Key CPC meeting opens to set reform agenda

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.  [Special coverage]

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 ground-breaking Third Plenary Session 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.

Facing changing situations and tasks, a comprehensively deepened reform is needed for the building of a moderately prosperous society in all aspects 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.

Xinhua has learned that opinions have been solicited within and outside the Party for the draft decision which will be discussed during the plenary session. Suggestions and opinions provided by different places, government departments and delegates of the 18th CPC National Congress have been fully absorbed and reflected in the draft.

Yu Zhengsheng, a Standing Committee member of the Political Bureau of the 18th CPC Central Committee, recently 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.