The 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015) will take effect from next year, a year that will also mark the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC).

The Fifth Plenary Session of the 17th CPC Central Committee, held last month, highlighted the importance of the macroeconomic plan for the next five years. The guideline for the plan presented by CPC General Secretary Hu Jintao is crucial for the country's development in the next five years and the building of a moderately prosperous (xiaokang) society, put forward by the Party.

"After 40 to 50 years, that is, by the beginning of the new century, China will have undergone great changes and become a powerful socialist industrial nation, making larger contributions to humankind," former Chairman Mao Zedong predicted as early as the mid-1950s on the completion of the First Five-Year Plan (1953-1957).

In 2008, Hu Jintao vowed to develop China into a higher-level xiaokang society by the time the CPC celebrated its 100th anniversary. A higher-level xiaokang society means a society in which every person benefits from economic development. With just 10 years, or two five-year plans, left to achieve that goal and the last relay baton in its hands, the CPC has reasons to feel a sense of urgency.

The Fifth Plenary Session of the 17th CPC Central Committee adopted a non-elusive attitude toward a variety of problems and contradictions seen in the country's economic and social transformation process. Despite the rapid economic development of the past three decades, the country still faces a series of problems: the contradictions between fast growth and an imbalanced economic structure, between increasing social wealth and widening income disparity, and between the rising diversity of its industrial products and their declining international competitiveness.