Reform roadmap before key meeting

A construction site; battling air pollution; former railways minister Liu Zhijun, who received a suspended death sentence in July for taking bribes and abuse of power. The plenum is likely to tackle problems as wide ranging as healthcare, urbanization, the environment and corruption.

Chin of York University says the two main domestic challenges for China are ensuring further advances in clean, ethical and fair governance and in environmental management and sustainable development, with social tensions appearing to have been on the rise in these two areas.

Measures are needed to strengthen and improve corruption prevention to achieve the first goal, he says. For sustainable development, a fundamental shift in the mindset and priorities of all stakeholders and within society are necessary.

Chin says breakthroughs must be made in the way problems are viewed and tackled, such as rethinking GDP in terms of "green GDP" and changes in the performance assessment and promotion/demotion criteria for leaders at all levels.

Alex Kirby, a retired BBC journalist who has tracked China's development for several years, lists ending corruption as the greatest challenge. He feels that it is important to tackle corruption with a "one stone kills several birds" approach.

"Once corruption stops, China will be able to maintain the growth it needs to end poverty and to protect the environment (its own and the world's)," Kirby says.

Martin Schoenhals, a professor at Columbia University in New York, expects the meeting to provide breakthroughs in achieving social equality in China. "What is worrisome is the growing inequality," he says.

Schoenhals says farmers are the key to the growth puzzle. "They account for more than 70 percent of the population, even though some of them no longer hold any land.

Historically also, China had a revolution that sought to provide land to farmers. If farmers lose land, or access to land, it will result in mass migration to cities and urban poverty.

"What worries me is whether these hundreds of millions of farmers can move to the cities and all find and keep jobs."

China's new leadership has already provided enough indications that it plans to chart a roadmap for urbanization. While this has long been in the works, experts feel that the plenum will provide the much-needed impetus by including it in the reform agenda.

However, Schoenhals feels the reform agenda should have steps to limit urbanization and outline steps to help farmers remain in the countryside if they so wish.