The most convenient way for local governments to shed their impossible liability is to sell off some of their expensive office buildings and convention centers to private companies. Some office buildings could be converted into privately owned hospitals or colleges. It doesn't require rocket science to get this done, as long as the investors' rights can be protected by policies and laws.

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With similar rules, land could be sold to investors in many social services - education and medical care being two of the most important and most inadequate. The country's ambitious urbanization program will never go far until these services are greatly improved.

With good policies and laws, government entities may in fact incur more debt rather than less in financing longer-term development plans, such as even more roads, high-speed railways and clean energy projects.

The same policies and laws will be needed on the national level, when China is ready to embrace more free trade practices (first in its pilot free trade zones) and to meet the challenge of such new global trade schemes as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which the United States formally joined in 2011 and has since been championing.

Developing competitive policies and laws, and having them duly implemented, is the most important task for China. This was the key message from the Chinese leaders after the third plenum last year. The real challenge for this year is how much is to be done along those lines. And, soon enough, at the forthcoming annual sessions of the National People's Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference national committee, we will see how much social force the leaders can mobilize.

Without such a framework, no matter how much growth in GDP the country can achieve on a quarterly or yearly basis, China will not build much global influence. But with it, it can derive a lot of resilience from its large size and great complexity, eventually building itself into a truly great economy.

The author is editor-at-large of China Daily.