Farmers will be granted more property rights, allowing them, for example, to transfer and mortgage land-use rights, though the government understandably continues to exercise caution about rural-land privatization.

A real-estate property tax will be introduced, in order to suppress skyrocketing housing prices and reduce the vacancy rate – a controversial but perhaps necessary move.

The one-child policy will be eased, allowing a couple to have two children if one parent is an only child. (Whether this change will be enough to reverse problematic demographic trends remains a topic of heated debate.)

The government will “accelerate the reform of the household registration system,” in an effort to facilitate urbanization. But emphasis seems to have shifted to encourage coordinated development between urban and rural areas. While rural migrant workers will be encouraged to settle in small and medium-size cities, migration to metropolises will remain tightly controlled – or even be more strictly regulated.

But the resolution’s genuinely groundbreaking objectives lie in other areas. For starters, the resolution includes two potentially game-changing legal reforms. First, it emphasizes the government’s commitment to “respect and protect human rights,” prohibiting law-enforcement authorities from extracting confessions “by torture, corporal punishment, or abuse” and abolishing widely criticized programs for “re-education through the labor system.”

Second, in order to strengthen judicial independence, the resolution includes a call “to explore the establishment of judicial jurisdiction systems that are suitably separated from administrative areas.” In other words, the courts should be able to make decisions independently of the local governments that finance them.

In the political realm, the resolution includes measures to strengthen China’s so-called “consultative democracy.” While the concept of enhancing the role of non-CCP forces in Chinese politics is not new, its prominence in the resolution reflects the Party’s willingness to adopt a more democratic political system – as long as it retains its dominant position, of course.

In a one-party system, meritocracy is a prerequisite for good governance, which in turn plays a central role in maintaining social stability. Unfortunately, meritocracy has been eroded by a political culture of sycophancy and cynicism. Designing a screening mechanism to minimize adverse selection in choosing bureaucrats and party officials has become one of the biggest challenges that China’s ruling elites confront.

Although the resolution’s general message is encouraging, a shopping list of reform objectives is not a strategic analysis of the contradictions that are undermining China’s development, let alone an action plan for responding to these contradictions. Indeed, for China’s new leadership, the successful completion of the Third Plenum is only the first step in a new long march toward a more stable, prosperous future.

Yu Yongding is former President of the China Society of World Economics and Director of the Institute of World Economics and Politics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and has also served on the Monetary Policy Committee of the People’s Bank of China.

This article was first published at www.chinausfocus.com. To see the original please visit http://www.chinausfocus.com/political-social-development/the-long-march-from-the-third-plenum/