Crowds watch a flag-lowering ceremony at Tiananmen Square on Friday, one day before the convening of the Third Plenum of the 18th Communist Party of China Central Committee in Beijing. Photo: AFP

The Communist Party of China (CPC) kicked off a key meeting 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 Oct. 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 US dollars 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 transformed their lives. 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.