Summary: The article argues that fine traditional Chinese culture is China's deepest cultural soft power and a prominent national advantage, based on a review of *Selected Works of Xi Jinping on Culture*, Volumes I and II. It outlines how the continuity, inclusiveness, and innovativeness of Chinese civilization provide a unique value system that can address global challenges and counter Western discourse. The piece calls for systematic policy measures to promote Chinese culture "going global," including deepening content supply, building a Chinese discourse system, expanding communication channels, strengthening the cultural industry, and enhancing civilizational mutual learning. It frames these efforts as essential for enhancing China's international discursive power, reshaping the global public opinion landscape, and building a culturally strong country. The author, a professor at Tsinghua University, emphasizes that disseminating Chinese culture offers Eastern wisdom for global governance and supports building a community with a shared future for mankind.
Summary: Xi Jinping has stressed the importance of ideological guidance and cohesion service for new employment groups, which now include 84 million couriers, delivery riders, and ride-hailing drivers. The article emphasizes consolidating the party's governing foundation by serving these groups, addressing their practical concerns, and integrating them into social governance. It calls for combining online and offline methods, strengthening party building in new economic and social organizations, and safeguarding workers' rights per the "Opinions on Strengthening Service Management for New Employment Groups." The piece also highlights guiding these workers to participate in grassroots governance, transforming them from "objects of governance" to "forces of governance." The author is Deputy Director of the Teaching and Research Department of Society and Ecological Civilization at the Party School of the CPC Central Committee.
Summary: The article emphasizes that leading cadres must always act with extreme caution and maintain a sense of profound vigilance, as articulated by General Secretary Xi Jinping, to avoid strategic errors and manage risks in a complex environment. It stresses the importance of self-discipline, guarding against corruption through cautious behavior in private and small matters, while organizations must fulfill supervision duties. The piece argues that this caution is a strategic sobriety, not conservatism, enabling cadres to handle complex situations, prevent risks, and fulfill their mission of advancing Chinese modernization. It concludes that leading cadres must diligently perform their duties with a sense of responsibility to live up to the organization's cultivation and the people's expectations on the new journey.
Summary: The article emphasizes the importance of a complete chain of responsibility for governing the Party, including primary, supervisory, and first-person responsibilities, which must be strictly implemented without perfunctory behavior. It states that strengthening the political functions of Party organizations includes implementing the primary responsibility for governing the Party. Leading cadres at all levels, as the "key minority," must resolutely shoulder this responsibility with political loyalty, exercising strict self-discipline and managing their purview to foster a strict atmosphere.
Summary: The article discusses the July 30, 2026, meeting of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, which emphasized "accelerating the replacement of old growth drivers with new ones" to sustain economic development. It argues that this replacement is key to building a modern industrial system and cultivating new quality productive forces, requiring breakthroughs toward the high-end, scaled-up growth, digital and intelligent transformation, and integrated development. Examples include China's carbon fiber and shipbuilding industries achieving high-end progress, while emerging industry clusters and AI applications drive incremental growth. The piece concludes that industrial integration, such as "Manufacturing + services," can open new growth curves, with the author identified as a researcher at the Institute of Industrial Economics and Technological Economics of the National Development and Reform Commission.
Summary: The article discusses trigger-based regulation, a new regulatory method proposed in the 15th Five-Year Plan outline, which sets thresholds and trigger conditions based on risk and credit to conduct differentiated regulation, aiming to minimize interference with normal business operations while ensuring market order remains safe and controllable. It notes that national policy guidance and local pilots, such as in the China (Xinjiang) Pilot Free Trade Zone and Nantong in Jiangsu, have driven its application, with main characteristics of "not disturbing businesses unless necessary, and conducting inspections whenever thresholds are triggered." The article explains that trigger-based regulation arises from the contradiction between rapid development of new economic organizations and the failure of traditional regulation, supported by digital technology, and requires operational systems including credit regulation, data governance, trigger mechanisms, and closed-loop regulation. It acknowledges problems such as lack of uniformity in trigger conditions, insufficient standardization of initiation procedures, and inadequate data sharing, proposing improvements like establishing unified standards, strengthening data support, and improving coordination mechanisms, while noting it does not apply to high-risk fields like food, pharmaceuticals, and special equipment.
Summary: The article explains the "attention economy" as an economic form where human attention is treated as a scarce resource, generating commercial value through attraction, aggregation, and conversion, with its logic manifested in short videos, livestream commerce, and algorithmic precision push. It attributes the rise of this economy to information overload, digital technology including AI and recommendation algorithms, and expanding digital consumption scenarios, while noting it has driven industrial shifts and daily-life digitalization. The piece also warns of risks such as weakened subjectivity, fragmented thinking, information cocoons, and content vulgarization, calling for individual attention management and institutional governance. It cites China's *Regulations on the Administration of Algorithmic Recommendations in Internet Information Services* as a basis for improving algorithmic governance, protecting user data rights, and balancing commercial interests with public responsibility. The article concludes that the attention economy should be guided by a people-centered development philosophy to serve better life needs and long-term social development.
Summary: The article discusses the Party Central Committee's deployment of a one-year deepening special campaign against black-and-evil crimes, which now requires close attention to new trends, focusing on organized crimes carried out through network platforms and soft violence means. It outlines the characteristics of online-related black-and-evil crimes, such as looser organizational structures, refined division of labor, and broader harmful consequences, citing typical forms including online loan fraud schemes, nude chat blackmail, and malicious claims. The piece emphasizes the need for a multi-dimensional lead discovery system using big data, destroying the entire criminal ecosystem by investigating tool, capital, and interest chains, and accurately applying the law with strict adherence to evidence standards for electronic data.
Summary: The Standing Committee of the 14th National People's Congress adopted the newly revised National Defense Mobilization Law on August 28, marking its first revision since promulgation 16 years ago. The revision explicitly writes the Party's leadership over national defense mobilization work into the general provisions, consolidates reform achievements by clarifying the National Defense Mobilization Commission's functions and adding a target responsibility system, and fills institutional shortcomings by improving informatization, intelligentization, and rights-and-interests protection provisions. The author, the Dean of the School of National Security of China University of Political Science and Law, argues the revision is a timely and imperative measure to address new security risks and align with deepened reforms.
Summary: The article argues that fine traditional Chinese culture is China's deepest cultural soft power and a prominent national advantage, based on a review of *Selected Works of Xi Jinping on Culture*, Volumes I and II. It outlines how the continuity, inclusiveness, and innovativeness of Chinese civilization provide a unique value system that can address global challenges and counter Western discourse. The piece calls for systematic policy measures to promote Chinese culture "going global," including deepening content supply, building a Chinese discourse system, expanding communication channels, strengthening the cultural industry, and enhancing civilizational mutual learning. It frames these efforts as essential for enhancing China's international discursive power, reshaping the global public opinion landscape, and building a culturally strong country. The author, a professor at Tsinghua University, emphasizes that disseminating Chinese culture offers Eastern wisdom for global governance and supports building a community with a shared future for mankind.
Summary: China Southern Air Holding is treating General Secretary Xi Jinping's December 2025 instructions on central enterprises as a major political task, combining them with the Fourth Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee and the Central Economic Work Conference to accelerate building a world-class air transport enterprise. The company adheres to the "Two Grasps and One Prevention" safety strategy, having ensured 320 months of flight safety, and will serve major national strategies including the Belt and Road Initiative, having opened 153 routes along it. It is strengthening hubs at Guangzhou, Beijing Daxing, and Urumqi, advancing scientific innovation such as the "Sky Eye" system, deepening reform with tenure-based management, and practicing "civil aviation for the people" through "warm and refined" services. The article details its Party building efforts, including implementing the "first agenda" system, punishing corruption, and rectifying the Four Malfeasances, with Grade A ratings in central enterprise assessments.
Summary: The article is a signed piece by the Party Committee Secretary and Chairman of the Board of Huadian New Energy Group Co., Ltd., arguing that upholding the Party's leadership is the "root" and "soul" of state-owned enterprises. It details how the company's Party Committee integrates Party leadership into corporate governance, uses the Party's innovative theories to unify thought, builds grassroots Party organizations as "fighting fortresses," and enforces strict Party self-governance to prevent risks. The piece emphasizes aligning enterprise development with national strategies such as energy security, green transformation, and the "dual carbon" goals. It frames these efforts as transforming the Party's political advantages into competitive advantages in green development, capital operation, and scientific and technological innovation.
Summary: The Party Committee of Tianjin Junliangcheng Power Generation Co., Ltd. has launched a "mass entrepreneurship and innovation" Party building enhancement project to drive deep integration of Party building and business in thermal power enterprises facing green transformation. The project constructs a systematic framework of "1 leadership + 4 supports + N practices," anchoring political leadership, empowering branch building, cultivating talent, enforcing integrity, and building culture. The author, the Company's Party Committee Secretary and Chairman of the Board, reports that implementation has improved theoretical study mechanisms, closer integration with central work, steady gains in production and profit indicators, and smoother talent channels. The article concludes that the project will be deepened to provide a replicable grassroots path for energy SOEs to integrate Party building with business work.
Summary: The author recounts how writing "Blooming: The Life Lessons of a Military Musician," which won the Ninth Lu Xun Literature Prize, was initially an attempt to "rescue" herself after a false alarm of severe illness. The protagonist, Yu Xiaodong, a former military guzheng artist and lung cancer patient, chose to teach in the Dabie Mountains for over ten years, and the author argues her story reveals that life's meaning lies in self-transcendence through helping others. The work uses a "dual-track" temporal structure and dense daily details to portray Yu Xiaodong's "original and unadulterated" character, resisting the impulse to "elevate" her. The author concludes that life is a spiritual cultivation of accumulated lessons, and that healing oneself by healing others is a path available to all in difficulty.
Summary: The author, former president of Southwest University of Political Science and Law, reflects on the Confucian ideal that "the scholar is devoted to the Way," arguing that modern university scholars should inherit this spirit by prioritizing collective welfare over personal gain. He distinguishes between the legal and spiritual meanings of "scholar," linking the latter to traditional virtues such as lofty ambitions and the "great man" ideal of not being corrupted by wealth, status, or force. The author emphasizes that alumni bonds are based on shared values rather than self-interest, and that scholars must uphold both a "morality of aspiration"—devotion to family and country—and a "morality of duty" represented by the school's bottom line. He concludes by urging scholars to cultivate integrity, calm reflection, and confidence, drawing on a couplet from the Party School of the CPC Central Committee to illustrate the principle that "with a well-nourished heart one has a master."
Summary: The article recounts Mao Zedong's lifelong reverence for his teacher Xu Teli, beginning with a 1937 birthday letter in Yan'an that praised Xu's revolutionary commitment and personal integrity. It details how Mao's respect was expressed through sustained actions, including birthday celebrations, personal gifts, and a 1959 visit to his hometown where he toasted his former teacher. The piece frames this as a tradition of respecting teachers and valuing education, linking it to Xi Jinping's own recollections of his teachers. It concludes by calling for the promotion of this tradition on the new journey of comprehensively building a modern socialist country.
Summary: Metascience, or "the science of science," takes scientific activity itself as its object of study, seeking to answer how science itself can be managed using scientific methods. Its current functions are diagnostic and experimental, aiming to identify causes of friction and inefficiency in the research system and to conduct controlled policy experiments within funding and review systems. The article argues that metascience's foremost value lies in enhancing the science and technology system's capacity for self-knowledge, optimizing resource allocation, and pushing reform from experience-driven to evidence-driven. For China, it recommends building a metascience system adapted to its own needs, with national coordination, internal research combined with external evaluation, and a professional workforce with diverse backgrounds. Ultimately, metascience embodies the principle that institutions managing science should also submit to scientific testing, marking a leap from "how to study the world" to "how to study science and technology themselves."
Summary: At the 2026 World AI Conference, Xi Jinping posed four questions on global AI governance concerning human-machine relations, technological safety, ethical governance, and inclusive benefits. The article argues for a people-centered approach, establishing human control over AI, and implementing comprehensive safety and ethical governance systems. It highlights risks like algorithmic bias, automation bias, and the concentration of AI computing power in North America andEast Asia, which disadvantages Global South countries. To address this, China pledges 5,000 AI training slots for developing countries, promotes open-source models like DeepSeek-R1, andsupports multilateral governance through the UN. The piece frames AI development as a global symphony requiring cooperation, not a solo performance by one country.
Summary: Xi Jinping has stressed the importance of ideological guidance and cohesion service for new employment groups, which now include 84 million couriers, delivery riders, and ride-hailing drivers. The article emphasizes consolidating the party's governing foundation by serving these groups, addressing their practical concerns, and integrating them into social governance. It calls for combining online and offline methods, strengthening party building in new economic and social organizations, and safeguarding workers' rights per the "Opinions on Strengthening Service Management for New Employment Groups." The piece also highlights guiding these workers to participate in grassroots governance, transforming them from "objects of governance" to "forces of governance." The author is Deputy Director of the Teaching and Research Department of Society and Ecological Civilization at the Party School of the CPC Central Committee.
Summary: At the Fourth Session of the 14th CPPCC National Committee, General Secretary Xi Jinping emphasized upholding the Party's leadership over health work, the people-first and life-first principles, the health-priority development strategy, and the public-welfare nature of basic medical and health services. The article argues that implementing this strategy is an urgent need to respond to complex health challenges, an engine for high-quality economic development, and an inherent requirement for common prosperity. It cites progress including the "Healthy China 2030" Planning Outline, rising health expenditure as a share of GDP, and improved key health indicators, while acknowledging persistent urban-rural and regional disparities. The author, the Party Committee Secretary of the Capacity Building and Continuing Education Center of the National Health Commission, calls for accelerating planning and institutional development, filling shortcomings in public health, grassroots services, industry, and talent, and advancing the modernization of health governance.
Summary: The article discusses the creation of urban waterfront spaces to meet public demand for water affinity, citing the "Action Plan for the Protection and Construction of Beautiful Rivers and Lakes (2025—2027)" and examples like Beijing's Liangma River and Ningbo's flood detention zones. It acknowledges challenges such as lagging management, unrealized dual-use functions, and insufficient inter-departmental coordination. The piece proposes solutions including a segmented checklist management system, IoT sensing for safety monitoring, and binding planning requirements for emergency function conversion. It also advocates for tiered management by flood risk, clarified departmental responsibilities, and a collaborative model combining industry supervision with territorial management.
Summary: The article discusses the 2026 Central Document No. 1's proposal to support employment and entrepreneurship upon return to one's hometown, highlighting the growing trend of returning to hometowns or villages to start businesses amid rural revitalization. It notes that over 15 million people have returned to start businesses, with 46% engaged in large-scale planting and breeding, and that these entrepreneurs account for 49.93% of high-quality farmers, though challenges such as fragmented policies, difficulty integrating into rural society, and insufficient development momentum persist. The piece recommends improving institutional safeguards, breaking through integration difficulties, and focusing on talent cultivation to fully unleash the employment-driving potential of returning entrepreneurs.
Summary: The article reports on Lishui's 20-year reform of "cultivating skill-oriented cadres, building a skill-oriented government," which has been elevated to the city's "No.1 Brand" of grassroots Party building through the "One Post, Two Capabilities, Two Evaluations" mechanism. It illustrates the initiative's impact through three cases: Xiaoshun Village's aerospace IP project, Xinjian Town's whole-industrial-chain development of the shelduck, and Chenjiapu Village's cross-village cultural-tourism planning. The piece concludes that this reform represents a reshaping of cadre capabilities, an organizational transformation through "mission-type organizations," and an upgrade of cadre-mass trust, with skill service teams having tackled 651 projects and resolved over 20,000 problems in 2025. The article was contributed by the Organization Department of the Lishui Municipal Party Committee, Zhejiang Province.
By: 邹广文
Cultural soft power is an indispensable core component of comprehensive national strength, and a country's cultural influence directly determines its discursive power, appeal, and international recognition in the global governance landscape. A comprehensive review of Selected Works of Xi Jinping on Culture, Volumes I and II, reveals that the important expositions therein on cultural development, the inheritance of fine traditional Chinese culture, and international communication are consistent and continuous throughout history (一脉相承, yī mài xiāng chéng - "one thread, follow each other") and progressing step by step in stages (层层递进, céng céng dì jìn - "layer, layer; step, step; advance"), together constructing an organic ideological system for the external dissemination of Chinese culture with complete logic and rich connotations. Volume I elucidates the strategic position of fine traditional Chinese culture as the prominent advantage of the Chinese nation and its deepest cultural soft power, revealing the dual attributes of Chinese culture as both historical and contemporary, both national and global; Volume II, grounded in the mission of the era to build a culturally strong country and create new brilliance for Chinese culture, deepens the scientific understanding of the outstanding characteristics of Chinese civilization, focuses on the core task of strengthening international communication capacity building and telling China's story well, and elevates the strategic value of cultural soft power in competition among major powers.
The Chinese civilization, which has continued uninterrupted for more than five thousand years, has accumulated the spiritual genes, values, and civilizational wisdom unique to the Chinese nation. It is both the spiritual foundation for establishing oneself and finding purpose in life (安身立命, ān shēn lì mìng - "be at peace, establish life") for all Chinese people and an invaluable treasure in the treasure house of human civilization. At present, global civilizational exchanges, integration, and confrontation continue to deepen, and erroneous trends of thought such as the "clash of civilizations" and "superiority of civilizations" constantly impact the order of global civilizational dialogue. Competition among countries around cultural discursive power and value appeal is becoming increasingly fierce. Against this backdrop of the era, in-depth study of Selected Works of Xi Jinping on Culture, Volumes I and II, will help us profoundly grasp the historical position and mission of the era of fine traditional Chinese culture, advance the building of a culturally strong country, and promote Chinese culture to better reach the world.
Why Fine Traditional Chinese Culture Has Become the Prominent Advantage of the Chinese Nation
General Secretary Xi Jinping has profoundly pointed out that "fine traditional Chinese culture is our deepest cultural soft power." This assertion, grounded in the history of several thousand years of Chinese civilization, the practice of Chinese modernization, and the grand landscape of global civilizational competition, comprehensively reveals the internal logic of fine traditional Chinese culture as the prominent advantage of the Chinese nation from four dimensions: the continuity of civilizational survival, the internal-external adaptability of value realization, the inclusiveness and innovativeness of civilizational development, and the supporting power of competition among major powers.
The continuity of Chinese civilization has forged a unique cultural foundation, forming a spiritual identity that distinguishes it from other nations. General Secretary Xi Jinping has emphasized: "Chinese civilization is the only great civilization in the world that has continued unbroken and developed in the form of a state to this day. This fully demonstrates that Chinese civilization possesses cultural subjectivity and vigorous vitality for self-development, responding to challenges, and breaking new ground." The civilizations of ancient Egypt, ancient Babylon, and ancient India all experienced ruptures; only Chinese culture, having undergone wars, divisions, and the integration of multiple ethnic groups, has always been passing on the torch from generation to generation (薪火相传, xīn huǒ xiāng chuán - "firewood, torch; mutually, pass"). The root cause lies in the mature mechanism of civilizational cohesion embedded in traditional Chinese culture. From the governance ideas of the people are the foundation of the state (民为邦本, mín wéi bāng běn - "people, are; state, foundation") and governing through virtue (为政以德, wéi zhèng yǐ dé - "govern, with; virtue"), to the social ideals of the world belongs to the public (天下为公, tiān xià wéi gōng - "world, is; public") and a vision of a world in great harmony (天下大同, tiān xià dà tóng - "world, great, harmony"), from the family-nation sentiment of self-cultivation, regulating the family, governing the state, and bringing peace to the world (修齐治平, xiū qí zhì píng - "cultivate, regulate, govern, pacify") and the sense of responsibility for the rise and fall of the nation, to the way of interaction of seeking harmony despite differences (和而不同, hé ér bù tóng - "harmony, but; not, same") and cherishing benevolence and good neighborliness, a complete and self-consistent value system has run through thousands of years of development, shaping the common spiritual genes of the Chinese nation. The cultural accumulation spanning several thousand years has forged the unique spiritual identity of the Chinese nation. Chinese characters, traditional festivals, the ritual and music system, poetry, calligraphy and painting, traditional Chinese medicine and tea ceremony, and traditional crafts all carry the unique way of thinking and spiritual pursuits of the Chinese people. Through transmission across generations, traditional culture has been internalized into the national character, becoming the underlying logic by which people understand the world, handle relationships, and pursue ideals. Compared with countries whose civilizational threads have been ruptured and whose cultural resources are relatively thin, we possess a naturally profound and irreplicable cultural reserve. This is the source of the "deepest cultural soft power" and a unique advantage that other countries cannot replicate.
