Let reform and opening-up be the guide

Editor's note: Party General Secretary Hu Jintao addressed the opening session of a workshop for ministerial and provincial officials on July 23. The following is People's Daily commentary on the speech:

All Party members should keep firmly in mind that China's rapid development over the past 30-odd years has benefited from the reform and opening-up and that the country should unswervingly depend on this policy for its development.

Addressing a high-level workshop, Hu Jintao reviewed the fundamental reason behind the great achievements made by China over the past 30-odd years, stating explicitly that the reform and opening-up are an important connotation of socialism with Chinese characteristics and a strong force for China's development.

To carefully study the spirit of Hu's remarks, we should understand, stick to and push forward the reform and opening-up as part of our efforts to realize the objective of building a well-off society in an all-round way, accelerate our socialist modernization drive and hold on to and develop socialism with Chinese characteristics.

China has made spectacular achievements over the past 30-odd years since the reform and opening-up started in 1979, especially since the 16th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2002. It has become the world's second largest economy, overcome the negative effects of the global financial crisis, successfully combated the SARS epidemic in 2003 and the deadly Wenchuan earthquake in 2008. It has also hosted the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games and the Shanghai 2010 World Expo, formed a legal system with Chinese characteristics, and forged a new pattern of economic, political, cultural, social and ecological modernization.

The reason why we have pushed the socialist cause with Chinese characteristics to a new development stage and successfully completed a series of major tasks and overcome a series of major difficulties in the face of rapidly changing international situations and the arduous and heavy task of reform and development is that we have consistently regarded the emancipation of our mind as a strong ideological weapon and consistently used the reform and opening-up as strong driving force.

Without the reform and opening-up, the China that we see today would not have been possible. Likewise, without the reform and opening-up, we would have no bright future. On one hand, we should never relax our efforts even for a moment in the next five years to lay a decisive foundation for realizing a well-off society in an all-round way by 2020 and facilitating our efforts to basically realize the objective of socialist modernization by the middle of this century. On the other hand, we still face some outstanding problems in the process of our development, such as imbalances, non-coordination and non-sustainability, and cannot dodge or bypass some institutional obstacles that impede our scientific development.

In this context, we should attach greater importance to our experiences, explore the reform and opening-up and value our hard-won achievements.

We should unswervingly push forward the reform and opening-up and try to reach a new stage of emancipating our mind and advancing the reform and opening-up to achieve new breakthroughs in uniting forces and overcoming difficulties. By doing so, we can unite all the forces that can be united and mobilize all the positive factors that can be mobilized to overcome the difficulties and risks on the way ahead.

The reform and opening-up will always be a strong driving force to push for the development of the cause of the Party and the people. To fully understand and firmly grasp this force, we should adapt ourselves to the new changes at home and abroad, keep in mind people's new anticipations and work harder to unremittingly implement the spirit of the reform and opening-up in every aspect of our governance and national development.

We should also continue advancing the reforms and innovations of our economic, political, cultural and social institutions, expedite reform measures in some important and key fields and resolutely break any ideological concepts and institutional defects that hamper scientific development in a bid to promote coordinated development between relations of production and productivity, and between economic basis and superstructure.

We have to make endless improvements in the development road and development mode suitable for China's national conditions and broaden the socialist road with Chinese characteristics.

The reform and opening-up are China's most distinct feature in the new era. The reform and opening-up have added a strong vitality to China's development and caused historical changes to socialist China.

Looking into the future, we should more consciously and resolutely push forward the reform and opening-up and continuously take steps toward institutional construction and innovations to lay a more solid foundation for China's development and national rejuvenation.

(China Daily 08/08/2012 page8)