Xi Jinping: The man who leads China's reform into a new era

For the people

In April, Xi told visiting UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres that "everything we do is for people's happiness and national rejuvenation and to seek common ground for the world."

Xi has been stressing that reform should focus on what the people care about and expect the most. The aim, he says, is to give the people a stronger sense of fulfillment.

That may be felt more directly from the rise of earnings. The average income of Chinese grew by 7.4 percent annually over the past six years, eclipsing the GDP growth.

In October, wage-earners hailed a personal income tax reform which exempts those who earn less than 5,000 yuan (725 U.S. dollars) a month.

Many migrant workers also made it to the country's expanding middle-income group.

Zou Bin is one of them who benefit from the reform. He rose from laying bricks at construction sites to heading a team in the Fortune 500 firm China Construction Group as a project manager.

This year, Zou started serving as a deputy to the National People's Congress, the top legislature. His first legislative proposal was, not surprisingly, about deepening construction labor reforms.

Poverty reduction is another milestone. In the past six years, about 70 million rural people had been lifted over the poverty line.

William Jones, Washington bureau chief of the Executive Intelligence Review news magazine, said ending poverty had long been regarded a major task for humanity but until recently, was seen as a Utopian dream.

"With China, that dream is now becoming a reality," he said.

Under Xi's lead, China's social security network has expanded, with the basic medical insurance covering 1.3 billion people and the social old-age insurance covering more than 900 million.

This summer, a domestic film shot up to box office stardom. "Dying to Survive" tells a fictional story of a shopkeeper who illegally imports cheap Indian drugs and sells them to cancer patients in China.

The blockbuster touched a public sore point of costly drugs. But fortunately, the issue is being addressed.

Policies have been introduced to exempt import tariffs on many cancer drugs, and efforts are on-going to bring more life-saving medicines into the medical insurance program.

Xi's reform also aims to nurture a great environment to conduct business.

The World Bank Group said in its annual "Doing Business Report" that China advanced to a global ranking of the 46th this year, up from the 78th last year, as the country implemented the largest number of reforms in the East Asia and Pacific region.

The "2018 China Business Report" by the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai also found that 83 percent of respondents in manufacturing sector and 81 percent in retail achieved profit, while 61.6 percent of companies expected to increase their China investment in 2018.

Private sectors in China have entered a new phase of development.

In 2018, a total of 28 Chinese private companies were enlisted in the Fortune 500, compared with a lone company in 2010.