Chinese wisdom, which possesses both national and global character, contains civilizational solutions for responding to global challenges. General Secretary Xi Jinping has pointed out: "Chinese culture is both historical and contemporary, both national and global." The philosophical thought, humanistic spirit, and moral concepts contained in Chinese culture can both answer China's development challenges and provide Eastern wisdom for responding to various global challenges. Domestically, "although Zhou was an ancient state, its mandate was renewed" provides important cultural inspiration for comprehensively deepening reform; "the unity of heaven and humanity" and "all things are nurtured together" provide important guidance for ecological civilization construction; "enriching the people and promoting well-being" and "balancing righteousness and benefit" provide important support for the practice of common prosperity; "holding to the two extremes and employing the mean" and "maintaining balance to achieve harmony" provide important principles for coordinating development and security and balancing efficiency and fairness. The combination of the fundamental tenets of Marxism with fine traditional Chinese culture endows the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics with profound historical depth, forming a unique cultural advantage distinct from Western modernization. Externally, the world today faces difficulties such as geopolitical conflict, development imbalance, ecological crisis, and civilizational estrangement, and Western zero-sum game and civilizational confrontation thinking is unable to provide effective solutions. The "harmonious alliance of all nations," "seeking harmony despite differences," and "promoting credibility and good neighborliness" advocated by Chinese culture champion equality and inclusiveness among civilizations; "do not do to others what you do not wish done to yourself" advocates mutual respect among nations; "the unity of heaven and humanity" and "following the laws of nature" provide intellectual reference for global climate governance and biodiversity protection. These concepts transcend region, race, and ideology, resonate with the aspirations of people of all countries for peace, development, cooperation, and win-win outcomes, and have laid a solid value foundation for the global dissemination of Chinese culture.
Strong inclusiveness and innovativeness enable Chinese culture to continue developing and maintain lasting vitality through absorbing diverse elements. General Secretary Xi Jinjiang has pointed out: "Chinese civilization is an open system formed through continuous exchange and mutual learning with other civilizations." Chinese civilization upholds fundamental principles without being conservative and respects the ancients without restoring the old; it both accommodates foreign civilizations and adheres to its own subjectivity. This is the key to Chinese culture's continued external dissemination and global influence. The ancient Silk Road was both a trade route and a corridor of civilizational exchange. While Chinese civilizational achievements such as silk, porcelain, papermaking, and printing spread westward, Chinese civilization also actively absorbed cultural nourishment from Central Asia, South Asia, and other regions, forming a civilizational character of pluralistic unity and inclusiveness. Chinese culture is both historical and contemporary, both national and global. Cultural development must "adhere to not forgetting the original, absorbing the foreign, and facing the future, transforming through inheritance and surpassing through learning, creating more excellent works that embody the essence of Chinese culture, reflect the aesthetic pursuits of the Chinese people, disseminate contemporary Chinese values, and also conform to the trend of world progress, so that our literature and art stand proudly in the world with distinct Chinese characteristics, Chinese style, and Chinese bearing." On the one hand, Chinese culture has the capacity for self-renewal and can continuously adapt to modern life through creative transformation and innovative development; on the other hand, Chinese culture dialectically absorbs outstanding foreign achievements, effectively avoiding closure and narrow-mindedness. This trait of inclusiveness and innovation enables Chinese culture to continuously produce cultural content that aligns with world trends, providing long-term content supply for cultural soft power.
It condenses the spiritual strength for national rejuvenation and constitutes the deep soft power support in comprehensive national strength competition. General Secretary Xi Jinping has emphasized: "Continuously enhance the national cultural soft power and the influence of Chinese culture." Cultural soft power exerts a subtle influence on the world through value resonance, with advantages of low cost, sustainability, and high recognition. Chinese culture, as an important component of cultural soft power, carries the cultural logic of peaceful development in Chinese modernization, and relies on rich traditional cultural resources to construct an independent discourse system, helping to break the Western monopoly on public opinion, effectively defuse the "China threat theory," and form deep-level competitiveness that economic and military strength cannot replace.
Promoting Chinese Culture to Better Reach the World Through Systematic Policy Measures
Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core has attached great importance to enhancing the dissemination and influence of Chinese civilization. "Focusing on strengthening international communication capacity building and promoting civilizational exchange and mutual learning" is an important component of Xi Jinping Thought on Culture. General Secretary Xi Jinping has pointed out: "We must better promote Chinese culture going global, conveying principles through culture, transmitting voices through culture, and educating people through culture, explaining and recommending to the world more excellent culture with Chinese characteristics, embodying the Chinese spirit, and containing Chinese wisdom." Promoting Chinese culture "going global" cannot be limited to superficial exchanges such as cultural relic exhibitions and artistic performances; it must adhere to "not forgetting the original, absorbing the foreign, and facing the future," take consolidating cultural subjectivity as the foundation, promoting creative transformation and innovative development as the core, and strengthening international communication capacity building as the starting point, constructing a multi-dimensional and integrated communication system covering content, discourse, channels, industry, mutual learning, and safeguards.
Uphing fundamental principles and breaking new ground to deepen content supply and truly realize the creative transformation and innovative development of fine traditional Chinese culture. General Secretary Xi Jinping has emphasized: "Adhere to the Chinese cultural standpoint and inherit the genes of Chinese culture." Content is the core carrier of culture "going global"; without high-quality content that bridges China and the rest of the world, international communication cannot take root. This requires systematic excavation of the spiritual symbols of Chinese civilization and refinement of the value core that bridges China and the world. Centering on the core concepts of fine traditional Chinese culture such as the vision of a world in great harmony, the people as the foundation of the state, the unity of heaven and humanity, and seeking harmony despite differences, we should build a system of civilizational symbols with international recognition, deeply explore the contemporary value behind cultural symbols, and closely align with global common concerns to achieve value resonance. We should create internationally oriented masterpieces, promote the integration of traditional opera, Chinese painting, intangible cultural heritage, and classical literature into modern aesthetics, extract cultural spirit that transcends time and space and possesses contemporary value, and adapt it to the context of globalized communication. We should balance historical and contemporary narratives to present a complete China where past and present are connected. International communication cannot only export ancient culture; it must also explain how traditional culture nourishes Chinese modernization, connect the narrative chain between past and present, respond to the international community's questions about "where China comes from and where China is going," and present a true, three-dimensional, and comprehensive civilized China.
Focus on building a Chinese discourse and narrative system that bridges China and the world, breaking down barriers to cross-cultural communication. General Secretary Xi Jinping has required "telling China's story well and spreading China's voice well." The greatest obstacle to cross-cultural communication lies in differences in discourse systems, ways of thinking, and contextual backgrounds, requiring the creation of narrative systems that overseas audiences can easily empathize with. We should implement segmented and targeted communication, strengthen regional and country studies, assess the cultural preferences and public opinion concerns of audiences in different regions, and abandon homogenized communication. For the Chinese character cultural sphere, we should highlight narratives of cultural common origin; for Europe and the United States, we should focus on issues such as ecology, peace, and global governance; for developing countries, we should explain the concepts of mutual benefit and win-win cooperation and the vision of a world in great harmony, using localized expression to bridge cultural estrangement. We should interpret traditional culture outside the framework of Western discourse, create new concepts and expressions that bridge China and the world, improve the standardized translation of core terms such as "the golden mean" and "the unity of heaven and humanity," defuse one-sided interpretations, transform traditional concepts into globally accessible discourse, use "seeking harmony despite differences" to explain the diversity of civilizations, and use "the vision of a world in great harmony" to interpret the promotion of building a community with a shared future for mankind, achieving Chinese positions with international expression.
Expand diversified communication channels and build a communication matrix with online and offline, official and non-official forces working in coordination. General Secretary Xi Jinping has emphasized: "We must promote the restructuring of the international communication landscape, innovatively carry out online external publicity, and build a multi-channel, three-dimensional external communication pattern." Channels determine the coverage and reach efficiency of communication. In the new era, culture "going global" requires coordinating online digital platforms and offline physical carriers and integrating multiple communication forces. We should strengthen digital international communication positions, develop new digital cultural business forms, rely on short videos, VR/AR, virtual digital humans and other technologies to revitalize cultural heritage, build independent and controllable international digital platforms, support the going global of national-style games, online literature, and digital cultural museums, and promote the digital overseas exhibitions of cultural heritage such as the Palace Museum, Dunhuang, and the Great Wall; at the same time, we should insist that technology serves content, adhere to cultural subjectivity, and prevent content entertainment and distortion of cultural connotations. We should strengthen offline international cultural exchange carriers, operate overseas cultural centers and Confucius Institutes well, hold international art festivals, cultural relic touring exhibitions, and traditional art touring performances, (relying on the Belt and Road Initiative cultural corridor to build the Silk Road cultural brand), deepen cooperation with countries along the route in intangible cultural heritage protection, academic exchange, and other areas, cultivate long-term cultural identity, and continuously expand the circle of friends who understand and are friendly to China.
Strengthen the main body of the cultural industry and cultivate Chinese cultural brands with global competitiveness. General Secretary Xi Jinping has pointed out: "Promote the development of cultural undertakings and cultural industries." Relying solely on non-profit cultural exchange often makes it difficult to achieve long-term, large-scale communication effects; it must rely on the market-based empowerment of the cultural industry. On the one hand, we should build a complete traditional culture IP industry chain covering cultural creativity, film and television, national-style fashion, and lifestyle aesthetics, promote the integration of cultural elements into overseas daily consumption, improve support policies, and cultivate local cultural enterprises with global operational capabilities; on the other hand, we should adhere to localized operations, jointly create and distribute with overseas local teams, adapt to local laws and regulations, aesthetics, and consumption habits, seek a balance between cultural core and market returns, resolutely prevent behaviors that dissolve local culture to cater to the market, and achieve the organic unity of social and economic benefits.
Adhere to openness, inclusiveness, and civilizational mutual learning, and build a pattern of global civilizational interaction with equal dialogue. General Secretary Xi Jinping has emphasized: "Adhere to equality, mutual learning, dialogue, and inclusiveness among civilizations, transcend civilizational estrangement through civilizational exchange, transcend civilizational conflict through civilizational mutual learning, and transcend civilizational superiority through civilizational inclusiveness." External cultural exchange is two-way equal dialogue, by no means one-way cultural export. We should adhere to cultural subjectivity, fully and accurately explain the value connotations of Chinese civilization, and resist the misinterpretation of local culture by Western theories; at the same time, we should respect the uniqueness of each country's civilization, rationally resolve cultural prejudice, and conduct equal exchange and dialogue. We should actively absorb outstanding achievements of foreign civilizations, learn from advanced international experience in cultural creativity, narrative, and brand operation, and after localized transformation, feed back into local cultural innovation, forming a two-way cycle of "bringing in" and "going global." We should build a global civilizational dialogue platform with the concept of harmonious coexistence, conduct civilizational dialogue around issues such as climate change, poverty reduction, and public health, exchange governance wisdom, and consolidate the foundation of global cooperation through cultural identity.
Improve safeguard systems for talent, institutions, and translation, and consolidate the foundational support for international communication. Long-term communication cannot be separated from supporting safeguards. General Secretary Xi Jinping has pointed out: "Build a strong contingent of specialized talent suited to the needs of international communication in the new era." We should strengthen the cultivation of composite international communication talent, build professional teams with traditional cultural literacy, foreign language ability, cross-cultural communication, and overseas operational capabilities, and improve talent cultivation and incentive mechanisms; build translation databases for classics and standardized core terminology, effectively solving problems such as translation distortion and loss of cultural imagery; and also improve relevant laws and regulations on overseas intellectual property protection and cultural security maintenance, effectively preventing the risks of ideological infiltration and distortion of cultural symbols, and building a strong defense line for cultural security.
Comprehensively Enhancing National Cultural Soft Power and the Influence of Chinese Culture Through the Global Dissemination of Culture
General Secretary Xi Jinping has emphasized: "Cultural soft power and influence are important components of comprehensive national strength." At present, the world's century-old changes are accelerating, and competition in national cultural influence is also becoming increasingly fierce. As a responsible major country, we must more proactively publicize China's propositions, spread Chinese culture, and present China's image. Promoting Chinese culture to reach the world must ultimately be anchored on the four core goals of strengthening cultural confidence, enhancing international discursive power, deepening civilizational exchange and mutual learning among mankind, and building a socialist cultural power.
Build a solid foundation of cultural confidence and consolidate the cultural subjectivity of the Chinese nation. General Secretary Xi Jinping has pointed out: "Strengthening cultural confidence is a major issue concerning the rise and fall of the nation's fortunes, cultural security, and the independence of the national spirit." National cultural soft power is rooted in deep national cultural soil, and the high degree of cultural identity of the entire nation is the fundamental confidence for conducting international communication and telling China's story well. Promoting Chinese culture "going global" should coordinate external communication and internal popularization to achieve two-way empowerment of internal and external cultural construction. In international communication practice, systematically excavating and creatively transforming local cultural resources helps guide the people to deepen historical consciousness and cultivate cultural confidence, continuously consolidating the cultural subjectivity of the Chinese nation. In a global landscape where diverse civilizations exchange and integrate and where ideas and cultures collide, the continuous and profound Chinese cultural lineage can effectively resist the erosion of Western cultural hegemony and condense the mighty spiritual force for advancing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.
Strive to reshape the international public opinion landscape and enhance China's international discursive power and appeal. General Secretary Xi Jinping has emphasized that "communication power determines influence, and discursive power determines initiative" and that "international discursive power is an important component of national cultural soft power." For a long time, the international public opinion arena has been dominated by Western discourse, and some overseas forces have continuously fabricated and exported distorted narratives about China. Chinese culture provides us with independent and profound discursive resources. We must break the Western narrative monopoly, continuously spread Eastern values of peace, win-win cooperation, inclusiveness, and coexistence, gradually reverse overseas stereotypes, defuse arguments such as the "clash of civilizations" and "China threat theory," cultivate more forces that understand and are friendly to China, transform cultural appeal into actual discursive power, and comprehensively enhance national cultural soft power.
Enrich the garden of human civilizations and provide new choices of Eastern civilization for global governance. General Secretary Xi Jinping has emphasized: "Diverse civilizations are the true colors of the world." Today, when the destinies of all countries are closely connected, the inclusive coexistence, exchange, and mutual learning of different civilizations play an irreplaceable role in promoting the modernization process of human society and enriching the garden of world civilizations. In today's world, the drawbacks of the Western civilizational development model are increasingly prominent, and the world urgently needs solutions from diverse civilizations. China's concepts such as the vision of a world in great harmony, the unity of heaven and humanity, and harmonious coexistence provide new ideas that can be referenced for global governance, ecological protection, and civilizational interaction. Disseminating Chinese culture is essentially contributing the wisdom of Chinese civilization to the world, enriching the diversity of world civilizations, guiding countries around the world to abandon zero-sum game thinking, establish a civilizational outlook of exchange, mutual learning, cooperation, and win-win outcomes, promote the building of a community with a shared future for mankind, and inject lasting civilizational momentum into world peace and development.
Cultivating strong international communication capacity is an inevitable requirement for promoting cultural prosperity and building a culturally strong country. General Secretary Xi Jinping has emphasized: "We must deeply understand the importance and necessity of strengthening and improving international communication work under the new circumstances, make great efforts to strengthen international communication capacity building, and form international discursive power commensurate with our comprehensive national strength and international status." At present, against the backdrop of global civilizational exchange and collision, it is even more necessary for us to consciously conduct systematic sorting and innovative transformation of local cultural resources, boost the creation of quality content, and consolidate the foundation of the cultural subjectivity of the Chinese nation. In particular, we should rely on the unique advantages of Chinese culture, continue to promote the "two creations" and international communication capacity building, make up for the shortcomings of China's external communication, achieve coordinated development of hard and soft power, shape a credible, lovable, and respectable image of China, effectively convey Chinese values and the Chinese spirit, build a solid cultural foundation for comprehensively building a great modern socialist country, and continuously provide civilizational strength for building a community with a shared future for mankind.
(The author is a professor at the School of Marxism, Tsinghua University)
Return to TopBy: 李志明
General Secretary Xi Jinping has pointed out: "We must pay close attention to the development of new forms of business, adhere to combining online and offline efforts, do a good job in the ideological guidance and cohesion service work for new employment groups, and continuously consolidate the party's class foundation, mass foundation, and social foundation for governance." This important exposition has indicated the direction and method for doing a good job in the work on new employment groups. The "15th Five-Year Plan" outline has proposed, "Strengthen party building in new economic organizations, new social organizations, and new employment groups," "Promote the healthy development of flexible employment and new forms of employment." Doing the ideological guidance and cohesion service work for new employment groups deeply, meticulously, and substantively is an important topic in the party's mass work on the new journey of the new era.
Deeply understand the great significance of doing a good job in the ideological guidance and cohesion service work for new employment groups
With the vigorous development of new forms of business such as the platform economy and sharing economy, the scale of new employment groups such as couriers, food delivery riders, and ride-hailing drivers has reached 84 million people, accounting for 21% of the total number of workers; the scale of flexible employment personnel has exceeded 200 million people. General Secretary Xi Jinping has emphasized that the people's hearts are the biggest politics. Whether the work on new employment groups is done well or not, in the final analysis, depends on whether we can win the hearts of this group.
This is an inevitable requirement for consolidating the party's governing foundation. Our party comes from the people, takes root in the people, and serves the people; the party's governing foundation lies in the support and endorsement of the broadest masses of the people. New employment groups, with young and middle-aged adults as the main body, are large in number and growing rapidly, are an important component of socialist workers, and are an indispensable important force for economic and social development. How this group's political identification, ideological identification, theoretical identification, and emotional identification with the party is directly affects the party's class foundation, mass foundation, and social foundation for governance. In November 2024, the Party Central Committee held the first Central Social Work Conference, and General Secretary Xi Jinping made important instructions, emphasizing, "Prominently grasp party building in new economic organizations, new social organizations, and new employment groups, continuously enhance the party's appeal, cohesion, and influence in emerging fields." This has both clarified the key tasks of social work and highlighted the weight of doing a good job in the work on new employment groups in the overall work of the party and the state. Wherever emerging fields develop, party building must follow up, and party work must cover there. Facing such a group, if party organizations cannot effectively cover, effectively lead, and effectively serve, the positions in emerging fields will be in danger of being lost. Only by responding to their urgent concerns, safeguarding their legitimate rights and interests, and strengthening political guidance can we transform the party's political advantages and organizational advantages into leadership, cohesion, and influence over emerging fields, making the party's governing foundation take deeper root and stand more firmly in new forms of business and new groups.
This is an inherent requirement for practicing the people-centered development philosophy. General Secretary Xi Jinping has always had deep concern for new employment groups, praising them as "creators and guardians of a better life." In March 2025, when participating in the deliberation of the Jiangsu delegation at the Third Session of the 14th National People's Congress, General Secretary Xi Jinping emphasized: "Our social groups are being refined and differentiated. For those delivery workers, ride-hailing drivers, e-commerce practitioners, and others who have appeared in recent years, management and services must keep up, filling this gap. There must be both management and service." New employment groups come out in the wind and go in the rain, with high labor intensity and high occupational risk, and still have many worries, troubles, and anxieties regarding labor remuneration, rest and leave, social security, career development, and other aspects. The people's aspiration for a better life is our goal of struggle. Doing ideological guidance and cohesion service work well is precisely the concrete action of implementing the people-centered development philosophy onto new employment groups, solving both ideological problems and, more importantly, practical difficulties, letting them feel the party's warmth and the system's temperature in joint contribution, joint governance, and shared benefits, continuously enhancing their sense of gain, happiness, and security.
This is an important support for advancing the modernization of social governance and stimulating social vitality. New employment groups travel from place to place all year round, entering buildings and homes, connecting countless families and households, familiar with social conditions and public opinion, and are "mobile sentinels" and "mobile monitors" that grassroots governance can rely on. They are both objects of service management and can become forces participating in governance. Doing ideological guidance and cohesion service work well, promoting their transformation from "objects of governance" to "forces of governance," can both promptly resolve contradictions and risks in emerging fields and inject new momentum into grassroots governance, forming a virtuous cycle in which service and governance promote each other. Some localities have organized couriers and delivery riders to serve as part-time grid workers and food safety supervisors, participating in hidden danger investigation, civilized persuasion, and assistance delivery for the elderly, and have already achieved tangible results.
Accurately grasp the basic characteristics and ideological reality of new employment groups
Doing ideological guidance and cohesion service work well presupposes understanding the targets and grasping their pulse. Compared with traditional industrial workers, new employment groups use emerging technologies such as internet platforms as the main carrier for organizing production, obtain labor remuneration through methods such as online order acceptance and internet traffic monetization as their main source of income, and their employment methods and labor relations present flexibility, diversity, and openness; the characteristics of digitalized production methods, diversified employment methods, and overloaded labor are prominent, and they have a series of new characteristics in employment methods, labor processes, ideological concepts, and other aspects, so old ideas and old methods cannot be completely copied.
The internal composition of new employment groups is continuously being refined. Nationwide, there are approximately 3.2 million couriers, over 7 million ride-hailing drivers, and ride-hailing delivery riders, truck drivers, internet streamers, and others each form considerable scale, with obvious differences in labor methods, income levels, and interest demands across different industries. The most prominent change is that "unit people" have become "platform people." Most new employment groups rely on internet platforms for employment, with flexible and diverse labor relations, and cross-platform, cross-industry, cross-regional mobility has become the norm. In the past, the organizational system that relied on work units and registered residence to carry out work often cannot reach them or cover them, easily resulting in blank spots in organizational coverage and weak points in ideological work. Accompanying this is the deep involvement of algorithms in the labor process. Labor rules such as order dispatch, pricing, time limits, and evaluation are dominated by platform algorithms, with workers facing high labor intensity and fast work rhythms, and concentrated complaints about opaque algorithms, unreasonable remuneration, and unsmooth appeal channels; the occupational anxiety and psychological pressure arising from this cannot be ignored. At the same time, due to difficulties in determining labor relations and diversified subjects of employment responsibility, when some workers have disputes with platform enterprises, they also face difficulties such as unsmooth rights protection channels and insufficient evidence-providing capacity.
