For months it was billed as a pivotal moment for the advancement of China’s economic reform agenda.
Such was the sense of anticipation that the so-called “third plenum” of the Chinese Communist party’s 18th Central Committee appeared to disappoint, in as much as it offered only faint clues about the specific reforms President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang intend to implement over the coming decade.
But there was enough from the four-day gathering of more than 370 of China’s most powerful men and women, which ended yesterday, to suggest that the president and premier are preparing to unleash market forces as never before in the world’s second-largest economy.