Bill, With regard to your question 3, the full context of Xi’s report to the 2nd Plenum suggests there is not much new or surprising about “deepening the reform of party and state institutions.” What is the context? The Politburo is telling the rest of the Party (and only indirectly, the Masses) to get out there and fight for the Perfection of the System that is being guided by Xi Jinping Socialism-with-Chinese-Characteristics-in-the-New-Era Thought. The Party, with Xi at its leadership core, is moving along a “reform” continuum set in motion at least as long ago at the 18th Party Congress and Xi’s Ascension. The Party’s leadership in modernizing socialism will be furthered by deepening organizational (not political) reform in “certain important areas” (深化重点领域机构改革) and, overall, by making party and state organizations “substantively even more scientific”, “even more optimally functional and deployed,” (职能配置上更加优化), “structurally and mechanically even more complete”, and “even more highly effective in execution and management.” Good God. These reforms, I suppose, will be fleshed out in “even more” mind-numbing hortatory lingo in the proposal being forwarded to the NPC by the Party Plenum. The report implies that these organizational reforms will address units at all levels and sectors of the Party State: the CCP Central Committee, the NPC, the State Council, the CCPCC, with an overall plan for both Center and Localities (统筹中央和地方). Xi & Co. may well hope that greater rationalization and “modernization” of Party-State institutions will make the Party-State even more efficiently effective in keeping the situation under control. I would doubt, however, that if implemented these reforms would lessen the Party’s central and now “even more” ubiquitous role in “guiding” China’s governmental, “civil society”, commercial, academic, media, and other institutions. The concepts of Separation of Party and State and/or Government and Enterprise are wispy phantoms of the 1980s....I found the differences between the English and Chinese versions of the report quite interesting. Certainly the tone in Chinese is much more strident, and more clearly directed at Party members to get out there and fight the good fight of studying, propagandizing--not “publicizing”--and implementing the “spirit/vitality” (not/not the “guiding principles”) of (the 20th Congress and 2nd Plenum). It is, after all, always the Spirit, the Jingshen (精神), that will catch the conscience of the People. And it is the Party’s duty to transmit it to the People in order to further Perfection of the great Chinese Nation.