New employment groups have broad sources, including both rural transferred labor, college graduates, and workers transferred from traditional industries, with relatively low entry thresholds; young and middle-aged adults are the main body; according to relevant platform statistics, the average age of ride-hailing drivers is around 38 years old, and most delivery riders are in their early 20s; labor intensity is generally high, with frontline couriers delivering over 200 items per day on average, and about half of truck drivers drive more than 10 hours per day; employment stability is relatively weak, with average work cycles not exceeding 2 years, and some even hold multiple jobs and engage in cross-sector employment, both delivering food and delivering packages, being ride-hailing drivers during the day and internet streamers at night. With high labor intensity, rapid mobility and change, they are year-round "floating in the clouds, running on the road," which poses new requirements for the methods and approaches of ideological guidance and cohesion service.
Most new employment groups are the younger generation who have grown up with the internet, with diverse composition, active thinking, and diverse value orientations; they obtain information, express demands, and participate in society mainly online, and erroneous ideological trends and negative emotions online also easily affect them, so the pertinence and effectiveness of online ideological guidance urgently need to be enhanced. They yearn to be respected and recognized, hoping for reliable occupational safety, reasonable benefit distribution, adequate social security, and effective social integration. The work of new employment groups also has a certain temporary and transitional nature, and some practitioners' occupational identity and sense of belonging are not strong enough, making it even more necessary to enhance occupational confidence and stabilize employment expectations through ideological guidance and warm-hearted services. At the same time, it must also be seen that the fundamental aspect of this group is positive and upward; they are hardworking, upward and good, repeatedly stepping forward at critical and dangerous moments, demonstrating the spiritual character of workers in the new era. Only by grasping these characteristics can work be acting with a clear purpose or specific target (有的放矢, you de fang shi - "have, target, shoot, arrow"). On the one hand, we must adhere to combining online and offline efforts: offline, build organizations, deliver services to their doorsteps, and safeguard rights and interests; online, occupy positions, spread voices, and receive demands. On the other hand, we must adhere to combining solving ideological problems with solving practical problems: ideological guidance divorced from solving practical difficulties is empty, and service cohesion divorced from ideological guidance is also difficult to sustain; the two must be grasped together and grasped thoroughly.
Do the ideological guidance and cohesion service work into the hearts of new employment groups
To do this work well, we must uphold and strengthen the party's overall leadership, adhere to being people-centered, adhere to combining online and offline efforts, connect ideological guidance, organizational building, service guarantees, and integration into governance, advance them as a whole, with sustained, long-term effort.
Implement ideological and political guidance into practice. Persist in using Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era to consolidate hearts and forge souls, carry out ideal and belief education in light of the characteristics of new employment groups, deepen the publicity and education of core socialist values, vigorously promote the spirit of labor, the spirit of struggle, the spirit of dedication, the spirit of creation, and the spirit of diligence and thrift. Methods and approaches must keep up with the reality that new employment groups have more "screen-to-screen" than "face-to-face" interactions, moving theoretical classrooms online, integrating learning content into their fingertips, promoting flexible and effective learning forms such as "ten minutes before shifts" and"micro classes at stations," using language and forms they can understand, remember, and apply to explain principles, preventing rigid indoctrination and indiscriminate flooding. Combine solving ideological problems with solving practical difficulties, conveying the party's care in resolving worries and difficulties, enhancing political identification, ideological identification, theoretical identification, and emotional identification in a gentle and subtle manner, guiding the broad masses of workers in new forms of employment to unswervingly listen to the party's words and follow the party.
Promote effective coverage of party organizations and party work. Wherever there are masses, there must be party work. In light of the work methods and activity scope of new employment groups, leverage the respective advantages of localities, industries, and enterprises, innovate the establishment methods and activity forms of party organizations, promote the extension of party organizational coverage and work coverage to platform enterprises, outlets and stations, transportation routes, and online live-streaming rooms. Strengthen and improve the education, management, supervision, and service of mobile party members, explore methods combining places of departure and places of arrival, and combining offline and online, so that every party member is included in organizational management and does not fall behind. Some localities have carried out activities such as "organizations seeking party members, party members seeking organizations," using data comparison from platform enterprises and screening at outlets and stations to find out and manage party members who have long been drifting outside organizations;these practices are worth summarizing and promoting. Effectively leverage the bridge-and-link role of mass organizations such as trade unions, Communist Youth League organizations, and women's federations, transmit the party's warmth through mass organizations to new employment groups, achieving full coverage of the party's voice and uninterrupted party work
Safeguard rights and interests according to law and provide meticulous care services. Service is the best cohesion, and protection is the most solid guidance. The General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council have issued the"Opinions on Strengthening Service Management for New Employment Groups," clearly proposing the goals of achieving full coverage of party organizations and party work for new employment groups, gradual standardization of labor employment, significant improvement in the employment environment, and strong protection of legitimate rights and interests by 2027, and making arrangements for standardizing labor employment management according to law, strengthening the protection of legitimate rights and interests, strengthening algorithm governance on internet platforms, improving the level of public services, and other aspects. We must grasp implementation, standardize labor employment according to law, promote the reasonable determination of labor remuneration and the protection of rest rights, urge platform enterprises to standardize algorithms and improve transparency, improve social security systems suited to the characteristics of new employment groups, expand pilots for occupational injury protection, steadily advance participation in the housing provident fund system, so that workers have remuneration for their labor, medical care when ill, and support in old age. Coordinate the use of party-mass service centers, trade union stations, driver homes, and other positions, advance the construction of friendly scenes in communities, commercial districts, office buildings, industrial parks, transportation hubs, and other places, help solve practical problems such as accommodation, meals, parking, and passage. Improve mechanisms for collecting and responding to demands, uphold and develop the "Fengqiao model" in the new era, promote cross-departmental, cross-regional, and government-enterprise coordinated handling of high-frequency demands and common problems, strive to ensure that every demand they make is handled by someone and every demand is advanced according to law, using tangible sense of gain to unite hearts. In December 2025, the State Council reported to the NPC Standing Committee on the protection of the rights and interests of flexible employment and workers in new forms of employment, clearly proposing to promptly introduce measures for the protection of the rights and interests of workers in new forms of employment, and the level of institutionalization and rule-of-law protection of the rights and interests of new employment groups will be further improved
Guide new employment groups to integrate into social governance. We must strengthen positive publicity, encouragement, and guidance, deeply explore and publicize advanced models among new employment groups, organize vocational skills competitions and job contribution activities well, create an atmosphere in the whole society of respecting labor and respecting new employment groups, enhance their sense of occupational honor and social identity. Improve working mechanisms and incentive mechanisms, encourage and guide new employment groups to participate in grassroots governance and volunteer services, support them to participate in industry governance according to law, orderly reflect reasonable demands, and play a social supervision role, so that "urban runners" become participants and contributors in urban governance, realizing self-worth in serving society. At the same time, encourage localities to explore points-based management, linking participation in governance and volunteer service with evaluation and commendation, skills training, and career development, mobilizing the enthusiasm of new employment groups to participate in governance, forming a vivid situation of "the party unites me, I contribute to society."
Doing the ideological guidance and cohesion service work for new employment groups cannot be achieving success in a single step (一蹴而就, yi cu er jiu - "one, stomp, and, achieve"), requiring long-term persistence and continuous advancement. We must unite more closely around the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core, deeply study and implement General Secretary Xi Jinping's important expositions, adhere to combining online and offline efforts, do the work to the wheels, to the stations, to the front of the screens, into the hearts of every worker in new forms of employment, closely unite and gather the 84 million workers in new forms of employment around the party, continuously consolidate the party's class foundation, mass foundation, and social foundation for governance, and gather mighty strength for completing the economic and social development goals of the "15th Five-Year Plan" period and advancing Chinese modernization
〔The author is Deputy Director of the Teaching and Research Department of Society and Ecological Civilization at the Party School of the CPC Central Committee (National Academy of Governance)〕
Return to TopBy: 本报评论员 李曼青
At present, our country is in a historical period of great promise and achievement, and the overall development situation is improving, but the road ahead cannot possibly be smooth sailing (一帆风顺, yi fan feng shun - "one, sail, wind, smooth"). "It is not easy for organizations to cultivate cadres, and they must be managed well and supervised well, so that they always maintain a sense of acting with extreme caution (如履薄冰, ru lü bo bing -"as if, tread, thin, ice") and maintaining a sense of profound vigilance (如临深渊, ru lin shen yuan -"as if, face, deep, abyss")." This important exposition by General Secretary Xi Jinping profoundly reveals the basic norms for leading cadres to cultivate their conduct, discipline themselves, exercise governance, and wield power, and points the way for building the cadre contingent in the new era. Power means responsibility, achievements accompany trials; the more one achieves results, the more leading cadres must maintain a clear head, must harbor deep reverence and being extremely cautious and meticulous (谨小慎微, jin xiao shen wei -"careful, small, cautious, tiny"), only then can they achieve long-term success through steady progress (行稳致远, xing wen zhi yuan -"walk, steady, reach, far") and avoid committing strategic and subversive errors.
Leading cadres hold key positions and wield important power entrusted by the people; every decision concerns the well-being of countless households, and every exercise of power affects the success or failure of the cause. Leading cadres bear the mission and responsibility of advancing Chinese modernization, carry the ardent expectations of the broad masses of the people; without a sense of responsibility like acting with extreme caution and a heart of reverence like maintaining a sense of profound vigilance, they can easily lose themselves amid applause, slacken amid favorable circumstances, and ultimately bring about irremediable consequences. History and reality have repeatedly proven that being conceited and self-satisfied (骄傲自满, jiao ao zi man -"proud, arrogant, self, full") and being careless due to a sense of security (麻痹大意, ma bi da yi -"paralyze, big, careless, intention") are great enemies of the development of the cause. In today's world, the once-in-a-century transformation is accelerating, the external environment has become more complex and severe, and the domestic tasks of reform, development, and stability are arduous and formidable; only by always maintaining the caution of acting with extreme caution, the keenness of perceiving subtle signs to predict future trends (见叶知秋, jian ye zhi qiu -"see, leaf, know, autumn"), highly vigilant against and on guard against major risks in one's own area of responsibility, can one see clearly the direction amid complex situations and hold one's ground before risks and challenges.
"The heart is not moved by the lure of petty gains, the eyes are not dazzled by the temptations of the five colors" — this is not only a maxim of self-cultivation from China's fine traditional culture, but also the political integrity of Communists in the new era to exercise self-restraint. Leading cadres must not only be vigilant against risks in the external environment, but also strictly guard against laxity and greed from within. General Secretary Xi Jinping has emphasized, "One must be cautious when alone, cautious at the outset, cautious in small matters, and cautious toward desires, cultivating and strengthening the consciousness and ability of self-restraint and self-control." The struggle between corruption and anti-corruption exists over the long term; the degenerate trajectories of many fallen officials often begin with a single meal, a single carton of cigarettes, a single gift card, as they relax their vigilance amid the gradual loss of vigilance through slow, subtle changes (温水煮青蛙, wen shui zhu qing wa -"warm, water, boil, green, frog") and cross the bottom line under the excuse that "small matters do not matter." Leading cadres must manage well their life circle, social circle, and entertainment circle, and must be even more cautious in private, when no one is watching, and in subtle matters, never indulging themselves, never overstepping bounds, never transgressing rules, strengthening their immunity against corruption and preventing degeneration. At the same time, organizations must also earnestly fulfill their management and supervision responsibilities, frequently conducting heart-to-heart talks with cadres, pointing out shortcomings and deficiencies while also giving urging and encouragement, making "flushing red and sweating" the norm. Self-discipline is the internal line of defense, heteronomy is the external constraint; only when both exert force in the same direction can one continuously strengthen the immunity against corruption and prevent degeneration, and guard well the spiritual home of Communists.
Adhering to bottom-line thinking is an important principle of Marxist methodology and an inevitable requirement for responding to risks and challenges. "Being prepared against the unexpected is the constant way of governing a state." Opportunities always coexist with challenges, development often grows together with risks, and a historical period of great promise is often also a sensitive period in which contradictions protrude and risks stack up. Maintaining an attitude of maintaining a sense of profound vigilance and acting with extreme caution means thinking through all possible situations as thoroughly and completely as possible, formulating measures comprehensively and meticulously, ensuring safety, smoothness, reliability, and stability. If one lacks a cautious attitude, fails to see potential risks, and is satisfied with present achievements, one may stumble and suffer great losses on the new journey. Leading cadres must strengthen their risk awareness, improve their ability of perceiving the whole from small, subtle signs (见微知著, jian wei zhi zhu -"see, tiny, know, obvious"), make scientific predictions about potential risks, make thorough arrangements against existing hidden dangers, and firmly grasp the initiative in their work. This kind of caution is by no means looking forward and backward, shrinking from fear, but rather a strategic sobriety that grasps objective laws, a decisiveness that, after thorough preparation, still dares to make the final call and is good at assuming responsibility; it is not an excuse for conservatism and retreat, but rather the confidence to hold the bottom line with foolproof plans, to boldly blaze new paths with an enterprising spirit, and the fighting capability to make the first move and fight the initiative battle amid complex changes.
"The gentleman is constantly diligent, and is vigilant even at night as if in danger, and thus commits no fault." Acting with extreme caution is a high degree of political sobriety, a strong sense of responsibility, a profound feeling of devotion to the people; it requires leading cadres to be adept at handling complex situations and preventing and defusing risks externally, and to strictly cultivate their conduct and discipline themselves internally, forever preserving their clean and honest character. On the new journey of the new era, only by diligently performing their duties and working solidly with a sense of responsibility that "one can never rest easy" can leading cadres live up to the cultivation of the organization, the expectations of the people, and the trust of the era, and deliver an excellent answer sheet to history and the people.
Return to TopThe responsibility for governing the Party and managing Party affairs encompasses primary responsibility, supervisory responsibility, the responsibility of the first person in charge, and the "dual responsibility for one post" — together these form a complete chain of responsibility. Every type of responsibility is important and must be strictly implemented; one cannot act in a perfunctory or superficial manner. When we speak of strengthening the political functions of Party organizations, the implementation of the primary responsibility for governing the Party and managing Party affairs is an important part of that connotation. Leading cadres at all levels, as the "key minority," must, with the political loyalty of loving the Party, worrying about the Party, protecting the Party, and revitalizing the Party, resolutely shoulder the responsibility for governing the Party and managing Party affairs, exercise strict self-discipline, strictly bear their own responsibilities, and strictly manage what is under their purview, transmitting pressure layer by layer, and truly fostering a strict atmosphere and establishing a correct ethos.
Return to TopBy: 徐建伟
On July 30, 2026, the meeting of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee pointed out that "China's economy is presenting a development trend in which growth drivers are shifting toward the new and the structure is shifting toward the superior," and when deploying work for the second half of the year, it emphasized "accelerating the replacement of old growth drivers with new ones." For economic growth, the succession of leading industries and the replacement of old and new growth drivers have always been the most core change. In the past, some developed countries failed to properly handle the relationship between old and new growth drivers, leading to economic recession and the emergence of "deindustrialization." For China, accelerating the replacement of old and new growth drivers is an important task in building a modern industrial system, an effective path for cultivating and developing new quality productive forces, and, more importantly, an important support for maintaining sustained and stable economic development.
The replacement of old and new growth drivers is an inevitable process of economic development, and this process is accompanied by optimizing the existing stock and cultivating incremental growth, adjusting structure and transforming modes, ultimately promoting the economy to achieve effective improvement in quality and reasonable growth in quantity. At present, a new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation is accelerating, and the key to promoting the replacement of old and new growth drivers lies in seizing and making good use of the technological variable, fully stimulating the traction, driving, and enabling effects of scientific and technological innovation on industrial development. To accelerate the replacement of old and new growth drivers, efforts need to be focused on the following aspects.
Breakthroughs toward the high-end
High-end manufacturing has the characteristics of technology intensity, strategic support, and high added value, and is an important direction for the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries and the renewal and iteration of growth drivers. Industrial structures in developing countries are mostly dominated by primary processing and manufacturing industries, while sophisticated and precision manufacturing constitutes the main component of the competitiveness of manufacturing powers. Having entered the stage of high-quality development, high-end manufacturing is likewise the top priority for China's industries to break through and leap upward and for the stock economy to bring forth new things and discard the old (推陈出新, tui chen chu xin - "push, old, out, new").
After long-term development and construction, China's industries have formed development advantages such as large scale, many categories, and complete fields, but structurally they still lean toward mid-and low-end products, and there is still a certain gap between high-end products and internationally advanced levels. For example, some major technical equipment has prominent shortcomings and relies on imports, some key components and materials still have deficiencies in quality and performance, and many fashion consumer goods have large room for improvement in quality. Developing toward the high-end and the superior is the inevitable direction of industrial transformation and upgrading.
Some industries, by overcoming technical difficulties and achieving breakthroughs toward the high-end, have not only escaped the path of cost-and-price competition and leaped toward competition in quality and value, but also filled shortcomings in industrial development and expanded space for high-value-added growth. For example, carbon fiber manufacturing involves complex processes and high technical requirements, and carbon fiber supply for fields such as aerospace, high-end equipment, etc. has long been controlled by developed countries. In recent years, domestic carbon fiber enterprises, by breaking through process routes such as wet spinning and dry-jet wet spinning, have greatly improved product strength, modulus, as well as high-temperature resistance, wave transmission, wave absorption, and other properties, and the gap between high-performance carbon fiber products and the world's top level has been continuously narrowed, with the level of domestic application continuously improved.
As one of China's most internationally competitive industries, the shipbuilding industry has accelerated its pace of quality improvement and upgrading, with remarkable results in high-end transformation. In the past, China's advantages in shipbuilding were concentrated in bulk carrier manufacturing, with relatively low technological content and added value. With the continuous enhancement of technical capabilities in ship power, integrated manufacturing, domestic supporting equipment, and other areas, the proportion of high-tech ships such as container ships and green-powered ships has continued to rise, and the conquest of industry "pearls" such as large cruise ships and large liquefied natural gas (LNG) carrier manufacturing, which represent the world's highest manufacturing level, indicates that China's shipbuilding industry is entering a new growth track with high "gold content."
Scaled-up growth
Scientific and technological innovation and industrial innovation give birth to new industries and new tracks, nurturing new growth drivers with high growth potential, and are the main support for expanding the incremental growth of development. Scientific and technological breakthroughs are the source of innovative development; promoting the engineering implementation of new technologies, and then achieving industrialization and scaled-up development, is the key to forming real productive forces. This is also a new trend and new requirement for the integrated development of scientific and technological innovation and industrial innovation.
In actual development, the transformation of scientific and technological innovation into production and application is not smooth sailing without any obstacles (一帆风顺, yi fan feng shun - "one, sail, wind, smooth"). A large number of new technologies "cannot walk out of" the laboratory, or are scattered across various places and develop in fragments, failing to connect upstream and downstream links and form a cluster development ecosystem, thereby restricting the growth and expansion of new growth drivers. To solve such problems, it is necessary to optimize industrial layout and factor allocation, and promote the formation of a scaled-up development pattern featuring integration of science and industry, chain coordination, and coupled closed loops. Behind scaled-up development lies the effective allocation of innovation, industry, capital, talent, and other resource factors, with coordinated layout of upstream, midstream, and downstream links of the industrial chain.
China's scientific and technological innovation is active and its industrial system is complete, making it the most qualified to promote the application of scientific and technological innovation achievements to industrial development and build internationally leading, competitive emerging industry clusters. The outline of the 15th Five-Year Plan proposes building strategic emerging industry clusters with distinctive features and complementary advantages in light of local conditions; and relying on regions with prominent scientific, educational, and resource advantages and solid industrial foundations to build a number of future industry pilot zones. Only by optimizing industrial layout, guiding the effective concentration of resource factors, and promoting the clustered development of key industries, can we continuously expand the incremental contribution of emerging industries.
At present, China's emerging industries such as next-generation information technology, new energy, new materials, intelligent connected new-energy vehicles, robotics, biomedicine, high-end equipment, aerospace, etc. have formed a sound innovation and development ecosystem, and the coupling chain from scientific and technological innovation to industrial development is continuously improving, becoming the main front for the growth of new quality productive forces. Led by the 66 national-level strategic emerging industry clusters that began construction in 2019, China's emerging industry clusters have continued to expand in scale and improve in development level, becoming new economic growth points with surging growth drivers.
