Reforms likely launched at Chinese leadership meeting, experts say

Communist Party leaders will be playing for high stakes in November when the party's 18th Central Committee convenes its third plenary session in Beijing, with some observers anticipating a watershed in China's economic development.

Any breakthroughs in fiscal and financial reform or the urbanisation push will have a impact on China's long-term growth, analysts say, and boost the standing of a new leadership struggling to forge a consensus among the political elite's different factions.

Hopes are high that the meeting will be revolutionary for the economy, like the party's most famous "third plenum" - in 1978 - when Deng Xiaoping announced the opening of China's market to foreign and private investors that introduced a new dynamism to what had been a heavily regulated economy.

But observers say the challenges facing the new leadership, led by President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang, are unprecedented - tougher than those faced by their predecessors, from Deng to former premier Zhu Rongji, the economic tsar who undertook reforms in the late 1990s.

At the meeting, to be held a year after the installation of the party's new leadership, policymakers are expected to discuss economic reform plans including an overhaul of the household registration system, the liberalisation of interest rates and reforms to better allocate fiscal revenues and limit local governments' excessive borrowing.

Beijing is also expected to reduce government intervention in the market and strengthen anti-corruption policies.