Next Big Future: Expectations of large Reforms in China next weeken

Next Big Future: Expectations of large Reforms in China next weeken...: The road map Mr Xi (China's leader) will submit to the third plenum has been months in the making. It draws on the advice of China’s ministries and the wider network of official research institutes and think-tanks. To knit it together, Mr Xi has appointed Liu He, a thoughtful, reform-minded policy adviser who was educated at Harvard’s Kennedy School and whom Cheng Li of the Brookings Institution once compared to Larry Summers, the brilliant academic who became Barack Obama’s economic guru. As a technocrat, Mr Liu has no power to impose his own ideas. But in picking him, Mr Xi clearly endorses some of the things he stands for.

Mr Liu used to work for the Development Research Centre (DRC), an official think-tank serving China’s cabinet. He had a hand in the “China 2030” report published last year by the DRC and the World Bank, which detailed the reforms China would need over the next two decades. In recent days China’s media has been abuzz with another DRC reform plan, known as the “383” plan, which is equally ambitious. It sets out three overarching reform principles (“effective markets require effective states and vice versa” is one), no fewer than eight reform priorities (cutting red tape, breaking up monopolies, reforming land ownership, liberalising finance, reforming the public finances, reforming state-owned enterprises, promoting innovation and opening up to foreign investment) and three broad strategies for achieving them.