Digital and intelligent transformation
Improvement in production efficiency is an important source of power for economic growth, and quality and efficiency improvement in the stock economy can release huge growth drivers. High production efficiency can attract investment and expand output, and is also an important source of industrial competitiveness. In the past period, China, by leveraging the advantages of traditional factors such as labor, actively undertook international capital and technology transfer, achieving rapid economic development. As production costs of traditional factors rise, industrial efficiency advantages gradually weaken, original growth drivers decline somewhat, posing challenges to the sustained development of industries.
Under this situation, to maintain sustained and stable growth of industries, it is necessary to build new modes of production and manufacturing that adapt to technological change, and through factor combination methods such as machine substitution for labor and human-machine collaboration, promote the formation of new space for efficiency and benefit improvement, thereby shaping new advantages in industrial competition. From actual development, expanding the application of digital and intelligent technologies and placing them at the key position in the reconstruction of production modes can promote enterprises to reduce costs, improve quality, and increase efficiency, becoming the main path for the deep transformation and development of industries.
At present, a new generation of intelligent manufacturing is spreading and penetrating into more and more industries. The shipbuilding industry has many production processes, long supply chains, and high technical requirements, and digital and intelligent transformation provides effective support for shipbuilding enterprises to improve process flows and optimize management systems, greatly reducing ship construction cycles and man-hours, with per-capita output value significantly improved. Some food manufacturing enterprises, by introducing intelligent manufacturing platforms, have achieved full-process digital collaboration from order to production, from equipment operation to energy consumption management, realizing multiple benefits such as increased output, quality control, cost savings, and reduced consumption.
With the widespread application of artificial intelligence technology, AI, while empowering manufacturing transformation, is also promoting the innovative development of "AI + R&D," deepening the coordinated development of the entire process of the innovation chain and industrial chain. Some enterprises in the biomedical field, by establishing intelligent automated biology laboratories and embedding AI models throughout the entire experimental development process, have achieved a complete closed loop from virtual design to real verification, shortening the R&D cycle of some experimental scenarios from 6 to 10 months to 6 to 8 weeks.
Integrated development
The technical and economic linkages between industries provide the possibility for cross-field integrated development, andhe cross-field penetration of technology and industries can form a growth-driver derivative effect featuring coordinated development and cascading amplification. China's industrial system is complete, with the best conditions and greatest potential for promoting integrated industrial development. Industrial integration can, through methods such as "technology + new products," "products + new functions," and "business formats + new fields," transform an innovation breakthrough at a single point into a derivative development pattern with linkage along the line and driving force across the surface.
Grafting traditional technological advantages onto new industries and new tracks can broaden product series and cultivate new growth points. For example, motor products have many application fields and strong technological interconnections, and traditional home appliance motor manufacturing enterprises, seizing the opportunity of emerging industry development, have accelerated the development of new motors for automotive, medical, industrial control, and other fields, achieving the transfer of technological advantages from traditional fields to emerging fields. Even when facing growth bottlenecks in traditional fields, they can open up a second growth curve for continued development.
Technological innovation has also promoted the development of new products with multiple functions, thereby opening new market space. In response to the needs of consumption upgrading, some ceramic enterprises have combined ceramic manufacturing with culture and art, developing ceramic art products that better meet personalized needs, promoting industrial development from ceramic manufacturing toward the supply of home aesthetics solutions. In response to the development of health needs, smart wearable devices and functional foods with health monitoring or regulation functions are welcomed by consumers, andheir markets are continuously expanding.
"Manufacturing + services" is becoming an effective path for integrated development in more and more fields, which is relatively common in the high-end equipment field. For example, industrial compressor manufacturing enterprises are no longer limited to providing hardware equipment, but have expanded into full-lifecycle value-added services such as energy management, condition monitoring, remote diagnosis, and intelligent operation and maintenance, transforming into system solution suppliers with stronger core competitiveness.
(The author is a researcher at the Institute of Industrial Economics and Technological Economics of the National Development and Reform Commission)
Return to TopBy: 董晓宇
The outline of the 15th Five-Year Plan proposes establishing an efficient and convenient access mechanism adapted to the development of new business forms, and exploring new types of regulatory methods such as "sandbox regulation" and trigger-based regulation. The so-called trigger-based regulation is a new type of regulatory method that, based on risk and credit, sets regulatory thresholds and trigger conditions to conduct differentiated regulation of business entities, aiming to minimize interference with the normal business operations of enterprises while ensuring that market order remains safe and controllable. The promotion and application of trigger-based regulation in practice result from the mutual reinforcement of national policy guidance and local innovative exploration. As early as 2020, the National Development and Reform Commission and 12 other departments issued the "Opinions on Supporting the Healthy Development of New Business Forms and New Models, Activating the Consumer Market, and Expanding Employment," which proposed exploring trigger-based regulatory mechanisms. In 2022, the State Administration for Market Regulation issued the "Opinions on Promoting Classified Management of Enterprise Credit Risk and Further Improving Regulatory Effectiveness," emphasizing differentiated regulation based on enterprise credit risk classification results, using trigger-based regulation to enhance regulatory precision and effectiveness. In recent years, China (Xinjiang) Pilot Free Trade Zone, Nantong in Jiangsu, and other places have carried out pilot trigger-based regulation in advance, accumulating valuable experience for "not disturbing businesses unless necessary, and conducting inspections whenever thresholds are triggered."
The main characteristics of trigger-based regulation are "not disturbing businesses unless necessary, and conducting inspections whenever thresholds are triggered." Based on industry characteristics, risk levels and thresholds are determined, an early-warning "yellow line" and an enforcement "red line" are set, and relying on smart monitoring and multi-point early warning, graded responses of different intensities are then adopted. For a large number of creditworthy, compliant enterprises that have not triggered thresholds, inspections are waived or reduced in frequency; for enterprises that touch the "yellow line" — that is, those committing first-time violations involving general risk — early warnings are issued and rectification is proposed, with flexible means such as reminders, cautions, and interviews, along with guidance and assistance, enabling enterprises to avoid risks within a buffer period; when an enterprise touches the safety "red line" for serious violations or reaches a specific risk threshold, law enforcement procedures are immediately initiated, and corresponding "strict regulation" measures are taken in accordance with the law.
Trigger-based regulation is the result of the contradiction between the rapid development of new economic organizations and the failure of traditional regulation. First, the drawbacks of traditional regulatory models are increasingly prominent. As the number of business entities continues to grow, traditional "net-casting, high-frequency" regulation imposes heavy burdens on enterprises and entails high regulatory costs. To address the regulatory pain points of "excessive disturbance of enterprises and poor effectiveness," adhering to inclusive and prudent regulation, strengthening credit-based regulation, and exploring tiered and classified regulation have consistently been important elements of optimizing the business environment. Second, traditional regulatory models find it difficult to meet the needs of the development of new economic organizations. In recent years, new technologies, new industries, new business forms, and new models have developed rapidly, accompanied by increasingly complex technical risks. It is necessary neither to suppress innovation through overly strict regulation, nor to allow risks to run unchecked through regulatory absence; it is necessary both to leave sufficient space for the development of new technologies and new industries, and to enhance regulatory departments' capacity for precisely identifying risks and dynamically preventing and controlling them. Third, digital technology empowers government regulatory capacity. Relying on technical means such as big data, artificial intelligence, credit systems, and integrated platforms for smart regulation, strong support is provided for real-time data monitoring, dynamic risk profiling, quantitative trigger thresholds, intelligent risk early warning, and timely and precise intervention. This both expands regulatory coverage and penetration, and enhances regulatory departments' ability to "see clearly and grasp accurately" risks and anomalies.
Implementing trigger-based regulation requires operational systems such as credit regulation, data governance, trigger mechanisms, and closed-loop regulation. First, credit regulation is the foundation. Relying on credit risk classification, the regulatory process is deeply linked to enterprise credit, forming the orientation that "those who are honest and law-abiding are not disturbed unless necessary, while those who are dishonest and law-breaking will surely be punished." Second, data governance is the support. Relying on big data and integrated intelligent regulatory platforms, enterprise business conditions are precisely monitored and dynamically perceived, forming enterprise risk profiles. Third, the trigger mechanism is the core. Relying on multiple channels such as online real-time monitoring, big data analysis, complaints and reports, and inter-departmental referrals, when anomalies are detected and preset "yellow line" or "red line" threshold trigger conditions are met, regulatory responses are promptly initiated. Fourth, closed-loop regulation is the guarantee. From formulating risk levels and lists of trigger items, to "yellow line" early-warning reminders and "red line" immediate inspection upon triggering, and then to differentiated responses such as rectification reminders, key inspections, and administrative penalties, with results fed back into the credit system.
As a new type of regulatory method, trigger-based regulation emphasizes achieving precise intervention, on the premise of holding the safety bottom line, through a sophisticated system of risk monitoring and differentiated response. The government invests limited regulatory resources in high-risk areas and key targets, achieving a transformation of regulation from net-casting to precision, and from passive handling to active prevention; while enterprises, guided by the signals of "traffic lights," form expectations of rewards for keeping credit and punishments for breaching credit, promoting the transformation of awareness of integrity and compliance from "passive observance" to "active practice." It should be noted that trigger-based regulation does not apply to all industries and business entities; it is mainly or preferentially applicable to some emerging industries and low-risk enterprises. For high-risk fields directly involving personal health and life safety, such as food, pharmaceuticals, and special equipment, normalized strict regulation must still be maintained.
As a new type of regulatory method still under continuous exploration, trigger-based regulation still faces a series of problems in practice that need to be improved. First, there is a lack of uniformity in the setting of trigger conditions. Risk indicators and trigger thresholds differ across regions, detailed rules for some industries still need to be explored, and inconsistencies in determination and enforcement standards will, to some extent, affect collaborative effectiveness. Second, the standardization of trigger initiation procedures is insufficient. Whether intelligent early warning or manual assessment, the operational procedures for initiating regulation lack unified norms across regions, easily leading to discretionary differences, weakening regulatory fairness, and also reducing enterprises' expectations regarding regulatory rules. Third, data sharing and coordinated regulation are insufficient. Insufficient coordination in areas such as automatic aggregation of effective data, cross-departmental data sharing, multi-departmental joint assessment, and coordinated law enforcement linkages affects, to a certain extent, risk identification and overall regulatory effectiveness.
To promote trigger-based regulation to become more scientific and standardized, the corresponding institutional design and operational mechanisms should be continuously improved. First, establish unified standards. Combining industry characteristics, technological maturity, and risk evolution features, unified risk classifications, early-warning thresholds, trigger indicators, response handling rules, and dynamic adjustment mechanisms should be constructed by industry, standardizing trigger determination standards and initiation procedures, and enhancing the uniformity of regulatory standards. Second, strengthen data support. Strengthen automatic data aggregation, enrich enterprise risk profiles, expand multi-source data dynamic monitoring and deep integration, improve mechanisms for automatic system aggregation, analysis, and generation of early warnings, and continuously enhance the level of risk identification and precise regulatory capacity. Third, improve coordination mechanisms. Improve mechanisms for information exchange and coordinated law enforcement among market regulation, taxation, finance, public security, emergency management, and other departments, consolidating multi-departmental joint regulatory synergy.
Trigger-based regulation is an important tool for advancing the modernization of governance, and should be promoted in coordination with other regulatory innovations. It is necessary to continuously promote the deep integration of regulation and services, explore the complementary application of trigger-based regulation and "sandbox regulation," advance the coordinated exertion of law-based regulation, credit-based regulation, and smart regulation, so as to both effectively prevent and control risks and promote enterprise development.
Return to TopBy: 李晓钰
From Zibo barbecue to Tianshui spicy hot pot, a single short video can make a city famous; a single "put it on the link" in a livestream room can, within seconds, move tens of millions of yuan in transaction volume. Against the backdrop of the deep integration of digital technology and the platform economy, whoever can effectively capture the public's attention holds, to a certain extent, the competitive initiative of the digital age. Attention is evolving from a psychological cognitive phenomenon into a scarce economic resource, and the "attention economy" has thus become one of the representative economic forms of the digital age.
The so-called attention economy refers to an economic form that treats human attention as a resource to be managed, creating commercial value by attracting, aggregating, processing, and converting attention. Because vision is an important channel for attracting attention, the attention economy is also vividly called the "eyeball economy." As early as 1971, Nobel Economics Prize laureate Herbert Simon pointed out: "The abundance of information creates a poverty of attention." Michael Goldhaber, for his part, held that in the process of information dissemination, attention is a scarce resource and the "hard currency" of cyberspace, and that the attention economy is in essence an important logic of the network economy. Its operating mechanism is that every swipe, click, and stay by a user on a digital terminal constitutes an input of attention and generates traffic data; the platform integrates and analyzes this data, draws user profiles, and achieves precision push, then completes monetization through advertising placement, livestream commerce, membership payments, and other means. In the current era of prevalent short videos, this logic has been fully manifested in fields such as social networking, information, and e-commerce. The China Online Audiovisual Development Research Report (2026) shows that as of December 2025, the scale of online audiovisual users in China reached 1.099 billion people; short videos remain the most important application for promoting new netizens' use of the Internet, and among newly connected netizens, 44.6 percent used a short-video application the first time they went online; 40 percent of respondents purchased food and beverages, daily necessities, and other products because of watching online audiovisual content, while 31.5 percent of respondents purchased clothing, bags, luggage, beauty, and personal care products.
The rise of the attention economy is the result of the combined action of the information environment, technological conditions, and commercial logic. First, the contradiction between information overload and attention scarcity constitutes the premise of its development. In the digital age, information is growing explosively, while people's waking time is ultimately limited; attention resources have already been fully developed, and fierce competition over the existing stock forces various platforms to continuously intensify their efforts to compete for users' attention. The logic of industry competition has also shifted from "making users stay one more minute" to "realizing more monetization within one minute." Second, digital technology is the core driving force of the development of the attention economy. The widespread application of artificial intelligence and recommendation algorithms, especially the rapid iteration of large AI model technology, enables platforms to complete, within an extremely short time, precision push from user behavior analysis to content matching, which can both cater to someone's likes and interests (投其所好, tou qi suo hao - "throw, towards; its, what; likes") and quietly guide the direction of users' attention. Finally, the continuous expansion of digital consumption scenarios has given rise to robust market demand. Media forms such as short videos, livestreaming, and micro-dramas fit the public's fragmented leisure habits and have gradually become embedded in daily life segments such as commuting, shopping, and socializing, providing broad scenarios for the aggregation, circulation, and monetization of attention and pushing the attention economy toward normalization and popularization.
The attention economy has exerted increasingly broad influence on industrial development and daily life. At the industry level, it has driven the shift from "produce what you sell" to "attract what you earn." For example, local cultural and tourism departments use short videos to draw traffic and create internet-famous cities, thereby driving regional consumption and industrial income growth. At the same time, algorithms precisely match supply and demand, shortening circulation and decision-making time: consumers can find products and services suited to them more quickly; merchants, especially small and micro enterprises and self-employed households, can reach customers without investing high advertising costs, reducing operating costs; and tens of millions of livestreamers and content creators also constitute a new form of employment. In daily life, the attention economy has extended to fields such as social networking, education, and healthcare, and new business forms such as online learning, remote diagnosis, and digital cultural tourism are becoming increasingly prevalent, pushing lifestyles to accelerate their digital transformation.
Of course, while the attention economy brings convenience and opportunities, the problems that accompany it must not be ignored. On the one hand, it has, to a certain extent, weakened human subjectivity and the capacity for deep thinking. The operating logic of platforms is to "attract eyeballs" as much as possible and prolong users' stay time, and to this end they continuously optimize algorithms, mine stimulation points, and design "addiction mechanisms." Long-term immersion in short videos may lead to the fragmentation and shallowing of attention, making it difficult for people to engage in prolonged deep reading and systematic thinking. Algorithmic push may also form "information cocoons," narrowing the cognitive horizon, entrenching thinking biases, and weakening the foundation for generating social consensus. The more choices algorithms make in place of people, the weaker human subjectivity becomes, and attention thus evolves into a hidden mechanism of power, realizing the invisible discipline and control of the subject. On the other hand, the content ecosystem also faces the risk of imbalance. In an environment where traffic reigns supreme, some content, in order to attract attention, moves toward entertainment and vulgarization, and even goes so far as spreading rumors and fabricated information (造谣传谣, zao yao chuan yao - "create, rumors; spread, rumors") and inciting confrontation, squeezing the space for the dissemination of quality content.
To this end, the attention economy should be prevented from falling into the predicament of disorderly development. At the individual level, the public should be guided to establish attention management awareness and enhance digital critical literacy, especially helping young people use smart terminals rationally and develop the habits of deep reading and rational thinking, becoming the masters of their attention. At the institutional level, China has already issued documents such as the Regulations on the Administration of Algorithmic Recommendations in Internet Information Services, and on this basis the algorithmic governance system should be further improved, the legal responsibilities of platforms should be clarified, and users' data rights and interests should be protected. At the same time, platforms should be pushed to optimize the value orientation of algorithms and set reasonable distribution weights for quality content, so that they balance commercial interests and public responsibility. Mainstream value guidance should be strengthened, and mainstream media should actively adapt to the form of the attention economy, innovate discourse expression and communication methods, and enable quality content to take the initiative in the competition for attention. The attention economy is an economic phenomenon of the digital age; one must both see its positive role in improving efficiency and stimulating vitality and must not let things take their own course without control (放任自流, fang ren zi liu - "let, allow; self, let; flow") or allow it to grow wildly. It is necessary to adhere to the people-centered development philosophy, strengthen the guidance and regulation of technological innovation, and enable it to truly serve the people's needs for a better life and the long-term development of society.
Return to TopBy: 武晓雯
With the deep application of information network technology, the operational space of black-and-evil forces is rapidly extending from "offline" to "online." Online-related black-and-evil crimes, namely criminal activities by black-and-evil forces carried out through information networks, are increasingly becoming a prominent issue affecting the people's sense of security. Recently, the Party Central Committee deployed a one-year deepening special campaign against black-and-evil crimes. On the basis of lawfully and severely cracking down on traditional black-and-evil crimes such as "village tyrants," this special campaign requires close attention to new trends in black-and-evil crimes, with a focus on cracking down on organized black-and-evil crimes carried out through network platforms and soft violence means. This requires accurately grasping the patterns and characteristics of online-related black-and-evil crimes and forming a more systematic response approach within the framework of the rule of law.
Online-related black-and-evil crime is a general term in judicial practice for organized crimes committed through information networks. According to the provisions of the Law of the People's Republic of China on Combating Organized Crime, organized crime refers to the crimes of organizing, leading, or participating in mafia-type organizations as stipulated in Article 294 of the Criminal Law of the People's Republic of China (hereinafter referred to as the "Criminal Law"), as well as crimes committed by mafia-type organizations and evil-force organizations; crimes committed through networks that meet the above provisions shall be recognized as organized crime. Compared with traditional black-and-evil crimes mainly committed offline in real life, online-related black-and-evil crimes have their own characteristics in terms of criminal organizational structure, methods of committing crimes, and harmful consequences. From the perspective of organizational structure, they show a loosening characteristic, with criminal members able to form a criminal gang of a certain scale in a short time through information networks or virtual identities. From the perspective of methods of committing crimes, the division of labor is increasingly refined, with different links handled by different personnel or professional teams, and criminal means becoming more concealed. From the perspective of harmful consequences, online-related black-and-evil crimes break through the geographical and temporal limitations of traditional crimes, with stronger penetration, wider reach, and more victims, causing enormous harm. The typical forms of such crimes mainly include online "loan fraud schemes," nude chat blackmail, malicious claims, negative public opinion blackmail, online water army provocation, online violent pyramid schemes, soft violence debt collection, and others, with the fields involved extending from traditional industries such as construction engineering and transportation to emerging fields such as internet finance, network self-media, and e-commerce, seriously disrupting economic and social life order.
In recent years, relevant departments have continuously improved institutional regulations and increased work efforts around lawfully punishing online-related black-and-evil crimes. The "Opinions on Several Issues Concerning Handling Criminal Cases of Black-and-Evil Forces Crimes Committed Through Information Networks" emphasizes "resolutely and severely punishing black-and-evil forces crimes committed through information networks in accordance with the law, and effectively maintaining network security and economic and social life order." Public security organs have continuously carried out comprehensive governance in key industries and fields, conducting investigation, rectification, and special operations on prominent issues such as online-related black-and-evil crimes. Adjudication organs have lawfully concluded and severely punished a number of related criminal acts, fully exerting the deterrent and educational functions of criminal penalties, and effectively curbing the breeding and spread of online-related black-and-evil crimes. Procuratorial organs have lawfully performed functions such as approving arrests and initiating prosecutions, intervening early in major cases, guiding investigation and evidence collection, and severely punishing online-related black-and-evil crimes. On the basis of existing work, in the face of the new characteristics and changes shown by online-related black-and-evil crimes, further strengthening is needed in discovering, cracking down on, and punishing crimes.
