BEIJING, Nov 12: China’s landmark 16th Party Congress on Tuesday cast its first votes on what is set to be a major clear-out of the aging leaders who have ruled the country for more than a decade, delegates said.

The vote at the 16th Party Congress began a process that will, delegates said, see virtually all the party’s top bosses, including President Jiang Zemin, begin stepping down from power.

Representatives from the southern province of Guangdong, who had been holding closed-door talks at a hotel in downtown Beijing, said initial voting was beginning on candidates for the party’s elite central committee.

“We have been having preliminary elections” for the central committee, a delegate said.

“We have got no results yet,” another said.

The delegate confirmed what a colleague said on Monday night: six of China’s top seven leaders are not on the candidates’ list for the central committee, a few hundred-strong body to which all senior leaders must belong.

Although the whole process remains officially secret, this appears to show clearly the leaders, including Premier Zhu Rongji and parliamentary head Li Peng as well as Jiang, will retire.

“Yes, it’s true, they are all stepping down. All except Hu Jintao,” the delegate said, referring to China’s vice president, who is expected to take over the party leadership from Jiang at the end of the Congress and become president next spring.

“It is because they are all too old and have to retire,” he added.

Meetings appeared to break up in the early evening, with streams of delegates seen leaving various hotels in cars.

The central committee officially elects the 20-member or so politburo, which in turn is supposed to vote in the ultra elite politburo standing committee, China’s top ruling body, currently seven-strong.

However, China-watchers say all the top-level leadership manoeuvres have been worked out in advance by a tiny group of leaders, with every other change working downwards from this.

But Tuesday’s events nonetheless have great symbolic significance, marking the beginning of retirement for a group of leaders in their 70s, who have been at the helm since 1989.

It is widely expected that after giving up their party posts, the leaders would step down from state government jobs at the annual meeting of China’s parliament in March next year.

Although the central committee list indicates that Jiang, 76, is serious about retiring after 13 years at the helm, experts say he appears keen to exert considerable influence even after stepping down.

The delegate who told newsmen about the list on Monday said it contained a series of close Jiang allies, including the president’s political right hand man, Zeng Qinghong.

“This is going to be a relatively clean sweep, but Jiang Zemin and the other outgoing leaders will still be important for the years to come,” said Paul Harris, a political scientist at Hong Kong’s Lingnan University.

The candidate list also seems to sound the political death-knell for Li Ruihuan, 68, one of China’s most liberal politicians who was tipped by some observers to remain on the standing committee, but was never close to Jiang.

The president at the same time seems set to get his personal theories adopted into the Communist Party charter, boosting his legacy.

Most strikingly, these may pave the way for capitalists to enter the party, as it tries to become more representative of a modernizing society.

READING TEA LEAVES: The final lineup of the new Standing Committee will not be known for sure until the new leaders emerge from behind a screen at a brief ceremony in the Great Hall on Friday.