Launched on Monday in Beijing, the 12th National People’s Congress consists of 2200 delegates gathering at the “Great Hall of the Public” in Tiananmen Square. As Minxin Pei explains, this year’s annual meeting will be closely watched to see how Xi Jinping’s reform agenda will play out over the 10-day session.

As President Xi implements his reform agenda, Cheng Li evaluates the fantastic opportunities and potentially enormous risks that lie ahead for the world’s second-largest economy.

When it comes to economic reform, China’s leaders no longer believe that time is on their side. With a new sense of urgency, President Xi Jinping and his inner circle are attempting one of the most ambitious economic and social-policy reform plans in history.

With the commanding in power of China’s new leadership in the March, China has unfolded its ambitious new diplomacy with amity, accommodation and principle, writes Shen Dingli.

China was hardly lacking in policy pronouncements in the final months of 2013. But, seen in their entirety, the risk of incoherence has become evident, writes Stephen Roach.

You may have missed the funeral, but China’s new leadership has quietly buried the admonition of former leader Deng Xiaoping that as China rises in wealth and power it should maintain a low profile (known as taoguang yanghui), writes Douglas Paal.

With the Central Economic Work Conference just concluded, the important task facing the 2014 Chinese economy seems to be twofold: balancing China's medium and long-term reform with its short-term growth, and balancing its structural adjustment with control and prevention of possible risks, writes Zhang Monan.

At the recent Third Plenum of the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee, China's leaders produced a 60-point "resolution" covering six areas. But a shopping list of reform objectives – many of which were not as bold or novel as promised – is inadequate to address the deep contradictions undermining China’s development.