Promptly discover leads on online-related black-and-evil crimes and grasp the initiative in combating crime
Online-related black-and-evil crimes are highly concealed and highly technical, and traditional lead investigation methods cannot fully adapt to the new situation, requiring coordinated efforts from multiple levels to build a multi-dimensional lead discovery system. First, fully mobilize and rely on the masses, smooth reporting channels, and broaden lead sources. Currently, political and legal organs across the country have successively issued relevant notices, widely collecting leads on online-related black-and-evil crimes from society, providing an important social foundation for promptly discovering and precisely combating such crimes. Second, fully utilize big data methods and intelligent technologies to discover leads. Behavioral traces of online-related black-and-evil crimes are largely retained in cyberspace, which provides the possibility of discovering leads through technical means. Big data methods and intelligent technologies should be fully utilized to deeply mine concealed leads from capital flows and network behaviors. By establishing data analysis and judgment models, strengthening correlation analysis of repeated police reports and complaint reporting matters, and effectively locking onto online-related black-and-evil criminal gangs with deep concealment and strong disguise. Third, improve the normalized lead investigation mechanism. A work system combining centralized investigation, rolling investigation, and key investigation can be established, conducting "look-back" reviews of leads repeatedly reported by the masses, ensuring that various signs of black-and-evil forces are discovered early, warned early, and handled early. At the same time, establish information sharing and joint analysis and judgment mechanisms among relevant departments, achieving information exchange and coordinated linkage, and improving the efficiency of discovering and handling online-related black-and-evil leads.
Completely destroy the ecosystem of online-related black-and-evil crimes and curb the ability of crime to regenerate
Behind online-related black-and-evil crimes, a chain-based and systematic operating mechanism is often formed. After entering cyberspace, the organization, traffic generation, implementation, and profit-making of illegal activities are decomposed into different links, and the behavior of a single link has strong disguise and concealment, appearing not particularly harmful, but the various links are closely interconnected and linked together (环环相扣, huan huan xiang kou - "ring, ring, interlock; link, link, connect"), and when combined may form a control network that continuously exerts pressure and amplifies harm. To effectively combat online-related black-and-evil crimes, it is necessary to deepen from punishing the perpetrators to destroying the entire criminal ecosystem. First, strengthen cross-regional and cross-departmental cooperation. Relevant departments should divide responsibilities and cooperate, mutually support and mutually restrain, improve and perfect work mechanisms such as risk prevention and control, lead verification, case consultation, and coordinated rectification, forming a joint work force of coordinated management and comprehensive governance. Second, deeply investigate the tool chain, capital chain, and interest chain. While lawfully punishing the organizations and personnel that carry out black-and-evil crimes, it is also necessary to deeply investigate the black-and-gray industrial chains that provide them with technical support, account resources, traffic channels, payment settlement, and other services. In particular, efforts should be made to strengthen the primary responsibility of network platforms, and resolutely cut off the illegal interest chains of upstream and downstream crimes such as infringement of citizens' personal information, illegal software development, "account farming and comment control," "fan attraction and traffic diversion," and "money laundering through account splitting." Third, deepen industry governance. For online-related black-and-evil cases with major and complex circumstances and high social attention, efforts to trace responsibility backward should be strengthened, both lawfully severely punishing the "protective umbrellas" behind them and deeply investigating and thoroughly exposing various "soft protection" problems. At the same time, in handling individual cases and analyzing similar cases, discover industry chaos and social governance difficulties behind black-and-evil crimes, promote prevention and rectification in key industry fields and key regions, combine case investigation with platform governance, industry rectification, and source prevention, and prevent the repeated breeding of black-and-evil crimes.
Accurately apply the law and strictly handle cases lawfully and impartially
Online-related black-and-evil crimes are more easily confused with normal social activities in appearance, and test more the fact-finding, evidence review, and law application capabilities of case-handling organs. At the level of fact determination, the provisions of Article 294, Paragraph 5 of the Criminal Law should be strictly followed, with comprehensive review and judgment focusing on organizational characteristics, economic characteristics, behavioral characteristics, and harmfulness characteristics, analyzing the internal connections among these four characteristics, and accurately evaluating and lawfully recognizing them based on the harm caused to citizens' personal, property, and democratic rights and to economic and social life order by illegal and criminal activities committed in cyberspace and real society. At the level of evidence review, such crimes involve a large amount of electronic data, and great importance needs to be attached to the collection, fixation, review, and use of electronic evidence. Electronic evidence has the characteristics of being easily tampered with and easily lost, and its collection and fixation should strictly follow legal procedures to ensure lawful sources, complete content, and a clear chain of custody. When reviewing and judging, the corroboration relationship between electronic evidence and other evidence should be combined to comprehensively determine the facts of the case. Where objective conditions such as a large number of victims make it impossible to collect victim statements one by one, the relevant facts may be comprehensively determined in accordance with the law by combining the collected victim statements with verified account transaction records, communication records, electronic data, and other evidence. At the level of law application, the principle of legality and the principle of evidence-based adjudication should be upheld, accurately distinguishing organizers, leaders, backbone members, active participants, and ordinary participants, and treating them separately according to the law based on factors such as the facts and circumstances of the crime, personal dangerousness, subjective malignancy, and attitude of admitting guilt and repentance, truly achieving leniency and severity with basis and punishment fitting the crime. At the same time, judicial organs should, through issuing judicial interpretations, publishing typical cases, and other means, further unify case-handling standards around key issues such as evidence standards for online-related black-and-evil cases, determination of organizational and behavioral characteristics, and fixation of electronic data, continuously improving the quality and efficiency of handling online-related black-and-evil cases.
Return to TopBy: 李卫海
On August 28, the 24th session of the Standing Committee of the 14th National People's Congress adopted the newly revised National Defense Mobilization Law of the People's Republic of China (hereinafter referred to as the "National Defense Mobilization Law"). This is the first revision of the law since its promulgation and implementation 16 years ago. It is a major measure to implement the decisions and arrangements of the Party Central Committee, a key link in improving the military-related legal system with Chinese characteristics, and a practical and urgent need for carrying out national defense mobilization work in accordance with the law in the new era. It is of great significance and far-reaching influence.
As the basic law regulating national defense mobilization activities of the state, the National Defense Mobilization Law, since its implementation on July 1, 2010, has comprehensively established the basic legal institutional framework in the field of national defense mobilization in China, changing the governance model in which national defense mobilization work had for a period of time relied on administrative directives and policy documents for its advancement. The law has played an irreplaceable and important role in clarifying the statutory rights and responsibilities of state organs at all levels, armed forces, social organizations, and all citizens, and in establishing the basic work guidelines of combining peacetime and wartime, combining military and civilian, and embedding the military in the civilian.
When the law keeps pace with the times, governance is achieved; when governance suits the world, merit is attained. Entering the new era, the global strategic landscape is undergoing profound reshaping, risks in non-traditional security fields such as cyberspace, electromagnetics, outer space, deep sea, and biology continue to increase, and various security risks are intertwined and overlapping.China's safeguarding of national sovereignty, security, and development interests faces unprecedented new tests. At the same time, the deepening of the reform of the national defense mobilization system has been fully rolled out, the military leadership and command system and the reserve force construction system have been further improved, and major adjustments have been made to the organizational structure, functional positioning, and operational model of national defense mobilization work. Frontier technologies such as artificial intelligence, unmanned manufacturing, and low-orbit satellites are developing rapidly, and major changes have occurred in the structure of potential resources for national defense mobilization. Some provisions of the National Defense Mobilization Law before the revision could no longer fully meet practical needs in terms of mobilization norms in emerging fields, rights and interests protection, and legal liability. Revising the National Defense Mobilization Law is happening at exactly the right moment (正当其时, zheng dang qi shi - "just, appropriate, its, time") and something that is imperative and must be done (势在必行, shi zai bi xing - "trend, exist, must, act").
The revision of a law reflects the changes of the times, responds to the needs of practice, and demonstrates the power of the rule of law. The revision of the National Defense Mobilization Law, with a higher standpoint and more concrete measures, injects legal momentum into the cause of national defense mobilization.
Strengthen political guidance and ensure the correct direction of work. This revision explicitly writes the Party's leadership over national defense mobilization work into the general provisions, enabling the Party's propositions to be transformed through statutory procedures into the will of the state and the common action of the people. This modification establishes the fundamental political guideline for national defense mobilization work at the legal level, aiming to ensure that all national defense mobilization work operates under the absolute leadership of the Party at all times, and that national defense mobilization forces always remain a loyal force trusted by the Party and the people. The legislative purpose has added the expression "development interests," further expanding the scope of legal protection for national defense mobilization, reflecting the inherent requirement of coordinating development and security. With more prominent political guidance and a more complete institutional system, national defense mobilization work will always advance in the correct political direction.
Consolidate the achievements of reform and further streamline the systems and mechanisms. In 2019, the Party Central Committee made decisions and arrangements for deepening the reform of the national defense mobilization system. In 2021, the NPC Standing Committee decided to temporarily adjust the application of certain provisions of the National Defense Mobilization Law during the reform period, requiring that "after the reform measures mature, relevant laws should be promptly revised and improved." This revision clarifies that under the centralized, unified leadership of the Party Central Committee, the National Defense Mobilization Commission performs the functions of organizing, guiding, and coordinating national defense mobilization work nationwide; it newly adds the implementation of a target responsibility system for national defense mobilization work; it establishes a national defense mobilization capability inspection and evaluation mechanism, and establishes a data service guarantee system adapted to the needs of national defense mobilization. These institutional designs elevate the mature experience of deepening the reform of the national defense mobilization system into legal institutions. These modifications are an important step in institutionalizing and legalizing the achievements of reform, making the organizational leadership of national defense mobilization work more scientific, the boundaries of powers and responsibilities clearer, and the operational mechanisms smoother.
Fill institutional shortcomings and enhance the targetedness and effectiveness of the legal system. With the rapid development of the digital economy, high-end manufacturing, and frontier technologies, major changes have occurred in the structure of potential resources for national defense mobilization. In recent years, China has revised laws such as the People's Armed Police Law and the National Defense Law, and formulated and issued laws such as the Coast Guard Law and the Reserve Personnel Law, providing solid legal support for national defense construction. As an important law in the national defense field, the National Defense Mobilization Law also needs to be improved through revision to align with relevant laws and ensure legal coordination. This revision precisely responds to these practical situations, improving the systems for compiling national defense mobilization plans and implementation plans, and improving the potential statistics and investigation system; it clearly proposes enhancing the level of informatization and intelligentization of national defense mobilization and advancing the modernization of national defense mobilization. A series of institutional designs focus on solving the prominent problems of the current law not adapting to high-quality development of national defense mobilization, significantly enhancing the targetedness and effectiveness of the legal system, helping to form a systematic, complete, and efficiently operating institutional system, and promoting national defense mobilization to advance in the direction of intelligentization, precision, and full-domain coverage.
Protect citizens' rights and interests and effectively promote military-civil fusion. The essence of national defense mobilization is to allocate social resources in accordance with the law, safeguard the potential for national defense mobilization, and connect national defense construction with economic and social development. While strengthening the national defense obligations of citizens and organizations, this revision attaches great importance to the institutional design of rights and interests protection, clearly stipulating the protection of the legitimate rights and interests of organizations and individuals participating in national defense mobilization activities, and making more specific provisions on compensation for the requisition of civilian resources and circumstances for exemption from national defense service duties; it newly adds confidentiality obligation clauses, covering state secrets, work secrets, commercial secrets, and personal privacy and personal information. This revision profoundly interprets the legal connotation of the military-civil fusion development strategy. National defense mobilization is not only a manifestation of the will of the state, but should also become a legal practice in which the whole society participates together, allowing every citizen to feel the warmth of fairness and justice when fulfilling national defense obligations.
National defense mobilization is a bridge and bond connecting national defense construction with economic construction, and an important support for winning future wars. This revision should be taken as an opportunity to further use legal thinking to solidly advance national defense mobilization construction, comprehensively enhance the capability for rapid peacetime-wartime conversion, strengthen military-local strategic planning coordination, policy and institutional alignment, and sharing of resource elements, and provide strong legal guarantees for consolidating national defense and building a world-class military.
(The author is the Dean of the School of National Security of China University of Political Science and Law)
Return to TopBy: 邹广文
Cultural soft power is an indispensable core component of comprehensive national strength, and a country's cultural influence directly determines its discursive power, appeal, and international recognition in the global governance landscape. A comprehensive review of Selected Works of Xi Jinping on Culture, Volumes I and II, reveals that the important expositions therein on cultural development, the inheritance of fine traditional Chinese culture, and international communication are consistent and continuous throughout history (一脉相承, yī mài xiāng chéng - "one thread, follow each other") and progressing step by step in stages (层层递进, céng céng dì jìn - "layer, layer; step, step; advance"), together constructing an organic ideological system for the external dissemination of Chinese culture with complete logic and rich connotations. Volume I elucidates the strategic position of fine traditional Chinese culture as the prominent advantage of the Chinese nation and its deepest cultural soft power, revealing the dual attributes of Chinese culture as both historical and contemporary, both national and global; Volume II, grounded in the mission of the era to build a culturally strong country and create new brilliance for Chinese culture, deepens the scientific understanding of the outstanding characteristics of Chinese civilization, focuses on the core task of strengthening international communication capacity building and telling China's story well, and elevates the strategic value of cultural soft power in competition among major powers.
The Chinese civilization, which has continued uninterrupted for more than five thousand years, has accumulated the spiritual genes, values, and civilizational wisdom unique to the Chinese nation. It is both the spiritual foundation for establishing oneself and finding purpose in life (安身立命, ān shēn lì mìng - "be at peace, establish life") for all Chinese people and an invaluable treasure in the treasure house of human civilization. At present, global civilizational exchanges, integration, and confrontation continue to deepen, and erroneous trends of thought such as the "clash of civilizations" and "superiority of civilizations" constantly impact the order of global civilizational dialogue. Competition among countries around cultural discursive power and value appeal is becoming increasingly fierce. Against this backdrop of the era, in-depth study of Selected Works of Xi Jinping on Culture, Volumes I and II, will help us profoundly grasp the historical position and mission of the era of fine traditional Chinese culture, advance the building of a culturally strong country, and promote Chinese culture to better reach the world.
Why Fine Traditional Chinese Culture Has Become the Prominent Advantage of the Chinese Nation
General Secretary Xi Jinping has profoundly pointed out that "fine traditional Chinese culture is our deepest cultural soft power." This assertion, grounded in the history of several thousand years of Chinese civilization, the practice of Chinese modernization, and the grand landscape of global civilizational competition, comprehensively reveals the internal logic of fine traditional Chinese culture as the prominent advantage of the Chinese nation from four dimensions: the continuity of civilizational survival, the internal-external adaptability of value realization, the inclusiveness and innovativeness of civilizational development, and the supporting power of competition among major powers.
The continuity of Chinese civilization has forged a unique cultural foundation, forming a spiritual identity that distinguishes it from other nations. General Secretary Xi Jinping has emphasized: "Chinese civilization is the only great civilization in the world that has continued unbroken and developed in the form of a state to this day. This fully demonstrates that Chinese civilization possesses cultural subjectivity and vigorous vitality for self-development, responding to challenges, and breaking new ground." The civilizations of ancient Egypt, ancient Babylon, and ancient India all experienced ruptures; only Chinese culture, having undergone wars, divisions, and the integration of multiple ethnic groups, has always been passing on the torch from generation to generation (薪火相传, xīn huǒ xiāng chuán - "firewood, torch; mutually, pass"). The root cause lies in the mature mechanism of civilizational cohesion embedded in traditional Chinese culture. From the governance ideas of the people are the foundation of the state (民为邦本, mín wéi bāng běn - "people, are; state, foundation") and governing through virtue (为政以德, wéi zhèng yǐ dé - "govern, with; virtue"), to the social ideals of the world belongs to the public (天下为公, tiān xià wéi gōng - "world, is; public") and a vision of a world in great harmony (天下大同, tiān xià dà tóng - "world, great, harmony"), from the family-nation sentiment of self-cultivation, regulating the family, governing the state, and bringing peace to the world (修齐治平, xiū qí zhì píng - "cultivate, regulate, govern, pacify") and the sense of responsibility for the rise and fall of the nation, to the way of interaction of seeking harmony despite differences (和而不同, hé ér bù tóng - "harmony, but; not, same") and cherishing benevolence and good neighborliness, a complete and self-consistent value system has run through thousands of years of development, shaping the common spiritual genes of the Chinese nation. The cultural accumulation spanning several thousand years has forged the unique spiritual identity of the Chinese nation. Chinese characters, traditional festivals, the ritual and music system, poetry, calligraphy and painting, traditional Chinese medicine and tea ceremony, and traditional crafts all carry the unique way of thinking and spiritual pursuits of the Chinese people. Through transmission across generations, traditional culture has been internalized into the national character, becoming the underlying logic by which people understand the world, handle relationships, and pursue ideals. Compared with countries whose civilizational threads have been ruptured and whose cultural resources are relatively thin, we possess a naturally profound and irreplicable cultural reserve. This is the source of the "deepest cultural soft power" and a unique advantage that other countries cannot replicate.
Chinese wisdom, which possesses both national and global character, contains civilizational solutions for responding to global challenges. General Secretary Xi Jinping has pointed out: "Chinese culture is both historical and contemporary, both national and global." The philosophical thought, humanistic spirit, and moral concepts contained in Chinese culture can both answer China's development challenges and provide Eastern wisdom for responding to various global challenges. Domestically, "although Zhou was an ancient state, its mandate was renewed" provides important cultural inspiration for comprehensively deepening reform; "the unity of heaven and humanity" and "all things are nurtured together" provide important guidance for ecological civilization construction; "enriching the people and promoting well-being" and "balancing righteousness and benefit" provide important support for the practice of common prosperity; "holding to the two extremes and employing the mean" and "maintaining balance to achieve harmony" provide important principles for coordinating development and security and balancing efficiency and fairness. The combination of the fundamental tenets of Marxism with fine traditional Chinese culture endows the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics with profound historical depth, forming a unique cultural advantage distinct from Western modernization. Externally, the world today faces difficulties such as geopolitical conflict, development imbalance, ecological crisis, and civilizational estrangement, and Western zero-sum game and civilizational confrontation thinking is unable to provide effective solutions. The "harmonious alliance of all nations," "seeking harmony despite differences," and "promoting credibility and good neighborliness" advocated by Chinese culture champion equality and inclusiveness among civilizations; "do not do to others what you do not wish done to yourself" advocates mutual respect among nations; "the unity of heaven and humanity" and "following the laws of nature" provide intellectual reference for global climate governance and biodiversity protection. These concepts transcend region, race, and ideology, resonate with the aspirations of people of all countries for peace, development, cooperation, and win-win outcomes, and have laid a solid value foundation for the global dissemination of Chinese culture.
Strong inclusiveness and innovativeness enable Chinese culture to continue developing and maintain lasting vitality through absorbing diverse elements. General Secretary Xi Jinjiang has pointed out: "Chinese civilization is an open system formed through continuous exchange and mutual learning with other civilizations." Chinese civilization upholds fundamental principles without being conservative and respects the ancients without restoring the old; it both accommodates foreign civilizations and adheres to its own subjectivity. This is the key to Chinese culture's continued external dissemination and global influence. The ancient Silk Road was both a trade route and a corridor of civilizational exchange. While Chinese civilizational achievements such as silk, porcelain, papermaking, and printing spread westward, Chinese civilization also actively absorbed cultural nourishment from Central Asia, South Asia, and other regions, forming a civilizational character of pluralistic unity and inclusiveness. Chinese culture is both historical and contemporary, both national and global. Cultural development must "adhere to not forgetting the original, absorbing the foreign, and facing the future, transforming through inheritance and surpassing through learning, creating more excellent works that embody the essence of Chinese culture, reflect the aesthetic pursuits of the Chinese people, disseminate contemporary Chinese values, and also conform to the trend of world progress, so that our literature and art stand proudly in the world with distinct Chinese characteristics, Chinese style, and Chinese bearing." On the one hand, Chinese culture has the capacity for self-renewal and can continuously adapt to modern life through creative transformation and innovative development; on the other hand, Chinese culture dialectically absorbs outstanding foreign achievements, effectively avoiding closure and narrow-mindedness. This trait of inclusiveness and innovation enables Chinese culture to continuously produce cultural content that aligns with world trends, providing long-term content supply for cultural soft power.
It condenses the spiritual strength for national rejuvenation and constitutes the deep soft power support in comprehensive national strength competition. General Secretary Xi Jinping has emphasized: "Continuously enhance the national cultural soft power and the influence of Chinese culture." Cultural soft power exerts a subtle influence on the world through value resonance, with advantages of low cost, sustainability, and high recognition. Chinese culture, as an important component of cultural soft power, carries the cultural logic of peaceful development in Chinese modernization, and relies on rich traditional cultural resources to construct an independent discourse system, helping to break the Western monopoly on public opinion, effectively defuse the "China threat theory," and form deep-level competitiveness that economic and military strength cannot replace.
