And now, it's time for China 24's special series - "Chinese Terminology", where we will help explain the magnitude of China's reform and opening up --which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. Today Jeff Moody looks at the "TEN-THOUSAND YUAN HOUSEHOLD" or "WAN YUAN HU".

What does ten-thousand-yuan mean to a modern family? That's about 15-hundred dollars. It's hardly enough for a modest family holiday now, but in the late 70s and early 80s it was a significant amount of money.

Not many ordinary families would have had more than a thousand yuan in savings. Indeed, the average monthly wage would have been less than 30 yuan -- not even five dollars. If a family had savings of ten thousand yuan, that family was considered nouveau riche. China's senior leader at the time, Deng Xiaoping, wanted to help certain people in the country to get rich first, with the aim of achieving common prosperity. This has been a major government policy ever since. And the emergence of China's reform and opening up program brought more families into this erstwhile exclusive group. So as China's economy took off, and with it the spending power of its huge population, the term 'ten-thousand-yuan household' slowly became redundant. In some developed regions in the country, it's not rare to find a "million-yuan household". And the 19th CPC National Congress pointed out the need to narrow the gap between rich and poor, and to take targeted measures in poverty alleviation.