More than four years after promising a great renewal of the Chinese nation, while making sure China stands tall in the world and the Communist Party of China (CPC) runs itself with strict discipline, Xi Jinping's insights on China's political and economic development are revitalizing China's modernization drive.
When Xi appeared in front of the press at the Great Hall of the People on Nov. 15, 2012 after being elected as the Party's top leader, his confident demeanor and open admission of challenges such as the Party's corruption all pointed to change.
"We are not complacent, and we will never rest on our laurels," he told the 1.3 billion Chinese in a televised address, after praising past achievements.
More than 1,500 days into his helmsmanship, Xi has successfully imbued the country's political and economic governance thought with his own thinking.
The Chinese president, who is also general secretary of the CPC Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, has spearheaded a popular anti-graft drive which exposed a long list of fraudulent officials, from low-ranking "flies" to high-ranking "tigers."
In 2016, a report by The Wall Street Journal said that during the campaign, which has punished more than a million officials since late 2012, Xi has called for greater checks on political power, creating a "cage of regulations" that ensures cadres "dare not, cannot and don't want" to be corrupt.
Xi has publicly defended free trade against the backdrop of weak growth momentum in major economies and rising trade protectionism, and managed to sustain the world's second-largest economy on the track of fast growth.
China's GDP grew 6.7 percent to 74.4 trillion yuan (10.8 trillion U.S. dollars) in 2016, making China also the fastest growing among the world's major economies.
Xi has also taken a quantum leap in leading China to participate in global governance, guiding the ancient civilization back to the center of the world stage.
"By 2016, a broad swathe of Americans had begun to feel the effects of China's development in their everyday lives -- in shopping malls, at the multiplex, in paychecks -- and to sense that the center of global power might be shifting from the United States toward China," Robert Daly, director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States, wrote early this year.
"In 2016, China's big plans may have begun to tilt the balance," Daly added in Foreign Policy.
Hu Angang, director of the center for China studies at Tsinghua University in Beijing, attributed China's political and economic achievements to new governance insights contributed by the newest generation of Chinese leaders.
"China's most important success since the 18th CPC National Congress rests on the success in strategic policymaking, which constitutes the essential reason for China's success," Hu said.
CHANGING WORLD
With the advent of the new century, human civilization has ushered in a new era that is distinguished by falling efficiency of Western countries in terms of economy, society and systems, said Liu Shangxi, director of the Chinese Academy of Fiscal Sciences.
"On the other hand, emerging countries such as China, with their surging influence, are eager to find an independent path of sustainable development," Liu said.
Although China's development is in a period of strategic opportunity, the world's second-largest economy is facing complex external and internal environments.
Externally, people are concerned with a sluggish recovery, a lack of growth momentum, weak trade and investment, and a backlash against globalization.
In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the global political and economic order, as well as Western social and economic development models, fell short in coming up with a viable solution to the crisis. As a result, the crisis still has not been fundamentally dissolved.
Internally, China's decades-long reform drive is at a crossroads amid pressing needs for a transition in the country's growth model.
Worldwide, policymakers and researchers of both developed and developing countries are beginning to search for new governance concepts and theories in the hope of building a new international political and economic order as well as new models of economic and social development.
To that end, China has put forward the two centenary goals, pegged to the 100th anniversaries of the CPC and the People's Republic of China, and the Chinese dream of great national renewal.
Liu believes the two centenary goals and the Chinese dream not only embody demands of the Chinese people to the ruling party, but also set off the Chinese nation's new voyage to search for a new path for mankind.
Professor Tian Yingkui with the Party School of the CPC Central Committee agreed, highlighting the role of the CPC Central Committee with Xi Jinping as the core in developing "political economic" theories with Chinese characteristics.
"It is based on the CPC's long experience of governance and theoretical confidence that they applied Marxist political economy to guide the drive to build the well-off society on the one hand, and developed Marxism on the other hand," Tian said.
Over the past four years, a set of approaches for China's development have been raised, including the concept of innovative, coordinated, green, open and shared development, the market's decisive role in resource allocation, the "new normal," and supply-side structural reform.
These theories suit China and the times and have created gateways to realize the Chinese dream of rejuvenation, Tian said.
