Reforms may ring changes for generations

In the past 20 or so years, those people have drawn on rich experience in helping China determine its orientation toward what it calls a socialist market economy; in its accession to the World Trade Organization and thereby enlarging its role in the global economy; in essentially emerging unscathed from the world financial crisis in 2008; in designing its transition from export dependency to a balance of manufacturing, domestic consumption and technological progress.

Their studies on all the issues arising from China's development will contribute to the intellectual content of the country's next round of reform.

For example, it was only this March that the issue of urbanization was highlighted in Premier Li Keqiang's "government work report" to the National People's Congress, as a new driver to sustain China's above-7-percent annual growth in GDP over the next decade. But the issue was not raised on a passing whim. Policy advisers have long been studying urbanization, in which China's lack of progress is recognized with candor and treated as a potential opportunity for generating change.