Tomorrow long queues will form outside the mausoleum containing the embalmed corpse of Chairman Mao in Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

Thousands of people, most of them middle-aged, will pay their respects to the man who helped found the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Shanghai on July 1st, 1921.

The Museum of the Chinese Revolution will do roaring business this weekend as the nation celebrates the Communist Party's 80th birthday. Tickets for a photo exhibition at the museum, "Shouldering the hopes of the people", are already sold out.

National and provincial television stations have carried reverential broadcasts all week charting the course of the Communist Party over eight decades and praising the contribution of Mao, and his successors, Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin.

On radio stations, stirring music celebrating the "success" of the Communist Party has been blaring and further "light" entertainment has come in the form of solemn recitations of some of Chairman Mao's best-known poems.

The Communist Party flagship, The People's Daily, in a throwback to its style in the days before Mao's death in 1976, has been running a special supplement each day this week with Mao's portrait and his sayings on the front page. On Thursday, it ran his famous quotation "The Chinese people have stood up" - Mao's words on the founding of communist China in 1949.

Websites have been set up to "e-nable" people to light electronic candles and present electronic flowers online in memory of those who gave their lives to establish the People's Republic.

The celebrations can't hide the fact that communism is slowly giving way to capitalism in the world's most populous nation, even if the political regime in Beijing remains as authoritarian as ever.

Founded as a one-party dictatorship operating a socialist economic system, the CCP is at a crossroads. It is struggling to maintain its relevance in a changing society, and is under pressure to reform following 20 years of economic liberalisation. China's economy is growing at a rate of almost 10 per cent a year since the "opening up and reform" policy was introduced under Deng Xiaoping just over 20 years ago.

The rapidly growing apartment-owning and car-driving middle-classes are testimony to the success of the new free market policies of the last decade. "China has made huge strides forward economically in the last decade, but politically things have remained stagnant. The policy mix of economic opening and political dictatorship has reached its limit. The Communist Party needs to reform itself or it will face grave consequences," a party member said this week.

As the party gears up for its 16th party congress in autumn next year, and a leadership change in 2003, it is refusing to talk of reform. It introduced new guidelines for media this week, banning the publication of any article calling for reform or criticising the system.

THE Communist Party's reputation has been tarnished by a succession of corruption scandals involving government officials and a rising level of organised crime. China is in the middle of a "strike hard" campaign to reverse the trend. Over 1,000 people have been executed since January, but it's noticeable that some senior Party officials have avoided prosecution.

The Communist Party chief, President Jiang Zemin, has put forward a three pronged theory designed to keep the party relevant in the era of multinational firms and entrepreneurs. It states that the Communist Party should represent advanced productive forces, and advance Chinese culture and the basic interests of the people.

Young people have mixed feelings on the party. Law graduate Sun Ting joined the CCP while she was in college. She told The Irish Times one of her motivations was that being a CCP member would be advantageous in later life.

"I applied for membership as soon as I entered college, as did most of my peers. As freshmen we all wanted to be progressive. We thought being a CCP member would bring us advantages afterwards in looking for jobs." Ting, who is planning to go abroad to do her masters, says she has concerns about a party being in power for a long period and does not agree with all CCP policies. She is unhappy with the abuse of power for personal gain, and the fact that the aid-the-poor programmes are not working in some places.

Wang Feng is not a member of the CCP. "Many Chinese are still struggling in poverty. Many peasants are being forced to pay high taxes and this is placing an intolerable burden on them. I saw one summer recently how difficult life has become for watermelon sellers, for instance, who were being forced to sell their produce for ridiculously low prices," says Feng.

As China develops further, and with WTO accession on the horizon, the CCP will have to move with the times and face up to some type of reform. If the Chinese leaders have their way, that reform will come slowly.