The world knows astonishingly little about the people who run the People's Republic of China.
For instance, no full biography has been written in English - and only one in Chinese - about Hu Jintao, even though he has been running the world's biggest country for a decade.
This is in part because he appears to be such a fully committed servant of the Communist Party and of China, leaving little or no space for colourful incidents, quotes or relationships.
But it is also because his life has been lived predominantly in "the great within", the term originally used for the imperial life in the Forbidden City, but almost as applicable to top Communist Party leaders today.
This week's visit to the US by China's Vice-President, Xi Jinping, who will, in eight months, take over as the country's paramount leader, is focusing global attention - and domestic attention, given China's fascination with America - on him personally.
Writers are dragging out every detail they can uncover about his past, including about his celebrated father Xi Zhongxun, a party veteran who was cast into the outer darkness by Mao Zedong in 1962, only to emerge as a right-hand-man of Deng Xiaoping after Mao's overdue demise.
Xi's US visit is heightening interest in the final stages of the increasingly fraught contest to join him at the top of the party tree.
The main focus is on the seven positions on the nine-man standing committee of the politburo - no woman has ever reached the standing committee, and none is likely to do so in October - which are expected to become vacant.
Vice-Premier Li Keqiang is almost certain to become Premier and effectively the No 2 Chinese leader. He will thus stay in the politburo standing committee, with Xi, who will take over from Hu as secretary-general of the party, the paramount leader's key role.
The PSC to emerge from the five-yearly party congress will aim to reflect the various factions and focuses of the party's 74 million members, and to provide something of a regional balance.
It will thus include, besides Xi, other taizidang, "princeling" children of party elders; besides Li, other tuanpai, followers of the grassroots Youth League with which Hu and Premier Wen Jiabao are associated; reformers and conservatives; and those close to the People's Liberation Army, which is the party's own army, and the security services.
A leadership story has emerged over the past week that has enthralled China's own vast online community and the world's China-watchers.
It appears likely to help determine whether one of the country's most controversial political figures will join the PSC or be perceived as too much of a risk.
He is Bo Xilai, a charismatic, English-speaking princeling whose father, Bo Yibo, was one of the party's "eight elders" but who was, like Xi Zhongxun, purged by Mao. Bo spent about 20 years in the northeastern Liaoning province, mostly as mayor of the city of Dalian, then as governor of the province. He then came to the centre, to Beijing, becoming commerce minister - winning less favourable reports - before taking over as party secretary for the huge city of Chongqing in southcentral China.
