Get ready for the next transformation of China and Japan Plans for both these changes were presented after closed sessions a year or so into new administrations. The so-called Third Plenum, the latest of which ended 10 days ago, has become the key platform for detailing a new leadership's 10-year plan. At first sight, President Xi Jinping's contribution to this series looked underwhelming, but the bland language at the end of the plenum was deceptive as it has become apparent that the changes under way in China today are as potentially transformational as Deng's. The growth of the past 30 years in China is nowhere clearer than in the city of Shenzhen, just over the border from Hong Kong. Just a village when it became China's first special economic zone in 1979, Shenzhen is today a city of more than 10m and one of China's busiest container ports. It has a stunning skyline of high rise buildings and is home to some of China's most successful hi-tech companies, such as internet giant Tencent, which, when I visited last week, had a screen showing the location of all 145m Chinese using its games and instant messaging services at that moment. Its leafy boulevards are a vision of what China may become when it breaks through to its post-industrial era. This is where Xi Jinping's reforms are heading. It will be a long and arduous march to get there but the scale and breadth of the changes that are proposed suggest China's new leadership is serious about making the social, financial and economic reforms needed to meet the aspirations of its people and hold on to power. The reform with the greatest symbolic significance is the end of the disastrous one-child policy. This will, in time, have a meaningful economic impact but in the short term it demonstrates the partial retreat of the state from its smothering interference in the lives of its people. The reforms to the Hukou registration system are no less important in this regard. More than half the population of Shenzhen is probably made up of migrant workers, essentially "non-people" under the system which withholds rights to education, welfare and basic services from people living away from their designated home. Other key reforms include a step towards private ownership of land, success measures for local government officials beyond simple GDP growth, and a levelling of the playing field between powerful and woefully inefficient state-owned enterprises and the private companies which have the potential to build on China's success but are discriminated against. Perhaps the single most important announcement is the establishment of a central reform group to be headed by Xi Jinping himself, which points to a seriousness about pushing through the reform programme. Western investors like to focus on China's problems. The evidence of the past fortnight is that it is once again getting ready to overcome them.