The 120th anniversary of Deng's birth

2024-08-23 15:21

On a hilltop at Lianhuashan Park in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, stands the bronze statue of late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (1904-97), the chief architect of China's reform and opening-up policy.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of visitors from across the country come to visit the site with a view to having a better understanding of how Deng and the policy he initiated have led Shenzhen, a metropolis that arose from a fishing village, to achieve an economic miracle.Embarking on the path set by Deng, China has achieved new milestones in its economic and social development. Per capita GDP increased phenomenally from about $155 in 1978 to over $10,000 today, and more than 700 million people have been lifted out of poverty.

"If there were no Deng who guided our Party to make the historic decision to reform and open up, we couldn't have achieved this much," President Xi Jinping said during an inspection tour of Guangdong in December 2012 — the first one he made outside Beijing after being elected general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee.

Deng's reform and opening-up policy was officially embraced at the third plenary session of the 11th CPC Central Committee in December 1978. The policy outlined the need to follow new economic management methods, introduce advanced technologies, boost economic exchanges with the outside world and scale down centralism in the planned economy to spur vitality and development.It was Deng's southern tour in 1992, especially his visit to Shenzhen starting on Jan 19, that pushed China's reform and opening-up policy further. The 87-year-old retired statesman, also founder of the theory of a socialist market economy, called on local officials to be "bolder in carrying out reform and opening-up" and to "dare to make experiments".His legacies in terms of politics, the economy and diplomacy have continued to inspire China across the years.Li Junru, former vice-president of the Party School of the CPC Central Committee, said that Deng led the Party and the people in advancing reform and opening-up, aiming to achieve socialist modernization.

Over the past decade, more than 2,000 reform measures have been rolled out, enabling the country to eliminate extreme poverty, promote integrated urban-rural development, fight corruption, support businesses, boost innovation and push forward a green transformation.With the reform measures, the Chinese economy has not only sustained robust growth but also more than doubled since 2012, cementing the country's status as a major contributor to global growth.The third plenary session of the 20th CPC Central Committee, which was held in July, adopted a resolution on further comprehensively deepening reform to advance Chinese modernization, which proposed over 300 reform measures to be completed by 2029. It sent out a clear message that in China, reform will not stop and opening-up will not cease.