Promoting Chinese Culture to Better Reach the World Through Systematic Policy Measures
Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core has attached great importance to enhancing the dissemination and influence of Chinese civilization. "Focusing on strengthening international communication capacity building and promoting civilizational exchange and mutual learning" is an important component of Xi Jinping Thought on Culture. General Secretary Xi Jinping has pointed out: "We must better promote Chinese culture going global, conveying principles through culture, transmitting voices through culture, and educating people through culture, explaining and recommending to the world more excellent culture with Chinese characteristics, embodying the Chinese spirit, and containing Chinese wisdom." Promoting Chinese culture "going global" cannot be limited to superficial exchanges such as cultural relic exhibitions and artistic performances; it must adhere to "not forgetting the original, absorbing the foreign, and facing the future," take consolidating cultural subjectivity as the foundation, promoting creative transformation and innovative development as the core, and strengthening international communication capacity building as the starting point, constructing a multi-dimensional and integrated communication system covering content, discourse, channels, industry, mutual learning, and safeguards.
Uphing fundamental principles and breaking new ground to deepen content supply and truly realize the creative transformation and innovative development of fine traditional Chinese culture. General Secretary Xi Jinping has emphasized: "Adhere to the Chinese cultural standpoint and inherit the genes of Chinese culture." Content is the core carrier of culture "going global"; without high-quality content that bridges China and the rest of the world, international communication cannot take root. This requires systematic excavation of the spiritual symbols of Chinese civilization and refinement of the value core that bridges China and the world. Centering on the core concepts of fine traditional Chinese culture such as the vision of a world in great harmony, the people as the foundation of the state, the unity of heaven and humanity, and seeking harmony despite differences, we should build a system of civilizational symbols with international recognition, deeply explore the contemporary value behind cultural symbols, and closely align with global common concerns to achieve value resonance. We should create internationally oriented masterpieces, promote the integration of traditional opera, Chinese painting, intangible cultural heritage, and classical literature into modern aesthetics, extract cultural spirit that transcends time and space and possesses contemporary value, and adapt it to the context of globalized communication. We should balance historical and contemporary narratives to present a complete China where past and present are connected. International communication cannot only export ancient culture; it must also explain how traditional culture nourishes Chinese modernization, connect the narrative chain between past and present, respond to the international community's questions about "where China comes from and where China is going," and present a true, three-dimensional, and comprehensive civilized China.
Focus on building a Chinese discourse and narrative system that bridges China and the world, breaking down barriers to cross-cultural communication. General Secretary Xi Jinping has required "telling China's story well and spreading China's voice well." The greatest obstacle to cross-cultural communication lies in differences in discourse systems, ways of thinking, and contextual backgrounds, requiring the creation of narrative systems that overseas audiences can easily empathize with. We should implement segmented and targeted communication, strengthen regional and country studies, assess the cultural preferences and public opinion concerns of audiences in different regions, and abandon homogenized communication. For the Chinese character cultural sphere, we should highlight narratives of cultural common origin; for Europe and the United States, we should focus on issues such as ecology, peace, and global governance; for developing countries, we should explain the concepts of mutual benefit and win-win cooperation and the vision of a world in great harmony, using localized expression to bridge cultural estrangement. We should interpret traditional culture outside the framework of Western discourse, create new concepts and expressions that bridge China and the world, improve the standardized translation of core terms such as "the golden mean" and "the unity of heaven and humanity," defuse one-sided interpretations, transform traditional concepts into globally accessible discourse, use "seeking harmony despite differences" to explain the diversity of civilizations, and use "the vision of a world in great harmony" to interpret the promotion of building a community with a shared future for mankind, achieving Chinese positions with international expression.
Expand diversified communication channels and build a communication matrix with online and offline, official and non-official forces working in coordination. General Secretary Xi Jinping has emphasized: "We must promote the restructuring of the international communication landscape, innovatively carry out online external publicity, and build a multi-channel, three-dimensional external communication pattern." Channels determine the coverage and reach efficiency of communication. In the new era, culture "going global" requires coordinating online digital platforms and offline physical carriers and integrating multiple communication forces. We should strengthen digital international communication positions, develop new digital cultural business forms, rely on short videos, VR/AR, virtual digital humans and other technologies to revitalize cultural heritage, build independent and controllable international digital platforms, support the going global of national-style games, online literature, and digital cultural museums, and promote the digital overseas exhibitions of cultural heritage such as the Palace Museum, Dunhuang, and the Great Wall; at the same time, we should insist that technology serves content, adhere to cultural subjectivity, and prevent content entertainment and distortion of cultural connotations. We should strengthen offline international cultural exchange carriers, operate overseas cultural centers and Confucius Institutes well, hold international art festivals, cultural relic touring exhibitions, and traditional art touring performances, (relying on the Belt and Road Initiative cultural corridor to build the Silk Road cultural brand), deepen cooperation with countries along the route in intangible cultural heritage protection, academic exchange, and other areas, cultivate long-term cultural identity, and continuously expand the circle of friends who understand and are friendly to China.
Strengthen the main body of the cultural industry and cultivate Chinese cultural brands with global competitiveness. General Secretary Xi Jinping has pointed out: "Promote the development of cultural undertakings and cultural industries." Relying solely on non-profit cultural exchange often makes it difficult to achieve long-term, large-scale communication effects; it must rely on the market-based empowerment of the cultural industry. On the one hand, we should build a complete traditional culture IP industry chain covering cultural creativity, film and television, national-style fashion, and lifestyle aesthetics, promote the integration of cultural elements into overseas daily consumption, improve support policies, and cultivate local cultural enterprises with global operational capabilities; on the other hand, we should adhere to localized operations, jointly create and distribute with overseas local teams, adapt to local laws and regulations, aesthetics, and consumption habits, seek a balance between cultural core and market returns, resolutely prevent behaviors that dissolve local culture to cater to the market, and achieve the organic unity of social and economic benefits.
Adhere to openness, inclusiveness, and civilizational mutual learning, and build a pattern of global civilizational interaction with equal dialogue. General Secretary Xi Jinping has emphasized: "Adhere to equality, mutual learning, dialogue, and inclusiveness among civilizations, transcend civilizational estrangement through civilizational exchange, transcend civilizational conflict through civilizational mutual learning, and transcend civilizational superiority through civilizational inclusiveness." External cultural exchange is two-way equal dialogue, by no means one-way cultural export. We should adhere to cultural subjectivity, fully and accurately explain the value connotations of Chinese civilization, and resist the misinterpretation of local culture by Western theories; at the same time, we should respect the uniqueness of each country's civilization, rationally resolve cultural prejudice, and conduct equal exchange and dialogue. We should actively absorb outstanding achievements of foreign civilizations, learn from advanced international experience in cultural creativity, narrative, and brand operation, and after localized transformation, feed back into local cultural innovation, forming a two-way cycle of "bringing in" and "going global." We should build a global civilizational dialogue platform with the concept of harmonious coexistence, conduct civilizational dialogue around issues such as climate change, poverty reduction, and public health, exchange governance wisdom, and consolidate the foundation of global cooperation through cultural identity.
Improve safeguard systems for talent, institutions, and translation, and consolidate the foundational support for international communication. Long-term communication cannot be separated from supporting safeguards. General Secretary Xi Jinping has pointed out: "Build a strong contingent of specialized talent suited to the needs of international communication in the new era." We should strengthen the cultivation of composite international communication talent, build professional teams with traditional cultural literacy, foreign language ability, cross-cultural communication, and overseas operational capabilities, and improve talent cultivation and incentive mechanisms; build translation databases for classics and standardized core terminology, effectively solving problems such as translation distortion and loss of cultural imagery; and also improve relevant laws and regulations on overseas intellectual property protection and cultural security maintenance, effectively preventing the risks of ideological infiltration and distortion of cultural symbols, and building a strong defense line for cultural security.
Comprehensively Enhancing National Cultural Soft Power and the Influence of Chinese Culture Through the Global Dissemination of Culture
General Secretary Xi Jinping has emphasized: "Cultural soft power and influence are important components of comprehensive national strength." At present, the world's century-old changes are accelerating, and competition in national cultural influence is also becoming increasingly fierce. As a responsible major country, we must more proactively publicize China's propositions, spread Chinese culture, and present China's image. Promoting Chinese culture to reach the world must ultimately be anchored on the four core goals of strengthening cultural confidence, enhancing international discursive power, deepening civilizational exchange and mutual learning among mankind, and building a socialist cultural power.
Build a solid foundation of cultural confidence and consolidate the cultural subjectivity of the Chinese nation. General Secretary Xi Jinping has pointed out: "Strengthening cultural confidence is a major issue concerning the rise and fall of the nation's fortunes, cultural security, and the independence of the national spirit." National cultural soft power is rooted in deep national cultural soil, and the high degree of cultural identity of the entire nation is the fundamental confidence for conducting international communication and telling China's story well. Promoting Chinese culture "going global" should coordinate external communication and internal popularization to achieve two-way empowerment of internal and external cultural construction. In international communication practice, systematically excavating and creatively transforming local cultural resources helps guide the people to deepen historical consciousness and cultivate cultural confidence, continuously consolidating the cultural subjectivity of the Chinese nation. In a global landscape where diverse civilizations exchange and integrate and where ideas and cultures collide, the continuous and profound Chinese cultural lineage can effectively resist the erosion of Western cultural hegemony and condense the mighty spiritual force for advancing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.
Strive to reshape the international public opinion landscape and enhance China's international discursive power and appeal. General Secretary Xi Jinping has emphasized that "communication power determines influence, and discursive power determines initiative" and that "international discursive power is an important component of national cultural soft power." For a long time, the international public opinion arena has been dominated by Western discourse, and some overseas forces have continuously fabricated and exported distorted narratives about China. Chinese culture provides us with independent and profound discursive resources. We must break the Western narrative monopoly, continuously spread Eastern values of peace, win-win cooperation, inclusiveness, and coexistence, gradually reverse overseas stereotypes, defuse arguments such as the "clash of civilizations" and "China threat theory," cultivate more forces that understand and are friendly to China, transform cultural appeal into actual discursive power, and comprehensively enhance national cultural soft power.
Enrich the garden of human civilizations and provide new choices of Eastern civilization for global governance. General Secretary Xi Jinping has emphasized: "Diverse civilizations are the true colors of the world." Today, when the destinies of all countries are closely connected, the inclusive coexistence, exchange, and mutual learning of different civilizations play an irreplaceable role in promoting the modernization process of human society and enriching the garden of world civilizations. In today's world, the drawbacks of the Western civilizational development model are increasingly prominent, and the world urgently needs solutions from diverse civilizations. China's concepts such as the vision of a world in great harmony, the unity of heaven and humanity, and harmonious coexistence provide new ideas that can be referenced for global governance, ecological protection, and civilizational interaction. Disseminating Chinese culture is essentially contributing the wisdom of Chinese civilization to the world, enriching the diversity of world civilizations, guiding countries around the world to abandon zero-sum game thinking, establish a civilizational outlook of exchange, mutual learning, cooperation, and win-win outcomes, promote the building of a community with a shared future for mankind, and inject lasting civilizational momentum into world peace and development.
Cultivating strong international communication capacity is an inevitable requirement for promoting cultural prosperity and building a culturally strong country. General Secretary Xi Jinping has emphasized: "We must deeply understand the importance and necessity of strengthening and improving international communication work under the new circumstances, make great efforts to strengthen international communication capacity building, and form international discursive power commensurate with our comprehensive national strength and international status." At present, against the backdrop of global civilizational exchange and collision, it is even more necessary for us to consciously conduct systematic sorting and innovative transformation of local cultural resources, boost the creation of quality content, and consolidate the foundation of the cultural subjectivity of the Chinese nation. In particular, we should rely on the unique advantages of Chinese culture, continue to promote the "two creations" and international communication capacity building, make up for the shortcomings of China's external communication, achieve coordinated development of hard and soft power, shape a credible, lovable, and respectable image of China, effectively convey Chinese values and the Chinese spirit, build a solid cultural foundation for comprehensively building a great modern socialist country, and continuously provide civilizational strength for building a community with a shared future for mankind.
(The author is a professor at the School of Marxism, Tsinghua University)
Return to TopBy: 中国南方航空集团有限公司党组书记、董事长 马须伦
In December 2025, General Secretary Xi Jinping made important instructions on the work of central enterprises, further clarifying the duties and missions shouldered by state-owned assets and central enterprises on the new journey, pointing out the direction of progress and providing fundamental guidance for doing well the work of state-owned assets and central enterprises in the current and future period. China Southern Air Holding Company (hereinafter referred to as China Southern Air Holding) treats studying and implementing General Secretary Xi Jinping's important instructions as a major political task, combining this with studying and implementing the spirit of the Fourth Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee of the Party and the Central Economic Work Conference, and linking it with studying and implementing General Secretary Xi Jinping's important expositions on the reform and development of state-owned enterprises and Party building, further strengthening the sense of responsibility and mission to accelerate the building of a world-class air transport enterprise, and striving to take the lead and set an example in Chinese modernization.
Adhere to the "Two Grasps and One Prevention" and better coordinate development and security. In recent years, China Southern Air Holding has deeply studied and implemented General Secretary Xi Jinping's important instructions and directives, adhered to the overall safety management strategy of "Two Grasps and One Prevention" (grasp the long term, grasp implementation, prevent risks), continuously deepened the construction of the seven major safety management systems (safety responsibility system, regulations and manuals system, training system, process control system, risk management and control system, safety culture system, science and technology innovation system), and built sustainable, high-quality safety. As of the first half of 2026, China Southern has continuously ensured 320 months of flight safety and 385 months of aviation security, with its safety level leading the industry. In the next step, China Southern Air Holding will thoroughly implement the holistic approach to national security, always adhere to safety first, vigorously grasp the implementation of safety responsibilities and the building of the qualification and capability of key teams, strictly, substantively, and meticulously manage and control various safety risks, and follow the path of safety driven by data and supported by science and technology.
Bear in mind the "great affairs of the state" and serve the implementation of major national strategies. In recent years, China Southern Air Holding has borne in mind the "great affairs of the state," formulated and implemented five action plans for serving the coordinated development of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the construction of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, the comprehensive revitalization of Northeast China in the new era, the rise of the central region, and the construction of the Xinjiang Pilot Free Trade Zone, deeply integrating the development of China Southern Air Holding into national strategies. Actively serving the construction of the Belt and Road Initiative, it has cumulatively opened 153 routes along the Belt and Road, reaching 36 countries and 55 destinations along the route, making it the largest air carrier along the Belt and Road. In the next step, China Southern Air Holding will consciously plan enterprise development within the overall framework of the Party and the state, focus on "high-quality connectivity," weave and strengthen the "Air Silk Road," and actively serve the construction of the new development pattern with domestic circulation as the main body and domestic and international dual circulation mutually promoting each other.
Focus on the main responsibility and main business, and effectively strengthen core functions and enhance core competitiveness. Hub construction is the key for full-service airlines to enhance their core competitiveness. In recent years, China Southern Air Holding has focused on the main responsibility and main business of air transport, driven by the hub network strategy, made every effort to build the Guangzhou hub, continuously improved the "five in, five out" flight bank, ranked first among major Asia-Pacific hubs in the number of 4-hour transit connection opportunities, and become the first gateway hub from mainland China to Oceania and Southeast Asia. It has built the Beijing Daxing hub with high quality, established a "four in, four out" flight bank, and in 2025 China Southern's international and regional flight volume at the Beijing hub reached 1.75 times that of 2019. It has accelerated the construction of the Urumqi hub, and in 2025 China Southern's passenger throughput market share at the Urumqi hub reached 42.7%. In the next step, China Southern Air Holding will make every effort to improve the quality of international aviation hub construction, "make the Guangzhou hub stronger and bigger," "make the Beijing Daxing hub finer and better," build the Urumqi western gateway hub that "forms wings to the east and west, forms a network within Xinjiang, and faces Central Asia, South Asia, and Europe," and serve the construction of China's civil aviation "3+7+N" international aviation hub functional system.
Strengthen scientific and technological innovation and serve high-level self-reliance and strength in science and technology. In recent years, China Southern Air Holding has continuously promoted innovation in science and technology, innovation in industry, and innovation in development methods, and developed new quality productive forces in light of local conditions. It has independently developed the world's first "Sky Eye" aircraft health diagnosis system capable of dynamic monitoring of all mainstream aircraft models and the "Sky Pole" flight planning system, and its independently developed D-level multi-model full-flight simulator was selected for the "Central Enterprise Scientific and Technological Achievements Application and Expansion Project." It has built a world-leading narrow-body aircraft engine maintenance capability system, and its subsidiary Xiangyi Company was selected as one of the fifth batch of national-level specialized, refined, distinctive, and innovative "little giant" enterprises. In 2025, the proportion of China Southern Air Holding's strategic emerging industry revenue to total revenue increased to 39%. Serving the domestic civil aircraft industry, relevant projects were selected for the State Council SASAC's "Hundred Major Projects." It has accelerated the implementation of digital transformation based on the "four unifications" (unified planning, unified architecture standards, unified data governance, unified network security management), and built a one-stop service mobile application platform "China Southern e-Travel." In the next step, China Southern Air Holding will continue to strengthen scientific and technological innovation research and the transformation of achievements, deeply implement the "AI+" special action, and empower business management with digital intelligence. Adhering to the principle of "highly relevant, broad prospects, controllable risks, and expected returns," it will accelerate the building of a "2+5+X" industrial system, striving to basically complete the construction of a modern civil aviation industrial system with complementary elements, independent controllability, strong competitiveness, and safety and reliability by 2030.
Continue to deepen reform and improve the modern enterprise system with Chinese characteristics. In recent years, China Southern Air Holding has thoroughly implemented the "two adherences" (adherence to the Party's leadership and adherence to the modern enterprise system with Chinese characteristics), solidly carried out the three-year action for state-owned enterprise reform and the action to deepen and improve state-owned enterprise reform, and focused on solving deep-seated problems such as unsmooth institutional mechanisms and insufficient vitality and motivation. Under the guidance of the State Council SASAC, it piloted the implementation of equity diversification reform measures. The China Southern Science and Technology Company established in 2024 is an independent legal person enterprise that applies scientific and technological achievements as priced equity contributions. It has continuously deepened the reform of the three systems (labor, personnel, and distribution), comprehensively promoted tenure-based and contract-based management, and in the first tenure period (2021-2023) of China Southern Air Holding, the annual salary income gap among the principal leaders of second-level units reached 4.4 times. It has carried out the adjustment and optimization of five major structures: fleet, market, human resources, industry, and assets and liabilities, cumulatively exiting or disposing of 7 types of high-cost, low-efficiency aircraft models, reducing the personnel-to-aircraft ratio from 140.3 in 2019 to 114.2 in 2025, and China Southern Air Holding has been rated Grade A in the central enterprise reform assessment for 5 consecutive years. In the next step, China Southern Air Holding will firmly establish a reform mindset, adhere to a problem-oriented approach, plan and implement further comprehensive deepening of reform, vigorously advance a new round of adjustment and optimization of the five major structures, continue to promote special actions such as "filling shortcomings, improving quality, and striving for first-class," and ensure obvious results in promoting the improvement of modern corporate governance of state-owned enterprises with Chinese characteristics.
Adhere to putting the people first and practice "civil aviation for the people." In recent years, China Southern Air Holding has always upheld the concept of "civil aviation for the people," continuously improving the quality of air transport supply to meet passengers' needs for better travel. It has defined the brand positioning of "warm and refined," built "five-oriented" (humanized, digitalized, refined, personalized, and convenient) services, deeply promoted the construction of large-scale operations, and many service indicators rank among the top domestic airlines. It has innovatively launched services such as "boarding in a moment," full-channel self-service refund and change for domestic tickets, and "baggage to home," and its pet transport-related services now cover 760 routes at 35 domestic airports. China Southern Air Holding has won the CAPSE "Best Airline Award" for 9 consecutive years and has maintained first place in the China Brand Power Index for aviation services for 16 consecutive years. In the next step, China Southern Air Holding will always take the issues customers care most about and are most concerned with as the direction for improving aviation services, and continue to build a modern large-scale service system that is "warm and refined, complete in system, coordinated and efficient, intelligent and precise, and value-driven."
Comprehensively improve the quality of Party building and lead and guarantee high-quality development. China Southern Air Holding has conscientiously implemented the general requirements for Party building in the new era, always adhered to and strengthened the Party's overall leadership, strengthened the building of enterprise leadership teams, strictly pressed and compacted the political responsibility for governing the Party, promoted the integration of the Party's leadership into all aspects of corporate governance, and promoted the deep integration of Party building work with production and operation. In its work, it highlights political nature, leading nature, normative nature, integrative nature, innovative nature, and cohesive nature, strictly implements the "first agenda" system and the theoretical learning center group study system, compacts responsibility through the "three lists and four responsibilities" full-cycle Party building responsibility management mechanism, and continuously improves the quality of Party building work. It has continuously improved the institutional system, made supervision work solid and detailed, continued to do well in rectification following the Central Committee's inspections, resolutely punished corruption, persevering and unremitting (锲而不舍, qie er bu she - "drill, and, not, abandon") in rectifying the Four Malfeasances, persevering in one's efforts (持之以恒, chi zhi yi heng - "hold, it, with, constant") in rectifying work styles, enforcing discipline, and fighting corruption, and striving to create a clean and upright political atmosphere (风清气正, feng qing qi zheng - "wind, clear, air, upright"). It has deeply implemented the science and technology talent cultivation project, cultivating 1 national master craftsman and 2 top scientific and technological talents of central enterprises, has been rated Grade A in the central enterprise Party building responsibility assessment for 9 consecutive years, and has achieved 8 consecutive "good" ratings in the assessment of targeted assistance work by central units.
