In one of several surprising and potentially welcome shifts in policy, China’s leaders announced Friday that they would relax China’s draconian one-child policy and end its brutal “re-education through labor” camps. They also outlined several ambitious economic initiatives that could make the country more hospitable to private enterprise in the coming years. Even so, they were silent on when and how they would carry out these reforms, and they made clear that the nation would remain under firm, one-party rule, and that neither political dissent nor democracy would be tolerated, much less embraced, anytime soon.