Xi Leads China’s Final Sprint to Achieve Xiaokang Goal
July 1, 2021 is a date that will go down in Chinese history. As the Communist Party of China (CPC) marked its centenary, China was declared to have reached a milestone development goal.
Atop Tian’anmen Rostrum, President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the CPC Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, announced that China has achieved building a moderately prosperous society, or Xiaokang, in all respects.
In the traditional Confucian sense, Xiaokang describes a state whereby, although there is imperfection, everyone is adequately provided for.
Over the past eight years, the CPC Central Committee with Xi at the core oversaw the final push that transformed China into a Xiaokang society in all respects.
Pick up the baton
Building a prosperous society has been the Chinese people’s common aspiration for millennia.
In the early years of China’s reform and opening up, the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping first used Xiaokang to describe Chinese modernization, and proposed building a Xiaokang society.
After the Chinese people no longer had to worry about feeding and clothing themselves and saw their lives generally improve, the Party laid out plans to further build China into a Xiaokang society “in all respects.”
At the 18th CPC National Congress in November 2012, the Party announced that China had entered a decisive stage of attaining this goal. Soon afterward, Xi was elected general secretary of the CPC Central Committee.
“By the time the CPC marks its centenary, a moderately prosperous society in all respects can definitely be achieved,” Xi said when visiting an exhibition in the National Museum of China, after taking over the helm of the Party.
The theme of the exhibition was “Road to Rejuvenation.”
Xi said achieving the Xiaokang goal on time represents “a solemn promise that our Party has made to the Chinese people and to history.”
He often told cadres that “time and history wait for no one” and urged them to go all out.
For a Xiaokang society, all aspects of modernization, including the economic, political, cultural, social and ecological domains, should be developed in a coordinated fashion, Xi said.