Return to TopBy: 侯军虎
Upholding the Party's leadership and strengthening Party building are the glorious tradition of China's state-owned enterprises, the "root" and "soul" of state-owned enterprises, and also their unique advantage. The Party Committee of Huadian New Energy Group Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Huadian New Energy) proactively serves the national strategy, precisely aligns with national needs, closely follows core functions such as listed company value management, green high-quality development, and energy security assurance, continuously promotes the deep integration and synchronized resonance of Party building work with business work, effectively transforms the Party's political and organizational advantages into competitive advantages in green development, green power supply, capital operation, and scientific and technological innovation, and genuinely leads and guarantees the enterprise's high-quality development with high-quality Party building.
Orienting and steering the company's high-quality development with the Party's overall leadership. Upholding the Party's leadership is the most essential feature of socialism with Chinese characteristics. As a national strategic, foundational, and pioneering industry, the new energy industry features high policy coordination, rapid industry transformation and iteration, strong market correlation, and high risk prevention and control requirements. Against the backdrop of profound adjustments in global energy supply and demand and the increased difficulty of coordinating energy supply security and green transformation, the more the external environment changes rapidly and the more arduous and complex the reform and development tasks become, the more unwaveringly we must uphold and strengthen the Party's overall leadership and resolutely safeguard the centralized, unified leadership of the Party Central Committee.
The Party Committee of Huadian New Energy has always adhered to the political attributes of state-owned assets and state-owned enterprises, kept in mind the "great affairs of the state," and consciously embedded enterprise development deeply into the overall framework of the national energy security strategy, the construction of a new energy system, and the realization of the "dual carbon" goals. It insists on placing the Party's political construction first, strictly implements the "first agenda item" system, establishes a closed-loop implementation mechanism of "quarterly tracking, semi-annual supervision, and annual summarization," and achieves orders that are carried out without fail, unified pace and coordination, and full penetration across all domains. It adheres to the "two persistences," integrates the Party's leadership into the entire chain and every link of corporate governance, conforms to the governance norms of listed companies, achieves full coverage of Party building written into the articles of association at both the company and regional subsidiary levels, implements the "one person holding both positions" of Party Committee Secretary and Chairman of the Board, dynamically revises and improves the lists of rights and responsibilities for deliberation and decision-making and the corresponding rules of procedure for the Party Committee, the Board of Directors, and the management layer, clarifies the boundaries of rights and responsibilities among various governance entities, and includes major investments, business development, capital operation, and market value management all in the Party Committee's pre-study, forming a governance pattern of Party Committee pre-review and gatekeeping, Board scientific decision-making, and management efficient execution. With strong political leadership, it coordinates the overall reform and development situation, prevents and resolves major development risks, and firmly shoulders the political, economic, and social responsibilities of safeguarding national energy security and promoting green energy transformation.
Consolidating the foundation for undertaking work and starting businesses with the Party's innovative theories. "Using the Party's innovative theories to strengthen people's resolve and spirit" is the fundamental task of the Party's ideological construction. Solidly doing well the Party's ideological construction is the core lever for state-owned assets and state-owned enterprises to unify thoughts, unify will, and unify action, and is the fundamental guarantee for condensing the consensus of cadres and employees, gathering development synergy, and promoting the enterprise to achieve steady and long-term development. For new energy power generation listed companies, with industry transformation changing with each passing day, complex and volatile market environments, and arduous and heavy strategic tasks, it is even more necessary to arm the mind, guide practice, and promote work with the Party's innovative theories, continuously consolidate the foundation of faith, replenish the calcium of spirit, and steady the rudder of thought, leading action with firm ideological consciousness, and providing a continuous source of spiritual motivation and ideological support for the enterprise's green development, scientific and technological innovation, and value enhancement.
The Party Committee of Huadian New Energy has always insisted on using the Party's innovative theories to strengthen people's resolve and spirit, improved normalized and systematic theoretical arming mechanisms, and through normalized research and study systems such as the Party Committee theoretical learning center group study, the Party branch's "three meetings and one lesson," and Party Day activities, continuously enhanced the political judgment, political comprehension, and political execution of Party members and cadres, promoting the Party's innovative theories to enter the mind and heart and take root and flourish. It solidly carries out learning and education on establishing and practicing a correct view of political achievements, resolutely corrects the short-sighted thinking and one-sided perceptions that emphasize scale over quality, expansion over efficiency, and visible achievements over potential achievements, and guides all cadres and employees to always plan work, implement policies, promote development, and fulfill responsibilities based on the overall national strategic framework. It adheres to the unity of learning, thinking, and application and the unity of knowledge, belief, and action, effectively transforming the results of theoretical learning into pragmatic measures for optimizing industrial layout, tackling core technologies, enhancing enterprise value, stabilizing and activating the capital market, and preventing and resolving risks, consolidating the ideological foundation for the company's green high-quality development and the steady leap of its core value.
Activating the internal driving force for development with strong fighting fortresses. "Adhering to the establishment of a sound organizational system that is connected from top to bottom and effective in execution" is where the Party's advantages and strength lie. The Party's grassroots organizations are the fighting fortresses of the Party in social grassroots organizations and the foundation of all the Party's work and combat effectiveness. New energy enterprises have industry characteristics of dispersed station layout, diversified business chains, scattered distribution of personnel across regions and stations, and broad frontline operation surfaces, and therefore need to rely on a rigorous and sound organizational system to unite people, connect work, and empower development.
The Party Committee of Huadian New Energy has always adhered to the principle that "wherever the enterprise develops, Party building follows, and the fighting fortress role of the Party branch is manifested," strictly implemented the "four synchronizations and four alignments," promoted full coverage of grassroots Party organizations, and formed a work pattern of "Party Committee coordination, Party branch promotion, and upper-lower linkage." Taking the construction of "four-strength" Party branches as the starting point, it continuously deepens the standardized and normalized construction of grassroots Party organizations, strictly implements the basic systems of intra-Party organizational life, and promotes the transformation and quality improvement of grassroots Party building from "visible coverage" to "effective empowerment" and from "passive implementation" to "deep integration." Based on the industrial characteristics of new energy and the positioning of a flagship listed company, it carries out Party building empowerment actions, continuously deepens the creation of Party member pioneer posts, Party member responsibility areas, and Party member commando teams for 6 consecutive years, improves the operation mechanism of special teams for major project tackling, and promotes the precise alignment and mutual promotion of Party building work with central tasks such as green development, quality and efficiency improvement, market value management, capital operation, reform and innovation, and social responsibility. It continuously deepens the joint construction and co-building of Party organizations, constructs a "four-level joint construction" mechanism of external coordination, regional linkage, cross-domain collaboration, and industrial complementarity, promotes resource sharing, advantage complementarity, and mutual development promotion, expands industrial development space, optimizes the industrial ecological pattern, strengthens industrial chain collaboration, and improves the quality and efficiency of business development through Party building linkage, constructing a new pattern of Party building work in the new era with all-domain linkage, whole-chain empowerment, and comprehensive quality improvement.
Safeguarding the enterprise's steady and long-term development with a clean and upright political ecosystem. "Adhering to full and rigorous self-governance of the Party" is the strategic policy for Party building in the new era. New energy listed companies have industry characteristics of capital intensity, numerous projects, high-frequency transactions, and strict supervision, where integrity risks, investment risks, operational risks, and capital market compliance risks are intertwined and superimposed,; it is therefore necessary to always adhere unwaveringly to the main tone of strictness and prevent and resolve various risks and challenges.
The Party Committee of Huadian New Energy resolutely shoulders the primary responsibility for full and rigorous self-governance of the Party, improves and perfects the "four responsibilities coordination" mechanism of the Party Committee's primary responsibility, the Discipline Inspection Commission's supervisory responsibility, the Secretary's first responsible person responsibility, and the leadership team members' "one post with dual responsibilities," and constructs a Party governance work pattern of layer-by-layer compaction, full coverage, and penetration to the end. Closely following the prominent characteristics of superimposed risks in the new energy industry, it adheres to the dominance of intra-Party supervision, coordinates and integrates various supervisory resources such as auditing, internal control, legal affairs, and digital penetration supervision, embeds supervision and control precisely into key links across the entire chain such as project construction, bidding management, fund disbursement, mergers and acquisitions, information disclosure, and capital operation, and achieves pre-positioned risk prevention and whole-process control. It normalizes discipline education, warning education, and integrity culture construction, deeply promotes the creation of "three-clean" enterprises, relies on anti-corruption and integrity publicity and education month activities, builds a solid line of defense for integrity among all cadres and employees, precisely rectifies formalism and bureaucracy, and continuously reduces burdens and empowers grassroots levels. It adheres to the simultaneous investigation and governance of misconduct and corruption, persevering with unremitting efforts in implementing the spirit of the Eight-Point Regulation and its implementation rules, strictly implements the "Regulations on Integrity and Self-Discipline of Leaders of State-Owned Enterprises," promotes the integrated advancement of not daring to be corrupt, not being able to be corrupt, and not wanting to be corrupt, continuously improves the institutional constraint system, risk prevention and control system, and supervision and governance system, and safeguards the enterprise's standardized, sustainable, and high-quality development by creating a good political ecosystem.
(The author is the Secretary of the Party Committee and Chairman of the Board of Huadian New Energy Group Co., Ltd.)
Return to TopBy: 周雪松
Upholding the Party's leadership and strengthening Party building are the "root" and "soul" of state-owned enterprises. At present, the traditional thermal power industry is in a critical stage where green transformation, structural adjustment, and operational breakthroughs overlap.Many thermal power enterprises face common difficulties to varying degrees, including insufficient innovation in Party building carriers, inadequate integration of Party building with core work, and imperfect mechanisms for stimulating the vanguard and exemplary role of Party members. As a key power generation enterprise of Huadian Tianjin Region, the Party Committee of Tianjin Junliangcheng Power Generation Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as the Company) bases itself on the general trend of industry transformation, directly confronts the practical bottlenecks in grassroots Party building, explores the creation of the "mass entrepreneurship and innovation" Party building enhancement project, constructs a systematic work framework of "1 leadership + 4 supports + N practices," strives to shape a new pattern of grassroots Party building featuring integrated coordination, multi-level support, and multi-scenario implementation, continuously transforms the Party's political and organizational advantages into corporate governance effectiveness, operational profit-making capability, and green transformation momentum, and endeavors to explore a Party building-empowered development path that suits thermal power transformation enterprises and has reference value for the industry.
Anchor political leadership and consolidate the ideological foundation. Political building is the fundamental building of Party building in state-owned enterprises. To promote deep integration of Party building and business work, the primary task is to use the Party's innovative theory to strengthen people's resolve and soul (凝心铸魂, ning xin zhu hun - "congeal, heart; cast, soul"), ensuring that enterprise reform and development always advance in the correct direction. The Company's Party Committee insists on running the strengthening of theoretical armed forces through the entire process of the "creating new benchmarks and new excellence" Party building enhancement project, strictly implements the "First Agenda" system, improves the closed-loop implementation mechanism for theoretical study, continuously perfects the whole-process working mechanism of "communication and study, research and deployment, implementation and execution, follow-up supervision, and evaluation and feedback," consolidates the normalized supervision model of "quarterly tracking, semi-annual supervision, and annual summary," and promotes closed-loop implementation of all agreed matters to be carried out in detail and with visible results.It insists on making the study and implementation of Xi Jinping's thought on Party building and the spirit of General Secretary Xi Jinping's important instructions the primary learning content of the Party Committee's theoretical study center group, branch "three meetings and one lesson," and themed Party days, and regularly carries out learning activities such as special reading classes, tiered lectures, and red study tours, guiding all cadres and employees to continuously enhance their political judgment, political comprehension, and political execution. All cadres and employees always bear in mind the "great affairs of the nation," closely adhere to the primary responsibility of energy supply guarantee, take ensuring stable regional power supply and accelerating green and low-carbon transformation as important yardsticks for testing the effectiveness of Party building work, and consciously unify their thinking and actions with the various decisions and deployments of the Party Central Committee on energy security and reform of state-owned assets and state-owned enterprises.
Build four-dimensional support and improve the collaborative operation system. Breaking through the bottlenecks and difficulties in integrating Party building and business work cannot rely on scattered and fragmented activity carriers; it is necessary to build a systematic, complete, and interconnected support system.
Empower branch building with organizational strength and build a strong fighting fortress. Adhere to the clear orientation of focusing on grassroots, deeply implement the "Four Forces and Four Drives" Party building project, earnestly carry out the standardized and normalized construction of "Four Strong" Party branches, improve the quantitative evaluation mechanism for branches, and promote deep adaptation between the Party organization system and the production system.Focus on key work such as unit maintenance, electricity sales, coal price control, energy-saving technological transformation, new energy expansion, and safe production, rely on Party organization joint building and co-construction, Party member posts, zones, and teams, secretary-led projects, and Party member tackling actions to build practical carriers, guide grassroots Party branches to benchmark against advanced standards and cultivate distinctive features, promote the upgrade of Party building work from "basic compliance" to "striving for excellence and innovation," and continuously enhance the political and organizational functions of grassroots Party organizations.
Promote the quality of Party member education through talent cultivation and build a platform for work and growth. Implement the principle of the Party managing talent and improve the "dual cultivation" mechanism. Closely follow the tasks of thermal power transformation, address the problems of aging personnel structure and talent echelon gaps, build a whole-chain talent cultivation mechanism, cultivate three teams of management, technical, and skilled personnel through mentor-apprentice pairing, on-the-job training, and skill competitions at different levels, smooth the growth channels for young backbone personnel, build platforms for Party members to tackle technical problems and innovate for efficiency, encourage Party members to take the initiative in the front line of technological innovation and cost reduction and efficiency enhancement, and promote the full play of Party members' vanguard role.
Safeguard the overall development situation with comprehensive integrity and weave a dense risk prevention and control network. Adhere unwaveringly to the strict tone and promote the integrated advancement of "three non-corruptions." Focus on key areas such as fuel management, contract management, and material procurement to improve the integrity risk prevention and control mechanism, and promote the normalization of integrity education and risk screening. Rely on the "four ones and two strengthenings" carrier to advance the actions of "integrity into maintenance and technological transformation." Create a "one branch, one feature" integrity brand, carry out activities such as integrity home visits, scholarly integrity reading, and family tradition integrity cultivation, continuously consolidate the political responsibility of all levels for governing the Party, create a clean and upright political atmosphere and a sound political ecosystem for work and entrepreneurship, and provide disciplinary guarantees for the stable operation of the enterprise.
Gather the joint force of endeavor through cultural construction and enrich the spiritual foundation of the enterprise. Integrate ideological and political work and corporate culture construction into the "双创双新" Party building enhancement project, inherit the red gene of energy state-owned enterprises, focus on the urgent difficulties and concerns of employees, provide thoughtful caring services, continuously enhance employees' sense of belonging and gain, and gather a strong spiritual joint force for overcoming great difficulties and challenges (攻坚克难, gong jian ke nan - "attack, stronghold; overcome, difficulty") and transformation and development.
Extend diversified practices and promote sinking to the front line. Based on the basic framework of "1 leadership + 4 supports," the Company closely follows central tasks such as safe production, quality and efficiency improvement, lean management, technological innovation, and green transformation, and extends to create N Party building integration practice carriers. Promote the construction of Party building positions, with Party members sinking into teams and taking root in their posts. Extensively establish Party member demonstration posts, Party member tackling groups, and Party member commando teams, and carry out tackling practices around key and difficult tasks such as unit optimization, energy conservation and consumption reduction, and new energy project advancement. Insist on ensuring that wherever central work advances, the "Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and New Development" Party building enhancement project follows, promote the simultaneous planning, deployment, implementation, and assessment of Party building work and production and operation, and achieve two-way embedding and resonance between Party building and business work.
Since the implementation of the "innovation and entrepreneurship" Party building enhancement project, the effectiveness of Party building in empowering enterprise development has continued to emerge.The long-term mechanism for theoretical armed forces has been continuously improved; the integration of Party building with central work has become closer, with indicators for safe production, operational profit-making, and technological innovation steadily improving; the cultivation channels for young talent have remained smooth, the comprehensive integrity prevention and control system has been continuously improved, and the endogenous development vitality of the enterprise has been fully stimulated.
Looking to the future, the task of transformation and development for thermal power enterprises remains arduous. The Company's Party Committee will continue to deepen the connotation expansion of the "creating new models and new achievements" Party building enhancement project, continuously improve the mechanisms for normalized operation, dynamic optimization, and effectiveness evaluation, continuously enrich the carriers for Party building integration, strive to transform the "creating new models and new achievements" Party building enhancement project into lasting momentum for ensuring energy security, promoting green transformation, and achieving high-quality development of the enterprise, and provide a grassroots practical path that can be referenced and replicated for energy state-owned enterprises to explore deep integration of Party building and business work.
(The author is the Secretary of the Party Committee and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Tianjin Junliangcheng Power Generation Co., Ltd.)
Return to TopBy: 丁捷
Upon learning that "Blooming: The Life Lessons of a Military Musician" (hereinafter referred to as "Blooming") had won the Ninth Lu Xun Literature Prize, the protagonist Yu Xiaodong sent a congratulatory message from the Dabie Mountains. She said: "I thank the writer. Literature has allowed me to see myself and to understand life." These words kept me from calming down for a long time. A military artist who walked into the mountains when the countdown to her life had begun, and stayed there for more than ten years, was able to see herself anew through words—this is perhaps the highest praise this work could receive.
But I must honestly say that the original intention of writing this book was not only to write about her, but also to "rescue" myself. In 2023, after I finished writing the documentary literature work "Sighing in Wonder at the Sea," my body suddenly developed problems—severe nerve pain all over. When I went to the hospital for an examination, all my lymph nodes were found to be enlarged. The doctor gave me a pessimistic prognosis and required immediate hospitalization for further diagnosis. During the three months of hospitalization, I was shrouded every day in the fear that my life might be slipping away, and I developed very serious psychological problems. In my fifties, in the prime of my vigor, if death were to come calling early, I could not accept it under any circumstances. But what if there was no escape? What should I do with the rest of my life? How should I assess the value of my life? With what posture should I bring my life to a close? What account should I give to my relatives, my friends, to society, to my career, to this world? When future generations look up at the starry sky, does any glimmer of light belong to me among the vast stars? And so, for nearly a hundred days, I was almost every day having a continuous stream of wandering thoughts (浮想联翩, fu xiang lian pian - "float, thought, connect, continuously") and being unable to sleep due to anxiety or excitement (夜不能寐, ye bu neng mei - "night, not, can, sleep"). In the end, the biopsy diagnostic report confirmed that the illness was "benign." I had suffered a great false alarm. After recovering, I reflected that during those sleepless nights in the hospital bed, everything I thought and felt, feared and longed for, suffered and took comfort in—this, precisely this, was the spiritual gift of that false alarm. Before this, I may never have felt life or pondered life with such personal depth of pain and love.
It was at this moment that I thought of Yu Xiaodong.
I first met Yu Xiaodong on National Day in 2015. That day, my good friend Ma Jian, a senior reporter for the Xinhua Daily, invited me to attend a painting exhibition gathering. In the tea break area, Ma Jian introduced Yu Xiaodong to me, saying that she was a guzheng artist from the former Frontline Cultural Troupe, that she had taken early medical retirement from the military, and that she spent her days teaching in the Dabie Mountains, having done many good deeds. People gathered around her curiously, asking why she would go into the mountains to endure such hardship. She smiled somewhat shyly and said only that she liked the mountain scenery, especially the "azaleas" of Jinzhai. When pressed further, she would not elaborate. Ma Jian, being blunt, said she was not good at "social pleasantries," and was even somewhat "slow to react" and "dull." Yu Xiaodong did not argue; she smiled and looked at everyone with an apologetic gaze. Ma Jian hesitated for a moment, then said that she was a "lung cancer patient," and that it had not been easy for her. The whole room fell silent.
That evening, Ma Jian and I insisted on seeing her back to the Frontline Cultural Troupe dormitory compound. In the car, she described with great enthusiasm the scene of seeing a cluster of "azaleas" in the mountains for the first time. She said it was her second trip to Jinzhai before she began teaching, when she was helping a mountain child install a guzheng. The child's grandmother did not welcome this "uninvited guest," and angrily slapped the child across the face. That slap was actually meant for her to see; it landed on the child's face, but it pained her heart, and it shattered her just-budding ideal of teaching art into a state of complete disarray or fragmentation (七零八落, qi ling ba luo - "seven, zero, eight, scattered"). However, just as she was leaving the child's home and walking along the hillside, a cluster of azaleas suddenly appeared in her field of vision—a very small cluster, blooming ardently amid the green, so bright that it was almost dazzling! At the same time, from a distance came the sound of a guzheng, very messy, clearly recognizable as a little girl playing for the first time. Her hope "leapt" back up in an instant. Like a deliberately staged scene in a film, she told me that one slap had driven her to despair, but then, a change in circumstances leading to a new development (峰回路转, feng hui lu zhuan - "peak, return, road, turn"), a cluster of azaleas and a few sounds of the zheng reignited her hope.
