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What does "China's National Defense in the New Era" reveal about the progress of China's military reforms? For those of us who have been tracking the topic closely since at least 2015, it primarily confirms existing assessments, with some notable details included...
"The history of the people’s armed forces is a history of reform and innovation." Xi Jinping has clearly elevated the notion of innovation as a priority to guide not only development but also military modernization.
These reforms have been motivated by China's assessment of trends in the form of warfare, recognizing the criticality of "removing institutional barriers and solving structural and policy-related problems to adapt to the trends of worldwide RMA and demands of national security."
The changes to the leadership and command system are described as "in response to the call of a modern and specialized military capable of fighting and winning wars in the information age..."
For those who haven't encountered this core principle, it involves: “the CMC exercising overall leadership, the TCs (theater commands) responsible for military operations and the services focusing on developing capabilities," not unlike the U.S. model in certain respects.
This is an interesting description of reforms in "supervision": "Thus, power is exercised in a way that decision-making, execution and supervision check each other and function in coordination." These changes seem to have reflected a response to prior issues of corruption, etc.
I see this statement as significant in articulating the direction of Chinese military modernization: "the PLA is striving to transform from a quantity-and-scale model to that of quality and efficiency, as well as from being personnel-intensive to one that is S&T-intensive."
"New types of combat forces have been enhanced to conduct special operations, all-dimensional offense and defense, amphibious operations, far seas protection and strategic projection, aiming to make the force composition complete, combined, multi-functional and flexible."
The Chinese military is promoting innovation not only in science and technology but also in military theories. Of course, innovation can be amorphous as a concept, but there are substantive indicators of advances on these fronts. 
I want to highlight a couple of points about the PLA as a Party military, because that comes through very clearly in this paper.
