Xi’s Lunar New Year Inspections Show People-Centred Development
Chinese President Xi Jinping visited the homes of impoverished villagers of the Yi ethnic group in the Daliang Mountains of southwest China’s Sichuan Province on Sunday, days before the country celebrates Spring Festival, its most important holiday.
Mr Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, asked the villagers about their lives and discussed poverty alleviation with local officials and villagers.
For the sixth year in a row, Mr Xi’s Lunar New Year inspection tour has taken him to the front lines of China’s war against poverty. He visited northwestern Gansu Province in 2013, northern Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in 2014, northwestern Shaanxi Province in 2015, eastern Jiangxi Province in 2016, and Hebei Province in 2017.
The poor have been Mr Xi’s foremost concern. In his 2018 New Year speech, the word “people” appeared most frequently and he emphasised the “well-being” of the Chinese people, showing the president’s people-centred governance philosophy.
Chinese leaders have made it a tradition to visit ordinary people across the country ahead of the Spring Festival, the most important family holiday in the Chinese calendar. During one of the Spring Festival inspections, Mr Xi bought festival gifts before visiting old acquaintances in the village where he worked as an “educated youth.” During other trips, he went to farmers’ barns and kitchens, calculated revenues and expenses with villagers and offered advice on increasing income. The trips reflect his concerns. “To lead the people to a better life is our goal.
Not a single ethnic group, family or person should be left behind in the process of finishing the building of a moderately prosperous society in all respects,” Mr Xi told villagers in Liangshan. China is striving to become a “moderately prosperous society in all respects” by 2020, just before the centennial anniversary of the founding of the CPC. That means all rural residents living below the current poverty line should be lifted out of poverty by 2020. It will be the first time in China’s thousands of years of history that extreme poverty is eliminated.