China's "new broom", Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping, is personally driving an initiative to sweep away swelling public criticism of corruption, a soaring wealth gap and an aristocratic attitude among officials.
His answer to such destabilising concerns: a "mass line" campaign, originally launched in June and now intensified with a round of public self-criticisms.
Mao Zedong had a slogan: "From the masses, to the masses". Thus a "mass line" around the correct thought and lifestyle of the masses. Xi is taking this campaign on the road around China. "The mass line campaign should not tail off once it gets started," he insists.
This week he has appeared on television, conducting such sessions for provincial cadres, starting in Hebei, which surrounds Beijing.
An official photo shows him in open-necked shirt, arms folded, leaning watchfully on a desk at which members of the Hebei party standing committee are writing self-criticisms.
The broader implication is clear: this is what the new leadership perceives as political reform. It does not involve increased accountability or democracy but a sharpened and cleaner team at the top, more responsive to direction.
Xi is the most palpably political leader to have emerged in China since Deng Xiaoping, in subtle contrast to the technocratic, bureaucratic style that has prevailed previously.
It is no coincidence that he has launched this drive just days after the sentencing of bitter rival Bo Xilai to life in prison, on corruption charges that Bo fiercely fought.
Bo won huge public popularity in the vast municipality of Chongqing, where he was party secretary, for his nostalgic return to the apparently simpler verities of the Mao era. His slogan: Chang hong da hei - Sing red songs, strike black crime.
Now, with Bo behind bars, Xi is free to take up elements of that Maoist heritage. He has already stated that he wishes, during his 10 years in office, to build pride in the entire period of Communist Party rule, including the three decades under Mao.
No one is exempt from the new campaign. Even foreign corporations have been enlisted.
In July, Xu Xinyu, a divisional head at the powerful central planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission, demonstrated his zeal to the new leadership team by demanding that 30 international companies, including General Electric and Siemens, undertake "self-criticism" over unfairly dominating market segments within China. Helpfully, revealed Reuters, he showed the firms' in-house lawyers how to write such self-criticisms and showed them copies of letters other businesses had sent to the commission to confess their guilt over previous cases.
In August, the commission announced $120 million fines against foreign milk-powder firms for collusion - while explaining three further companies were excused such penalties because they carried out "self-rectification".
A commentary carried by press agency Xinhua said: "Probing and punishing ill-behaved companies will increase the confidence of international firms in the Chinese market, not the other way round."
Dmitri Hubbard, an analyst at consultancy Control Risks, says: "China's rules are changing and, in many ways, hardening. The solutions, like the problems, must be based in China to avoid falling foul of new regulations."
Self-criticism is a ubiquitous element of the party's heritage. It is also a personally evocative picture. When I checked in to a hotel in a provincial Chinese town a few years back, my details were inevitably forwarded to the local Public Security Bureau for checking, since the work permit in my passport showed I was a journalist. This was during the transition from the days when foreign media was required to get permission from local officials before entering their patch. Late that evening, cadres from the local waiban - foreign affairs office - knocked on the doors of the hotel rooms of my Chinese colleague and myself.
We were summoned to answer for our failure to get in touch before. We explained we had sought the local authority's help with our visit but had been told all the staff were too busy, so proceeded on our own.
This drew a thunderous rebuke from the leader, who pointed out that "none other than Li Peng himself" - widely excoriated within China as a driver of the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen and beyond - had insisted no Chinese person could be interviewed by a foreigner without an official being present.
His younger and more contemporary-minded colleagues cringed, but he ploughed on, instructing my colleague to write a self-criticism and sign it.
Understandably cowed, my colleague began to write. Feeling protected to a degree by my foreigner status, I objected, saying it was unnecessary to behave so angrily. He told me if I felt like that, then he would also make me write a self-criticism.
I refused and said I'd seek the opinion of the chief government spokesman - a very senior official in the same ministry, and one I knew reasonably well, partly since we support the same English soccer team. I began to dial my mobile, and the cadre grew silent before suddenly switching moods, saying we should get off to a fresh start and next time we visited we should all have a banquet together, get drunk and find some women.
Xi told those cadres in Hebei: "Party members should constantly relay criticism and self-criticism of their work to boost unity and the implementation of democratic centralism." These, he said, were "the traditional party methods to keep a good working style", enabling "close ties with the public".
He has listed four "undesirable" work styles as being to blame, described by China Daily as formalism, bureaucracy, hedonism and extravagance. These, he told his comrades in Hebei, were "harmful, stubborn in nature and prone to relapse".
One party member, a woman in her 30s working for a foreign-Chinese joint venture in Wuhan, tells me how when she first applied for junior party membership, she had to write an essay explaining why she wanted to join.
"You have to self-criticise," she recalls. "You have to state your shortcomings. One is enough. Usually people will say something modest, like 'I'm not seriously minded.' You learn how to make it up."