Understanding the New Development Stage, Applying the New Development Philosophy, and Creating a New Development Dynamic

Xi Jinping

Since the Fifth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) held in October 2020, all regions and departments have yielded positive results from their hard work to study, publicize, and apply the guiding principles from the Session in line with the Central Committee's requirements. During this special seminar, the Central Committee hopes that we will gain an accurate understanding of the new stage of development through extensive discussions and exchanges of experience, with a view to fully implementing the new development philosophy, accelerating our efforts to create a new development dynamic, and promoting high-quality development during the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-2025). Doing so will see us setting the stage for building a modern socialist country in all respects.

I have spoken of the importance of studying and applying the guiding principles of the Fifth Plenary Session both at the Session itself and on many other occasions, such as meetings of the Central Committee Political Bureau and its Standing Committee, the Central Economic Work Conference, and the Central Rural Work Conference. Today, I would like to focus on the following four subjects.

First, we need to have an accurate understanding of the new stage of development.

An accurate understanding of the historical stage that the cause of our Party and people has entered is essential for defining the central task of the current period and setting the guidelines, principles, and policies for our work. This is an important practice our Party has used to move from victory to victory in leading China's revolution, development, and reform.

During the new-democratic revolution, our Party came to realize during the course of its arduous explorations that the Chinese revolution would have to pass through the historical stage of New Democracy. Based on this understanding, it set the tasks, strategies, and tactics that enabled it to lead the people to win the Chinese revolution. When the People's Republic of China (PRC) was founded in 1949, our Party was keenly aware that a transitional period would be required to move from new democracy to socialism. It accordingly formulated a general guideline for this period, which enabled our country to complete its socialist revolution and move smoothly into the period of socialist development. Following the introduction of the reform and opening up policy in 1978, it reviewed the positive and negative experiences of socialist development around the world, and particularly in China, and reached the major conclusion that China was in the primary stage of socialism and would remain in that stage for a long time to come. Accordingly, it set the basic guideline that ushered in a brand-new phase of reform, opening up, and socialist modernization. Since the 18th CPC National Congress in 2012, the Central Committee has built on the sustained efforts of our predecessors by pursuing coordinated implementation of the Five-sphere Integrated Plan and the Four-pronged Comprehensive Strategy. As a result, we have witnessed historic achievements and developments in the cause of our Party and the country, as socialism with Chinese characteristics has crossed the threshold into a new era.

The Fifth Plenary Session determined that China, having accomplished the First Centenary Goal of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects, would build on this achievement to embark on a new journey toward the Second Centenary Goal of building a modern socialist country in all respects, thus signifying China's entry into a new stage of development. This strategic judgment was made based on the following considerations.

From a theoretical standpoint, Marxism blends high ideals with practical tasks, and insists on the unity between historical inevitability and the stage-specific nature of development, in the belief that as human society moves inexorably toward communism, it must complete certain historical stages along the way. While applying the basic tenets of Marxism to the practical problems of China, our Party came to realize that the development of socialism did not only constitute one continuous historical process, but was made up of different stages. Between late 1959 and early 1960, Mao Zedong wrote in his reading notes on the Soviet textbook Political Economy that "It is possible to divide the period of socialism into two stages: one could be called underdeveloped socialism and one comparatively developed socialism. This latter stage," he noted, "may take even longer than the first." In 1987, Deng Xiaoping stated that "Socialism itself is the first stage of communism, and here in China we are still in the primary stage of socialism – that is, the underdeveloped stage. In everything we do we must proceed from this reality, and all planning must be consistent with it." The new development stage we are in today is just one part of the primary stage of socialism, but thanks to many decades of hard work, it is a period that marks a new starting point for us.