Zhou Li’an, professor of applied economics at the Guanghua School of Management at Peking University, said the new guidelines could clear up doubts about the fate of China’s future economic direction, including whether it can “continue to maintain growth”.

“To cope with the huge uncertainty in the external environment, China needs to open up fresh growth potential and unleash the ‘reform dividend’,” said Zhou, referring to the potential improvement to growth after institutional barriers are removed.

China will also create a nationwide land quota exchange system among different provinces so that developed areas and cities can use more land for development.

The new directive also stipulates that all Chinese cities, with the exception of a few major metropolitan areas, should allow domestic migrants to register for residency and offer new migrants equal access to public services, from education to health care.

This is a step closer towards fully dismantling China’s house registration system, which controls access to public services based on the birthplace of the hukou registration document holder and can be traced as far back as two millennia.

In addition to land and labour reform, Beijing also pledged to promote market-based exchanges of capital, technology and data, while reiterating earlier promises such as making the yuan a convertible currency.

Analysts said the promised reforms, including freeing up domestic migration and ensuring capital flows to the most efficient sectors, could unleash growth in China’s US$14 trillion economy.

Lu Zhengwei, the chief economist of Industrial Bank in Shanghai, said the promised liberalisation could “create a new round of long-term economic boom” with the effects rivalling China’s former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping’s decision in 1978 to embrace “reform and opening up”.

“The effects of stimulus measures will be short-lived, but the effects of reform measures can be long-lasting,” Lu wrote recently.

China’s major trading partners have long complained about its state-led economic model, which includes the presence of large state-owned businesses in key sectors.

The new policy directive reiterated previous commitments made by China to deepen reform of its state-owned enterprises, including ushering in a more flexible system of hiring and compensation.

It stressed that enterprises under different ownership models would have the same access to resources, which is similar to Beijing's argument that China’s state companies and private businesses can compete fairly.

Liberal Chinese economists and private businesses are also advocating for a freer market at home and hope Beijing will fulfil a promise made in 2013 to let the market play a “decisive” role in the allocation of resources.

Economists Hua Changchun and Zhang Jie, from Guotai Junan Securities, one of China’s largest investment banks, said the liberalisation process would be slow but it would create “long-term reform dividends” for China.

“The release of the paper … shows that Beijing is still committed to [pro-market] reforms,” they wrote in a note.