At the weekend this paper reported on how China's Communist Party central committee had resolved on a series of reforms entailing "sweeping changes to the economy and the country's social fabric."

The Star wasn't exaggerating. Media, NGOs and businesses have confessed to being taken aback by how wide-ranging the party's proposals are. The party's general secretary Xi Jinping (pictured) has won praise at home and abroad for a determination to tackle tough issues head-on.

Still, observers could be forgiven for confusion over what all this signifies - especially as the plans affect so many different fields. Re-education through labour is to be abolished. The one-child policy is to be relaxed.

Divisions between urban and rural development will be scrapped. Residency or "hukou" reform will accelerate. The relationship between government, state-owned firms and private businesses will shift.

What does it all mean? Some plans are straightforward. The re-education through labour system was obviously past its sell-by date, if it was ever properly used in the first place.

When set up in the 1950s the thinking was that certain categories of criminal were guiltless victims of pre-revolution exploitation - drug addicts, for example - and being sent for re-education was preferable to jail, since it did not give you a criminal record.

But nor did it require a proper trial, and cases of people being sent to these camps simply for getting on the wrong side of the local police have been widely reported in China in recent years.

The system was clearly open to abuse, so it's on the way out as part of wider judicial reforms such as a requirement to keep full records of trials and publish judges' reasoning when issuing sentences.

As for the one-child policy, the change is gradual and long-expected, in that couples in which either partner is an only child can now have two children.

China-watchers see the "one-child policy" as a misnomer anyway since there have always been huge numbers of exceptions to it.

In practice a policy which was always intended to be a temporary brake on runaway population growth is slowly being phased out as that growth stabilises, which is hardly evidence of a U-turn on Beijing's part.

Much more interesting are changes which will affect the structure of China's economy. The number of proposals is daunting, and one Star article can't deal with them all.

The most debated in China has been hukou reform. The hukou system registers people as resident in a certain area, and having the right hukou for your area affects what services and rights you are legally entitled to locally.

Precisely how varies according to the local authority, but getting school places for your children, having the right to buy a house and even having redress to legal support if your employer is abusing your workplace rights can all depend on having the right hukou.

At first glance the system is simply unfair. Hundreds of millions of migrant workers have moved to cities since the 1980s, and many still lack formal residency rights.

This has created a two-tier society in many cities, with a vast swathe of workers effectively facing institutional discrimination at every turn. Critics have even called it a "caste system" incompatible with the Communist Party's commitment to equality.

The contradiction is glaring and hukou reform has been backed by almost everyone in China for years. But the barriers to reform have been equally serious.

China prides itself on how the largest migration from country to town in human history has been carefully planned, avoiding the explosion of shanty towns and slums that disfigure many other developing countries.

The hukou system discriminates against internal migrants, but planned urbanisation - which presupposes some control over where people can live - has improved their living standards in some ways.

Tom Miller in China's Urban Billion has noted that "China's rural migrants live less squalid lives than their counterparts in other countries. The vast majority have access to clean water and proper (if often filthy) lavatories, few sleep on the street and hardly any die of cholera ... notably, China's cities do not swarm with malnourished children."

Cities have stuck to an infrastructure-first policy that involves building accommodation, health facilities and transport links before the people who will use them arrive. Miller later quotes an official from Wuhan who remarks: "We do not want to be like India," when defending the city's plans to revamp its public transport infrastructure to improve capacity before relaxing residency rules.

Local government concerns that the burden of providing social security to much larger numbers will become intolerable if hukou restrictions are removed are well founded.

But last week's ruling that the share of state-owned companies' profits to be handed to the treasury to fund a growing welfare state will double from 15 to 30 per cent should help deal with the problem.

Alongside that the plenum pledged to streamline budgets across China, bringing "the powers of government bodies into line with their expenditure responsibilities," which ought to boost the ability of provincial and municipal governments to pay for welfare.

If proposals from the State Council's development research centre are followed up a first step could be a "basic social safety package" including medical insurance and pension rights which would not be dependent on residency.

The agency suggests issuing personal social security cards which would allow nationwide access to benefits, arguing that even if not all urban benefits can be extended to everyone overnight the system could be gradually "expanded and improved to eventually replace the residency registration system."

Some provinces are implementing reforms ahead of the curve - Sichuan has just ruled that the spouse, children and parents of a migrant worker with "secure employment" in the city are now eligible for urban hukou, removing a major barrier to equal status and helping families to stay together.

We're likely to see other authorities follow suit as the impact of the party's fiscal reforms makes itself felt in their coffers, providing hope that an outdated and unfair system can be dismantled without throwing the country's urbanisation plans into chaos.