BEIJING: During his early years in Liangjiahe, a village on the Loess Plateau in Shaanxi province, Xi Jinping, then one of the educated youths sent to the countryside, was struck by a small detail at mealtime.
While the educated youths were given corn buns, many local villagers survived on coarse cakes made from husks and bran — food that was barely edible and served only to keep hunger at bay.
Seeing the difference, Xi offered to swap his food with theirs. Only later did he realize that some villagers had not eaten the better food at all, but had saved it for family members back in the cave dwellings, especially the men who bore the heavier burdens.
Years later, Xi recalled that it was in those days that he came to understand the hardships ordinary people endured and began to think that, if given the chance, he should do practical things for their benefit.
That early conviction helps explain why the Communist Party of China’s latest Party-wide education campaign for fostering and practicing a correct view on governance performance places such strong emphasis on putting the people first. On Nov 15, 2012, the day he was elected general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, Xi met with Chinese and foreign journalists.
He spoke not in grand abstractions, but about the issues that mattered most to ordinary people: better education, more stable jobs, more satisfactory incomes, more reliable social security, better medical and health services, more comfortable living conditions, a better environment, and better opportunities for their children to grow, work and live well.
He distilled that commitment into an expression that would later become one of the most widely cited statements of the Party’s governing philosophy: “The Chinese people’s aspiration for a better life is the goal we strive for.”
Putting the people first has remained central to Xi’s thinking on governance and modernization. During an inspection tour in Chongqing in April 2024, he put it in especially direct terms: “As far as Chinese modernization is concerned, the people’s well-being matters the most.”
In this sense, a correct view of governance performance is measured not by headline numbers alone, but by how people actually experience the results of policy. During a visit to Huamao village in Zunyi, Guizhou province, in June 2015, Xi told villagers that the effectiveness of the Party’s policies should be judged by whether people were smiling or in tears.
That point also helps explain why the current education campaign carries particular weight at this stage of China’s development. Lin Jianhua, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ National Academy of Chinese Modernization, wrote that the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30) period will be critical to laying a solid foundation for the basic realization of socialist modernization. –The Daily Mail-China Daily news exchange item
