interests to the people" is a brilliant summary of the economic reforms of the past three decades, for their main aim has been to privatize economic interests that had been entirely monopolized by the state under the socialist command economy. Zhang himself (probably deliberately) failed to further clarify what he meant by "to return quan to the people", which is open to different interpretations due to the double meaning of quan. From the context of his speech, he may have been hinting at giving back people some of their rights and power.

Given the way in which Zhang has failed to clarify, he may have retained the services of Jerry's fictional colleague and rival, Bob Sugar.