Chinese Communist Party chief Hu Jintao has ruled out multi-party democracy on the eve of a key meeting aimed at tightening the party's grip on power.
"History indicates that indiscriminately copying Western political systems is a blind alley for China," the official Xinhua news agency on Wednesday quoted Hu as telling a gathering to mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the National People's Congress, or parliament.
Hu said China's existing people's congress system had vitality and superiority.
Hu's vision of perpetuating Communist Party rule through good governance - code for increased transparency and official accountability - will top the agenda of the four-day plenum of the party's elite 198-member Central Committee, which begins on Thursday.
The Communist Party, founded in Shanghai in 1921, has monopolised politics since the 1949 revolution, but experimented with modest political change in recent years, searching for checks and balances to curb corruption and official waste.