| The Communist Party of China (CPC) kicked off a key meeting in Beijing on Saturday, with a discussion on comprehensively deepening reform top on the agenda.
The four-day Third Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee will deliberate on a draft decision of the CPC Central Committee on "major issues concerning comprehensively deepening reforms."
The document, which pools the wisdom of the whole Party and from all aspects, has been widely expected as a tone-setter for the world's second-largest economy to advance the reform that has lasted for more than three decades.
Comprehensively deepening reform means the reform will be more systematic, integrated and coordinated. The CPC will work to speed up the development of a socialist market economy, democracy, cultural development, social harmony and ecological progress, according to the statement of a Political Bureau of the 18th CPC Central Committee meeting held on October 29.
"We should let labor, knowledge, technology, management and capital unleash their dynamism, let all sources of wealth spread and let all people enjoy more fruits of development fairly," it added.
Since the groundbreaking Third Plenary Session of the 11th CPC Central Committee launched China's reform and opening-up drive in 1978, all the Third Plenary Sessions have taken reform and opening up as their central agenda.
Facing changing situations and tasks, a comprehensively deepened reform is needed for the building of a moderately prosperous society and the building of a prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious and modernized socialist country, as well as for the realization of the Chinese dream of national rejuvenation, according to the Political Bureau.
Yu Zhengsheng, a Standing Committee member of the Political Bureau of the 18th CPC Central Committee, has pledged that the reforms this time will be "broad, with major strength, and unprecedented."
"Inevitably they will strongly push forward profound transformations in the economy, society and other spheres," he added.
A reform that affects all
The decisions made at the key Party session 35 years ago changed the fate of all Chinese.
Shanghai resident Yang Huaiding, later known by his nickname "Millionaire Yang," is surely one of them.
A pioneer in China's budding capital market, he grossed his first barrel of gold through trading treasury bonds and then invested in the burgeoning stock market. In the late 1980s, he became a millionaire when most Chinese earned about 1,200 yuan ($194 in current rate) a year.
"I benefited from policy changes at the third plenary sessions of the 11th and 12th CPC Central Committee (in 1978 and 1984 respectively). I embody what reform and opening up has done for common Chinese," Yang told Xinhua.
Today, he still trades securities, at a time when a million yuan is no longer big money and the Shanghai bourse has joined New York, London and Tokyo to be a major economic indicator.
Like Yang, writer and Nobel laureate Mo Yan was one of those who seized opportunities that had not been presented for decades.
Born in a small village in east China's Shandong Province, Mo recalled that a number of people there starved to death in the early 1960s.
When he started writing in the 1970s, most Chinese had little access to literature except a few revolutionary novels and plays. Opening up to the outside world drastically liberated the mind of Chinese and allowed writers like Mo to record a rapidly changing society, in a freer way.
With his works flourishing since reform and opening up, he made it all the way to win the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Although not everyone became such household names, a lot more struggled to change life. More than 260 million rural youths went to cities for work and many left government jobs to set up private business. Once a taboo, private companies contributed about 60 percent of the country's gross domestic product (GDP) last year.
Liu Heung Shing, an American Pulitzer Prize winner, started and spent most of his career as a photojournalist in China.
"Only if you understand China's 30 years of history before reform will you know its leaders' determination to push forward the reform. They don't have a Plan B, because stability and development are impossible to achieve without reform," said Liu, who was born in Hong Kong but spent his childhood in his family's ancestral home of Fuzhou, southeast China, in the 1950s.
Changing situation, new challenges
Thirty-five years later, both China and the world have dramatically changed. As the Cold War ended, the East and the West headed toward globalization.
The West stumbled over a global financial crisis, which singled out China's economic performance. But, being the world's second-largest economy, China now sees its once two-digit growth slowing to less than 8 percent.
With most Chinese already having a full stomach and living in a relatively safe and prosperous society, impatience and discontent about other more aspirational matters are growing.
A thin chance of owning an apartment is the problem for Chen Hao, a college graduate working in Beijing, currently the most expensive city in China in terms of housing price.
"An apartment in the Beijing suburbs sells for 20,000 yuan per square meter and I earn 5,000 yuan a month," he said. "My girlfriend says 'no house, no marriage.'"
The government's performance has not improved as satisfying as the economy.
Bureaucracy runs deep. It took 14 months to build a nursery in east China's Zhejiang Province, for example, but gaining government approval to build it and getting the nursery building past the inspection took two years and stamps from 133 departments.
Deteriorating corruption among civil servants worries many. Dozens of high-ranking officials have been sacked for corruption over the past year, which not only showed the anti-graft resolve but also a grave situation.
Amid fast urbanization, the countryside is losing young laborers, land and wealth while the cities are running short of resources and facing worsening pollution.
Poverty has not been totally wiped out. Nearly 200 million Chinese, including villagers living only 160 km away from Beijing, are living under the absolute poverty line by the World Bank standard ($1 per day).
What's more, people are beginning to question the sustainability of the country's economic growth. Among the three known growth engines, investment still overwhelms while domestic consumption and export are relatively weak.
All these questions need to be answered soon. That's why high expectation is placed on the ongoing party session.
Greatly expected reform
Since it took office nearly a year ago, the current Chinese leadership has been making reform moves.
In December 2012, President Xi Jinping signalled his commitment to this drive by making his first inspection tour as new Party chief to Shenzhen, the forefront of China's reform and opening up, where he stressed that "reform will not come to a standstill nor will opening up come to a stop."
The new Central Government formed in March has been pushing forward an institutional reform, which aims to cut red tape and decentralize power at its core. So far, it has abolished or transferred 221 administrative approval items to local governments.
Market-oriented reform is under way as well. In July, China's central bank canceled the floor on lending rates. The China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone launched in September is expected to create a testing ground for convertibility of the Chinese currency and the deregulation of interest rates.
Analysts say that, helped by official reform policies and announcements, a strong consensus on and great expectations of reform are building in the country.
Professor Wang Huaichao with the Party School of the CPC Central Committee said there is no disagreement on the necessity of reform. "The debate is on the sequence, degree and measures of reform," said Wang.
Qin Gang, another professor with the school, believes that reform must address public expectations, such as narrowing the income gap, social equality, and an end to corruption through institutional changes.
Private and state-owned enterprises should be on an equal footing in using production resources, competing in markets and enjoying legal protection, said Xie Lingquan, board chairman of a private food company in Shaanxi Province.
A global challenge
Analysts say both China and the rest of the world is pinning hopes on reform.
Western developed economies still in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis face the choice of reform or impasse. For the developed countries that have taken a reform course, significant progress seems to be elusive.
The Obama Administration has not yet achieved breakthroughs in financial and fiscal reforms; the European Union is mired in the debt crisis; and Japan is exhausted in turning around persisting economic stagnation.
In an atmosphere of lackluster global recovery, the performance of the Chinese economy is under the international microscope, according to Zheng Yongnian, director of the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore.
It is not unreasonable to contend that China's internal economic vitality will drive the world down a similar path, he said.
Liu Heung Shing said, "Actually, reform takes place in every country, but in the 20th and 21st centuries nowhere has it been as influential as in China, stirring the interest of the whole world."
The analysts say the CPC, governing the world's largest developing country, has a dual task.
It has to confront domestic problems such as a 1.3-billion population, the urban-rural gap, income disparity and diverse interests.
Globally, it needs to explore a new approach to the development of humankind by leading China into both competition and cooperation with other systems.
The analysts believe reform in China has been successful yet unfinished. For future reform, practice will provide the answers.
(Xinhua News Agency November 9, 2013) | 
