High-quality development serves national rejuvenation: China Daily editorial

The Chinese people have confidence in the country's future and are more inspired and resolved than ever to forge ahead under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, which provides a firm guarantee for building China into a great modern socialist country, President Xi Jinping asserted in his address to the closing meeting of the first session of the 14th National People's Congress, China's top legislature, on Monday.

Saying that the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is an irreversible historical process, Xi stressed that security is the bedrock of development, stability is a prerequisite for prosperity, and that development and security should be better coordinated to effectively safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity and the country's development interests.

Emphasizing the need to invigorate China through science and education and the innovation-driven development strategy, his speech was a galvanizing call to the nation to forge ahead with enterprise and fortitude to realize high-quality development at a time when it has many internal bottlenecks to overcome and when the external attempts to hinder the country's modernization are intensifying.

Having harvested the lower-hanging development fruit over the past more than 40 years since it launched the reform and opening-up policy in 1978, the nation now needs to address the many tough issues in the reform of key areas in order to enjoy the harder-to-harvest fruit necessary for high-quality development. To this end, Xi called on the country to fully and faithfully apply the new development philosophy on all fronts and accelerate efforts to establish a new pattern of development. He accentuated that greater efforts are required to realize industrial transformation and upgrading in order to continuously increase the country's economic strength and enhance its capabilities so as to achieve greater self-reliance in science and technology.

To better integrate Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan into the country's endeavor to realize its rejuvenation, Xi also called for the interference of external forces to be resolutely opposed so that the "one country, two systems" policy can be fully and faithfully implemented in the Hong Kong and Macao special administrative regions and the peaceful development of cross-Straits relations can be promoted.

But although the eyes of the nation are fixed on the modernization path ahead, that does not mean that the country is oblivious to the common aspirations of the rest of the world.

Xi once again advocated the implementation of the Global Development Initiative and the Global Security Initiative to promote the peaceful development of the world, and pledged that China will seek to add more positive energy to that endeavor by contributing to the building of an open world economy and playing an active part in the reform and development of the global governance system.

Shining a light on the nation's path into the future, Xi's speech affirmed that the relay baton of building a great modern socialist country and advancing national rejuvenation has been firmly grasped by the current leaders of the country.