Grand plan needs pragmatic actions

At the recently concluded Fifth Plenum of the 18th Communist Party of China Central Committee, the "Four Comprehensives" became the grand blueprint for the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20). Each of the four tasks requires broad measures and pragmatic actions.

The first one - and the most critical - stresses the task of building a "moderately prosperous society". It does not refer to "middle class", a term that is often, but mistakenly, evoked in the international media. True, the middle class is emerging in China, but it is still not comparable to that in the West.

In the United States and the European Union, the average per capita GDP, adjusted to purchasing power parity, varies between $55,000 and $38,000, but in China it is still $13,200. As a result, the term has vastly different meanings in advanced economies and China.