The plenary session of China’s central leadership that ends today will unleash China’s new round of reform, which is expected to steer the country into a historic turning point and transform its growth pattern.

However, the new round of reform is not only based on the growth and development situation created through China’s past 35 years of opening up, but also entangled with intricate problems and conflicts brought along by its past development.

The key to the success of China’s latest reform lies in whether the Party can coordinate different agendas with the strength to tackle hard issues.

During past reforms, economic growth “in overdraft mode” brought about prominent imbalances and conflicts in China’s development. The growth has been achieved at a heavy cost in land, energy consumption, the environment and cheap labor.

As Justin Yifu Lin, former chief economist and senior president of the World Bank, put it, although comprehensive reform in an all-round way has had the largest consensus in China, risks are likely to accumulate to obstruct the progress of the new reform, which leaves the reformers with little room to maneuver.

The economist said at a forum last week that China still needs to boost effective investment to shore up its economy against the backdrop of slow global economic recovery.

Pressing need

Compared with the social environment of reform now and 35 years ago, China’s leadership has a more pressing need to seek an agenda and path for reform that can gather the greatest support. It requires a fair distribution of the costs of reform and the wisdom to pool benefits to take into account various social interests.

In recent years, a large number of “mass incidents,” which involve a group of people staging a protest, have happened annually in China. Such conflicts are becoming “more varied and complicated,” according to a blue book released by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in December.

It said land expropriation and housing demolitions, environmental pollution and labor disputes have been the top three causes of mass incidents. Many of those nowadays tend to last for a longer time and are conducted on a larger scale.

Social imbalances in certain fields have constituted the root of the conflicts. For example, China’s higher education, although expanding rapidly in the past decade, has included a smaller number of students from rural regions than it did 10 years ago.

A widening wealth gap has appeared between cities and the countryside, and different regions, jobs and groups of people.

Many offenses against social order by the second generation of China’s wealthy families in recent years have also demoralized the country’s social working spirit. Some talented young people complain that hard work can never yield the wealth they deserve, as wealth has come to be dominated by certain groups of people.

Without incorporating political restructuring into economic restructuring, social wealth cannot be redistributed, and the new strength of social energy cannot be invigorated.

The Chinese leadership is aware that deepening reform rather than maintaining the status quo can ensure the stability of the Party’s rule and help find solutions to all thorny issues the government is facing.

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