(FORTUNE Magazine) – A revolution, as Mao Zedong aptly put it, is not a dinner party. Neither is global capitalism. So as the world's most populous nation lurches into the most painful phase of its transition to a market economy, why do the guys taking charge look as if they sip tea with extended pinkie fingers?

As China braces for the competition due to be unleashed by its entry into the World Trade Organization, Beijing has cut subsidies to money-losing state enterprises and sent millions of factory workers packing. Miners are rioting. Farmers are refusing to pay taxes. The gap between rich and poor has widened to a chasm. The nation's banks are suffocating under a $440 billion mountain of unprofitable loans. Corruption rages.

But never mind. When they gather in Beijing on Nov. 8 for their national congress, which meets every five years, senior members of China's Communist Party plan to pick 59-year-old Hu Jintao--a reclusive hydroelectric engineer who has held few positions of real authority, never criticizes his colleagues, and hardly ever travels abroad--to succeed Jiang Zemin as general secretary. Hu is also expected to take Jiang's posts as president and as chairman of the central military committee early next year. When all the nameplates are changed, he will have the most impressive collection of titles in the Chinese government.

Hu stands at the head of the "fourth generation" of Communist leaders (the prior three were led by Mao, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang, respectively). He and the men who are expected to join him on the party's all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee (see box) have been carefully groomed for power, chosen in large part for their proper (Communist) party manners. But they are an extraordinarily timid lot. Sure, they are all smart, and they all favor economic liberalization. But most got where they are by clinging to the Mao jacket-tails of more dynamic mentors. Many, notably Hu, seem to have succeeded primarily by dodging conflict. As a group, they are preoccupied above all with preserving social order and maintaining the Communist Party's lock on power.

The government will nonetheless take huge pride in them. Over the past 53 years, the Communist Party has yet to manage a peaceful transfer of power. Mao Zedong's twilight years as "great helmsman" were stained by the chaos and violence of the Cultural Revolution. Deng dumped two heirs apparent who stumbled politically; it took years after the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 for the party to settle on today's ruling trio of Jiang, Zhu Rongji, and Li Peng.

Desperate to avoid another debacle, party leaders have been planning the current transition for years. The broad outlines of this handover are carefully scripted. Jiang is to bow out, or at least retreat behind the scenes (a recent bid to stay in power was rebuffed). Zhu, the architect of China's economic reform program, is to cede the stage to his soft-spoken understudy, Wen Jiabao. The unpopular Li Peng is supposed to disappear. And all down the ranks, grizzled party veterans will yield to younger, better-educated technocrats.

The precise choreography of this remains a mystery--the workings of China's political system are as murky as ever. Even so, it looks likely to be a switch without a hitch. An orderly transition would give an enormous boost to the Communist Party, enabling its leaders to boast of their unity and efficiency.

Foreign capitalists, who have pumped more than $430 billion into China's booming economy since Tiananmen, are not so much worried about the handover itself as about what happens afterward. The optimistic case, as put by Christian Murck, chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in Beijing, is that the "new leadership could be a big plus" for economic reform. "If anything, a lot of people here see the possibility that change will breathe new energy into the process." James McGregor, an American businessman who has worked in China for years, doesn't buy it. "Are you kidding?" he scoffs. China needs "decisive leaders," McGregor argues, people with "backbone, vision, and guts." The fourth generation doesn't fit that bill.

In a sense, the new leaders constitute a revenge of the nerds. They tend to have glittering academic credentials and to have won the support of powerful older men. Hu, for example, like many of the new leadership, trained as an engineer at Beijing's prestigious Qinghua University. Then came the Cultural Revolution, when gifted people were routinely "sent down" to perform menial labor in the countryside. Hu (and Wen) went to the arid southwestern province of Gansu. Hu remained there for 13 years.

After taking power in 1978, Deng Xiaoping championed the idea that leaders should be chosen on the basis of merit and not just party loyalty. The shift in policy, combined with the backing of Gansu's party boss, enabled Hu to vault from his lowly post as dam planner to chairmanship of the Communist Youth League in Beijing in the early 1980s. In 1989, after a brief stint as party secretary in Guizhou, another backwater, Hu accepted a key assignment as party chief in Tibet. There he crushed a fledgling independence movement with brutal efficiency, catching the eye of Deng. In 1992, Hu joined the Politburo's Standing Committee, becoming the panel's youngest member. Ten years later, he has made it to the top. Hu's biography is impressive in its way--lots of people never make it out of the likes of Gansu. But it is not a record of great achievement or vision.

A new Chinese-language book entitled Disidai, or The Fourth Generation, offers an extraordinarily detailed study of just how the leaders of the fourth generation came into prominence. The book, by an author writing under the pseudonym Zong Hairen, highlights the role of the party's shadowy Organization Department in evaluating the job performance of prospective leaders and helping to identify the stars.

Purportedly based on confidential dossiers leaked from the department, the book depicts the presumptive members of the next standing committee as low-key but confident pragmatists--with some unexpected policy leanings. Li Ruihan comes across as a closet liberal who favors provincial elections and greater press freedom. Luo Gan, the police and security czar, is described as willing to scrap the household registration system. Wen, meanwhile, is said to have doubts about Zhu's policy of closing small state-run firms to free up resources for colossal government dinosaurs. All these differences, though, are muted by a system that demands consensus. Indeed, Zong suggests that the group was deliberately composed to preserve the fragile balance among the party's existing factions. The calculation seems to be that harmony within the party is more important than economic dynamism.

A recipe for gridlock? Not necessarily, says Andrew Nathan, a professor of Chinese politics at Columbia University. "It remains to be seen how the chemistry within this group will actually work," he says. The world can only hope that they can engineer a formula for more growth--fast.

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