Deeper reform tops plenary agenda
Print Edition
China’s Communist Party kicked off a key meeting yesterday, with a discussion on comprehensively deepening reform top of the agenda.
The four-day Third Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee will deliberate on a draft decision 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 Politburo meeting held on October 29.
Yu Zhengsheng, China’s top political adviser, recently said the reforms this time will be “unprecedented.”
“Inevitably, they will strongly push forward profound transformations in the economy, society and other spheres,” he said.
‘Millionaire Yang’
Since the ground-breaking Third Plenum of the 11th CPC Central Committee launched China’s reform and opening-up drive in 1978, all the third plenary sessions of the CPC Central Committees have taken reform and opening up as their central agenda.
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 (US$194) a year.
“I benefited from policy changes introduced 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 said.
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.
Nobel laureate
Like Yang, 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.
Although not everyone became such household names, a lot more transformed their lives. More than 260 million rural young people 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 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.
Thirty-five years later, both China and the world have dramatically changed. With most Chinese having a full stomach and living in a relatively safe and prosperous society, impatience and discontent about more aspirational matters are growing.
However, improvements to the government’s performance have proved less marked than those to 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.
Corruption among civil servants worries many. Dozens of senior officials have been sacked for corruption over the past year, which not only showed the Party’s resolve to fight graft but also revealed a grave situation.
Amid fast urbanization, the countryside is losing young laborers, land and wealth, while cities are running short of resources and face worsening pollution.
Poverty has not been totally wiped out. Nearly 200 million Chinese, including villagers living only 160 kilometers from Beijing, are living under the absolute poverty line by the World Bank standard of US$1 per day.
What’s more, people are beginning to question the sustainability of the country’s economic growth, with fears that it relies too much on investment.
All these questions need to be answered soon.
And that is why such high expectation is placed on the ongoing Party session.
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