A reform that affects all

The decisions made at the key Party session 35 years ago changed the fate of all Chinese.

Shanghai resident Yang Huaiding, later known by his nickname "Millionaire Yang," is surely one of them.

A pioneer in China's budding capital market, he grossed his first barrel of gold through trading treasury bonds and then invested in the burgeoning stock market. In the late 1980s, he became a millionaire when most Chinese earned about 1,200 yuan ($194 in current rate) a year.

"I benefited from policy changes at the third plenary sessions of the 11th and 12th CPC Central Committee (in 1978 and 1984 respectively). I embody what reform and opening up has done for common Chinese," Yang told Xinhua.

Today, he still trades securities, at a time when a million yuan is no longer big money and the Shanghai bourse has joined New York, London and Tokyo to be a major economic indicator.

Like Yang, writer and Nobel laureate Mo Yan was one of those who seized opportunities that had not been presented for decades.

Born in a small village in east China's Shandong Province, Mo recalled that a number of people there starved to death in the early 1960s.

When he started writing in the 1970s, most Chinese had little access to literature except a few revolutionary novels and plays. Opening up to the outside world drastically liberated the mind of Chinese and allowed writers like Mo to record a rapidly changing society, in a freer way.

With his works flourishing since reform and opening up, he made it all the way to win the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Although not everyone became such household names, a lot more transformed their lives. More than 260 million rural youths went to cities for work and many left government jobs to set up private business. Once a taboo, private companies contributed about 60 percent of the country's gross domestic product (GDP) last year.

Liu Heung Shing, an American Pulitzer Prize winner, started and spent most of his career as a photojournalist in China.

"Only if you understand China's 30 years of history before reform will you know its leaders' determination to push forward the reform. They don't have a Plan B, because stability and development are impossible to achieve without reform," said Liu, who was born in Hong Kong but spent his childhood in his family's ancestral home of Fuzhou, southeast China, in the 1950s.