Public finance key to reform
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The second decade of this century will be an important period of strategic opportunities for China's development, as it is possible that it will concentrate various deep contradictions that have emerged during the country's economic and social transformation over the past decades.
Many issues are involved in the country's bid to overhaul its long-controversial development mode and achieve its goal of comprehensively improving people's welfare. The transformation of the development mode should ensure the people have access, not only to a decent material life, but also to a healthy lifestyle, as well as equal opportunities for self-development, the acquiring of knowledge, and a sense of dignity and security. People should also be able to enjoy a pleasant living environment, including a clean environment and water, under this development mode.
All these demand that the country focus on improving people's welfare as it develops the economy, strengthens public services, adjusts the current income distribution structure and changes the long-established development mode.
Signals transmitted from the just-concluded Fifth Plenary Session of the 17th Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee indicate that deepening reforms will become the central theme of the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015) for national economic and social development.
China's reforms mean it faces an environment and conditions completely different from those in the preceding decades. The previous from-easy-to-difficult model of reforms, which did not touch the fundamental interests of vested interest groups, is now facing a narrower space in which to advance further. As a result, any individual reform is likely to trigger other reforms and thus lead to some profound adjustments to the established vested interest distribution pattern.
For a big country like China, in the process of transformation, any comprehensive economic, social and political reform package will be difficult to advance.
So the reform of the public financial system, which contains not only economic and social dimensions but also a political one, will possibly be the first step toward transformation of the country's development model.
Financial systems and policies serve as the basic means for the government to regulate the national economy. All government education, healthcare, social security, and environmental services are based on public finance, their openness, transparency and comprehensiveness will help transform government functions and promote Socialist democracy and the legal system in China.
