A Chinese clerk counts RMB (renminbi) yuan banknotes at a bank in Huaibei city, East China's Anhui province, January 22, 2015.[Photo/IC]

Reform should rely on the public and benefit the public, as President Xi Jinping said at the 10th meeting of the central leading group for comprehensively deepening reform in last Febuary. He pointed out that reform should deal with the problems ordinary people face in their lives and better meet their needs, and for the first time raised a new benchmark for evaluating the results of reform--sense of gain.

The results of reform thus come under a new sort of scrutiny--subjective evaluations from residents decide whether reform is successful or not.

Looking back, residents could sense the fruits of reform over the last year. Still, it takes time and will require further effort to meet residents' expectations in some less well-performing areas.

Rising income for both rural and urban residents in the last year gave them a direct sense of gain. Official data shows that China's national per capita disposable income stood at 21,966 yuan ($ 3,349) in 2015, up 7.4 percent from 2014 in real terms, outpacing GDP growth.

The gap between rich and poor narrowed, according to measurements using the Gini coefficient, a statistical index in which zero equals perfect equality. It stood at 0.462 in 2015, dropping for seven years in a row after the index hit 0.491 in 2008.

In the next five years, the government will further deepen income distribution reform, during which time the key task is to increase people's incomes to achieve the goal of doubling rural and urban residents' real income by 2020, compared with that of 2010.

While rising income brings a sense of gain and leads to rising happiness in a certain sense, excessively focusing on economic indicators takes our attention away from the real measurement of a country's and people's progress.

The government has done a lot to help people lead better lives.

One week before January 1, lights came to 39,800 people in remote northwest China. They became the last group to receive electricity to light their homes in the world's most populous country. At the end of 2015, China met its goal of providing electricity to all of its people, set out in the 12th five-year plan.

In early January, government loosened restrictions on who can apply for permanent residency in cities and provided more policy support for improving shantytown dwellings and dangerous homes as part of efforts to accelerate urbanization and improve living conditions.

There were more jobs created through policy support. In the face of economic headwinds, when economic growth slowed to 6.9 percent in the last year, supportive policies to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship bring a sense of gain to residents who wish to start their own business.