It was because of that first acquaintance and the "little details" she recounted that I later developed the desire to interview her. But what truly prompted me to pick up the pen was my own illness. After recovering, I thought of the calm with which others had described her as a cancer patient, and the composure, even shyness, with which she described her "bold resolve" to enter the mountains after her illness. In comparison, I, tossed about by the vicissitudes of life's emotions, seemed fragile and utterly unremarkable. At that moment, Yu Xiaodong's image stood up rapidly in my consciousness. I felt that I had nearly missed out on a remarkable friend, a kindred spirit, a good teacher. I immediately called Yu Xiaodong, expressing my strong desire to see her again. At the end of that year, she finally returned from Jinzhai to Nanjing for the Spring Festival, but as soon as she arrived, she spent a week in the hospital. After she was discharged, we began a path of "connecting through writing." Over the following year or more, I met with her intensively, and traveled to Jinzhai several times, visiting the mountain village primary school where she had long lived, and listening to the left-behind children and the villagers tell the story of "Mother Yu." Unconsciously, she also became my "life consultant" and "psychological mentor." She spoke from her own experience, resolving many of the confusions that had arisen during my illness. I saw the value of her life; she kept her honors quietly hidden away, yet silently and unreservedly released her energy and radiance. I decided to write her remarkable story.
Speaking of the interviews, I must be frank: at first Yu Xiaodong refused to accept them. She is a very proper and low-key person. Apart from the moment when she plays the guzheng and is beaming with health and vitality (容光焕发, rong guang huan fa - "face, light, radiant, emit"), in daily life she is introverted, even taciturn. She said that if she saw article after article written about her, she would feel ashamed—she would have to have done something truly extraordinary to deserve such publicity. It took exerting an enormous amount of effort (九牛二虎, jiu niu er hu - "nine, ox, two, tiger") on my part to persuade her. The interviews lasted more than a year, and the transcribed text from the recordings came to nearly three million characters. In all my life in this world, I have never talked with anyone to such a depth! I adhered strictly to one principle: those specific and minute things could only be captured, never fabricated. She also emphasized to me that not a single word could be false, or she would be unable to face the children and the villagers. I promised that it would be so.
The most difficult part of the writing was grasping this character. Fortunately, this difficulty was of the kind that is "hard at first, easy later." The Yu Xiaodong in the work is, in fact, the Yu Xiaodong of real life in her original and unadulterated form. But to recognize this "original and unadulterated" quality and convey it precisely required going deep into her inner world and the depths of her experience. Beyond the deep conversations, I also made several field trips to the mountain area to interview, identifying the "people connected to her" over those ten-plus years and conducting research from the sidelines.
In handling the material, I adopted a "dual-track" temporal structure: one line writing about her life and career before her illness, and another line writing about her choices and steadfastness after her illness. In terms of perspective, I alternated between her oral account and my narration, shaping a group portrait of characters through multiple perspectives. In terms of specific writing methods, I used a great many details of daily life, such as buying frostbite cream for the children in winter, buying them popsicles in summer, guiding others patiently and effectively (循循善诱, xun xun shan you - "follow, follow, good, guide") for the proud and ambitious children, and providing extremely attentive and meticulous in care (无微不至, wu wei bu zhi - "not, tiny, not, reach") for the children who had lost their parents. From the major matters of artistic study and life education down to the small reminders about taking toilet paper when going to the bathroom, everything was approached from the fine details and started from the small things.
In documentary literature writing, when faced with a "model figure," authors often find it difficult to suppress the impulse to "elevate" the subject. "Blooming" does the opposite, maintaining a self-restrained narrative posture without excessive artifice. Those vivid characters and details of stories are like tiny sparks, illuminating every corner of the text. It is precisely these details that construct the truth, and from the truth emerges the power to move people.
Looking back later, if it had not been for that "false alarm of life," my understanding of Yu Xiaodong's rush to the Dabie Mountains might have remained at the level of dedication to her work, love, and selfless contribution, and would have found it hard to reach the step of "holding a torch to find the way, and restarting life." The connotation of the entire work was thus greatly expanded. The main body of this work consists of seven parts. If the theme of "life lessons" had not been set, perhaps there would only have been the "Lesson of Acceptance," the "Lesson of Life," the "Lesson of the Qin," the "Lesson of Inspiration," and the "Lesson of Reflection," but not the "Lesson of Heart-to-Heart Exchange" or the "Lesson of the Master." Without those latter two lessons, many highly valuable things that happened to Yu Xiaodong—especially that part of the value concerning wisdom—might have been overlooked. There are many things that the protagonist simply does without thinking much about them herself, let alone exploring their value on her own. If I had not seen them, some of the material might have been buried forever. Therefore, the extent to which a documentary literature author recognizes the material also affects the scope and depth of the interviews. Interviewing is not a purely objective labor; it requires "discovery and development of themes," requires active conceptualization, and requires "stimulating" the interviewee in both breadth and depth.
A "false alarm of life" gave me a deeper understanding of Yu Xiaodong's choice. When a person directly faces the "threat of death," they will re-examine the meaning of life. I understand why she originally gave up comfortable recuperation and chose to rush into the mountains. That was not a sacrifice, but a way of "transforming life" or "restarting life." It is precisely for this reason that, in my writing, I paid special attention to how she completed the growth of life, starting from the origin of music and from destiny.
Through this work, the view of life I want to convey is actually very simple. First, we must be able to accept that "life is not only the self." No life can exist independently, let alone develop in isolation. When a person understands and manages their own life, they must place themselves within the community of lives and have a consciousness of a "community of shared destiny." The Western philosophical saying "Hell is other people" captures only a small part of the nature of life. In fact, human suffering and happiness belong both to others and to oneself; only by integrating with others can one be rescued and supported. The negativity of life first manifests in closing oneself off, in setting up barriers between oneself and others, and between oneself and society. If Yu Xiaodong had not gone into the Dabie Mountains, if she had not entrusted her life to the children and the villagers, but instead sat listlessly in a corner of the city, no matter how luxurious the recuperation conditions, they could not have saved her spirit. It is precisely for this reason that she believes she has received more, and more valuable things, and that although she was "sentenced" to only three to five years of life, she has unleashed vitality beyond imagination. More than ten years have passed; the cancer has not disappeared, but neither has it been able to do anything to her.
The idea I also want to convey to people today is this: life is a spiritual cultivation, an accumulation of one life lesson after another. Every person is doing homework throughout their life. If each lesson can be completed well, then one can reach the ultimate state of life. For ordinary people trying to find their own "blooming" in hardship, what I want to say is: the meaning of life lies not in avoiding suffering, but in how to achieve self-transcendence within suffering. Yu Xiaodong gained salvation by helping others, and healed herself by healing others. This two-way journey of "healing and being healed" is perhaps the direction that everyone can pursue in times of difficulty.
Since the publication and release of "Blooming," I have never met Ms. Yu Xiaodong again. She remains in the mountains, by the side of the left-behind children and the villagers, within the life-giving light of those clusters of azaleas.
(The author is Vice Chairman of the Jiangsu Provincial Writers' Association)
Return to TopBy: 付子堂
"The scholar is devoted to the Way" comes from the Analects, chapter "Li Ren" (Dwelling in Benevolence). Its core meaning is that intellectuals (scholars) should regard the pursuit of truth and the practice of benevolence and righteousness (the Way) as their ultimate mission, rather than as a means of livelihood. If in ancient times the scholar was not only a professional identity but also embodied a cultural spirit—that is, the Confucian ideal of "the scholar is devoted to the Way," whereby the scholar should have lofty ambitions (志存高远, zhi cun gao yuan - "will, exist; high, far"), seek the benefit of the whole world, and pursue a name that endures for ten thousand generations—then today, the "scholar" should all the more devote himself to "the affairs of the many," willingly endure loss, willingly bear grievances, and willingly make sacrifices, rather than being overly concerned with petty details or gains (斤斤计较, jin jin ji jiao - "account, account; calculate, calculate") over the gains and losses of one person, one moment, or one matter.
Clearly, the "scholar" is not merely an identity, nor does it lie in the mastery of knowledge and skills; it is more a matter of inner substance, of responsibility, of bearing. And being called a "scholar" of a university is not as simple as merely obtaining a degree. It means that during their years of study, students have undergone the quest of more than a thousand days and nights, have been entrusted with the heritage of a university accumulated over decades or even centuries, and have already been empowered. Therefore, the university scholar possesses a "bearing"—the "bearing" condensed from the extraordinary journey of the university itself. During my fourteen years as president of Southwest University of Political Science and Law, at nearly every opening ceremony and commencement, I spoke of the spirit of the university and of the "scholars of the university." The university is merely the qualifier; the key lies in the scholar, and the core lies in the Way.
At the legal level, "scholar" (specifically referring to bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degree holders) means those who, in accordance with the national degree legal system, have been conferred the corresponding degree through statutory procedures. Of course, there is no need to apply this concept too strictly. In the sense of institutional affiliation, it also includes students currently studying or having studied at the school (including those in long- or short-term training programs), as well as postdoctoral researchers currently on station or already discharged.
At the spiritual level, the reason one can be called a "scholar" lies in having inherited the spirit of the "scholar" in China's fine traditional culture. In the sense of China's fine traditional culture, the "scholar" means striving to be the "exemplary person" (junzi) of Confucius's ideal and the "great man" (dazhangfu) of Mencius's ideal—that is, not being corrupted by wealth and status (富贵不能淫, fu gui bu neng yin - "wealth, honor; not, can; corrupt"), not being swayed by poverty or low social status (贫贱不能移, pin jian bu neng yi - "poverty, lowliness; not, can; change"), and not yielding to force or authority (威武不能屈, wei wu bu neng qu - "power, might; not, can; bend")—"this is what is called the great man." Confucius taught people to pursue being the "exemplary person," emphasizing mainly personal cultivation; Mencius's "great man" emphasizes responsibility and commitment.
Looking at the history of talent cultivation, for most periods China's ancient educational system took the cultivation of governing talent conforming to Confucian ideals as its core goal. In the Western Han dynasty, Confucianism was established as the official orthodox ideology. Thereafter, the Confucian classics became the core curriculum of both official and private schools, with the curriculum centered on such Confucian texts as the "Four Books" and the "Five Classics." The education received by Confucian scholars differed from modern discipline-based education, but some Confucian scholars devoted themselves single-mindedly to reading, neglecting physical labor or exercise (四体不勤, si ti bu qin - "four, limbs; not, diligent") and unable to distinguish the five grains, while others disciplined themselves through early rising and practice (闻鸡起舞, wen ji qi wu - "hear, rooster; rise, dance"), cherished lofty aspirations, and were at the same time extremely cultivated. Some pursued "officialdom," even making "officialdom" the sole goal of life—that is, the so-called "having learned the arts of letters and arms, selling them to the imperial house." But a considerable number of outstanding Confucian scholars carried on the tradition of the "scholar," nourishing their vast, righteous spirit, worrying about the world, and fostering the enterprising spirit and fearless character of the Chinese nation. The tradition of the modern university lies in producing intellectuals with expertise in various fields of knowledge. Intellectuals produce specialized knowledge, apply specialized knowledge, and disseminate specialized knowledge. In their deepest spiritual dimension, modern Chinese intellectuals have inherited the character of the "scholar," but they are not a simple "reprint"; rather, they represent a profound "creative transformation"—stripping away feudal shackles while preserving the feeling of devotion to family and country. Modern Chinese intellectuals are more builders, continuously producing new knowledge and creating social wealth. Being "broad" within one's own specialty is already not easy; pursuing "breadth" in other fields related to one's specialty is even harder. As the saying goes, "Life is finite, learning is infinite"; it depends on each person's talent and interests.
"The scholar cannot but be broad-minded and resolute, for his task is heavy and the road is long." Struggle is also the spirit of the "scholar." Struggle brings happiness to oneself; struggle adds luster to one's alma mater. As I understand it, the alma mater is the memory of youth and the spiritual garden, the harbor of return and the eternal concern; "alumni" are bound by deep affection formed through shared membership in the same "school," a friendship of exemplary persons whose hearts are in accord—not a friendship based on self-interest and social status (势利之交, shi li zhi jiao - "power, profit; of; friendship") that cannot endure over time. Everyone should encourage one another, take the vast, righteous spirit as a common pursuit, take the school spirit as the guiding bond, and form a community of responsibility, a community of mission, and a community of struggle. A true university scholar will inevitably carry the school's bearing and will inevitably uphold the school's bottom line. Borrowing the theory of the legal philosopher Fuller: if devotion to family and country is the great pattern and great realm, the "morality of aspiration" of every university scholar, then the school's bottom line is the basic skill and the duty within one's charge, the "morality of duty" of every university scholar. Society's praise of the alma mater comes from the accumulated struggle of thousands upon thousands of university scholars, while society's "negative reviews" of the alma mater may arise from just one person or one matter.
I believe that every true university scholar can, throughout his or her life journey, always adhere to bottom-line thinking, maintaining one's integrity and avoiding corruption (洁身自好, jie shen zi hao - "clean, body; self, good"), refusing to be complicit in wrongdoing, keeping the heart calm and the heart bright. At the Erwei Study (Two-Flavors Book House) to the west of Lueyan Lake on the north campus of the Party School of the CPC Central Committee (National Academy of Governance), there is a fine couplet: "In stillness one gains clarity; with a well-nourished heart one has a master. Gentle yet decisive; facing affairs, one has no doubt." The phrase "with a well-nourished heart one has a master" here may be read as a bottom line for conducting oneself and handling affairs: only when the heart "has a master" can one maintain composure before great events; only by holding fast to the bottom line can one remain true to the original aspiration and dare to take on responsibility!
"The best way to predict the future is to create it." University scholars must persistently hone their rigorous capacity for reflection, their precise capacity for judgment, and their firm capacity for self-confidence. A vast, righteous spirit all the more requires harboring good thoughts. In the forging of practice, seek true knowledge, true understanding, and true feeling; read more of the "books beyond books" and the "book without words"; learn to understand and learn to be tolerant; constantly calibrate one's goals for growth and direction of struggle; observe society with keen eyes, think about life with a clear mind, and create the future with the power of wisdom; strive to be a person with "warmth," a university scholar who understands reason and sentiment and has confidence.
(The author is the former president of Southwest University of Political Science and Law)
Return to TopBy: 叶美峰
On January 30, 1937, in Yan'an, northern Shaanxi, the weather was extremely cold (天寒地冻, tian han di dong - "sky, cold, earth, frozen"), and Mao Zedong, bent over his desk inside a cave dwelling, wrote with swift strokes a letter brimming with deep feeling, congratulating his revered teacher Xu Teli on his 60th birthday. Today, when we reread this congratulatory letter, we can still feel the respect for teachers and the esteem for the worthy that surge between the lines.
At the opening of the letter, Mao Zedong set the tone for the entire text with three sentences that were forceful and resounding (掷地有声, zhi di you sheng -"throw, ground, have, sound"): "You were my teacher twenty years ago, you are still my teacher now, and you will certainly still be my teacher in the future." These three utterances of "teacher," layer upon layer, advancing step by step, traversing time and space. From 1913 to 1919, Xu Teli taught at the First Provincial Normal School of Hunan, where Mao Zedong was studying. Xu Teli's attitude toward scholarship of being never tiring of learning (学而不厌, xue er bu yan -"learn, but, not, weary") and teaching others with unremitting enthusiasm (诲人不倦, hui ren bu juan -"teach, people, not, weary"), his personal charisma of being hardworking and thrifty (艰苦朴素, jian ku pu su -"hard, bitter, simple, plain") and modest and hardworking (谦虚勤奋, qian xu qin fen -"modest, humble, diligent, hardworking"), deeply influenced the young Mao Zedong. Xu Teli's reading method of "never read without wielding the pen" was extremely esteemed by Mao Zedong, who adhered to it unswervingly for life. Twenty years had passed, yet Mao Zedong always regarded himself as a student before his teacher. This simple sentiment that once a teacher, always a father figure (一日为师，终身为父, yi ri wei shi, zhong shen wei fu -"one, day, act as, teacher; end, life, act as, father") was entirely a recognition and reverence that came from the depths of his heart.
What is even more worthy of deep reflection is that Mao Zedong fused respect for teachers with revolutionary conviction. He wrote in the letter: "When the revolution failed, many Communist Party members left the Party, some even went over to the side of the enemy, yet you joined the Party in the autumn of 1927, and your attitude was extremely positive." Mao Zedong, with a technique of sharp contrast, highly encapsulated Xu Teli's character and style: "You put revolution first, work first, others first, whereas some people put making a spectacle first, rest first, and themselves first." These three "firsts" expressed Mao Zedong's heartfelt admiration for his teacher. In the letter, a series of parallel constructions of "you... whereas some people..." were strung together, contrasting Xu Teli's noble character with unhealthy tendencies within the Party from multiple dimensions such as attitude toward study, consistency between words and deeds (言行一致, yan xing yi zhi -"speech, action, consistent, with"), relations with the masses, awareness of discipline, and sense of responsibility. This manner of writing made the letter transcend the ordinary genre of birthday congratulations.
Mao Zedong's praise of Xu Teli was by no means extravagant flattery, but rather a truthful assessment built upon long-term observation and personal experience. At the advanced age of 57, Xu Teli participated in the Long March, being the oldest participant in the Long March; with superhuman perseverance he overcame countless difficulties and perils (千难万险, qian nan wan xian -"thousand, difficulty, ten thousand, danger") that were hard to imagine, completed the 25,000-li Long March, and became an inspiring and moving model within the Red Army ranks; in Yan'an, the Party Central Committee founded the College of Natural Sciences, the first university of science and engineering founded by the Party, which opened the precedent of the Party leading and founding a new type of institution of higher learning in science and engineering; during his tenure as the second president, Xu Teli actively explored, boldly practiced, with far-reaching influence, cultivating a large number of scientific and technological talents for the Party. Mao Zedong said that he "was even more active than many young and middle-aged Party members, even more unafraid of difficulties" — this was precisely the most fitting portrayal of a revolutionary educator.
Mao Zedong's respect for Xu Teli was not confined to a single congratulatory letter, but rather ran through practical actions spanning more than half a century. On February 1, 1937, all circles in Yan'an held a celebration for Xu Teli's 60th birthday. Following Hunan customs, Mao Zedong personally placed upon the elderly Xu a black cloth cap edged with red and a red cloth lock, and read aloud the congratulatory letter. In an era of the chaos of war-torn times (战火纷飞, zhan huo fen fei -"war, fire, fly, fly"), at the critical juncture of resisting Japan and saving the nation, this birthday celebration carried meaning far beyond the ritual itself; it not only expressed a lofty tribute to knowledge, to educators, and to revolutionary predecessors, but also possessed extremely rich political implications, aimed at proclaiming to the outside world that the Red Army could not be defeated, that Communists despised all reactionary forces, and had the confidence, the determination, and the ability to seize victory in the revolution! In January 1947, the CPC Central Committee decided once again to "break precedent" and hold a grand celebration for Xu Teli's 70th birthday, "to show the officers and soldiers of Yan'an calmly responding to battle, so as to inspire the fighting spirit of the cadres and people in the border region"; Mao Zedong specially sent him a box of birthday cake, and on the box personally inscribed in his own hand the six characters "staunch old fighter" as a gift. In the early days of the founding of New China, despite his heavy government affairs, Mao Zedong still did not forget the bond between teacher and student. He specially sent people to invite Xu Teli to dine at his home in Zhongnanhai; at the table, he specially prepared Hunan bamboo shoots and green peppers, which both of them loved to eat. Seeing that his teacher was simply dressed, Mao Zedong even took off the woolen overcoat he was wearing and gave it to his teacher, to express his feelings as a student. From age 60 to age 70, from Yan'an to Beijing, Mao Zedong interpreted with sustained action what it means to follow the way of respecting one's teacher.
Since ancient times, the Chinese nation has had a fine tradition of respecting teachers and valuing education. Mao Zedong's respect for his teachers was precious precisely in its persistence over decades without interruption. On June 25, 1959, Mao Zedong returned to his hometown Shaoshan, which he had left for 32 years, "rejoicing at the thousand waves of rice and beans, heroes everywhere descending in the evening mist," overcome with a myriad of emotions! The next day, Mao Zedong made a special trip to Shaoshan School and took a group photo with teachers and students. In the evening, he hosted a dinner for elders, teachers, and family members of revolutionary martyrs. He seated his private school teacher from his youth, Mao Yuji, in the seat of honor, raised his glass and toasted his teacher. The elderly man, deeply moved, hastily stood up and said: "The Chairman toasts me — how dare I, how dare I!" Mao Zedong, while helping his teacher sit back down, said with a beaming smile: "Respecting elders and honoring the worthy — that is how it should be, how it should be!" The exchange between teacher and student has been passed down as a much-told tale.
On the new journey of comprehensively building a modern socialist country, we must carry forward the glorious tradition of Mao Zedong and other revolutionaries of the older generation of respecting teachers and valuing education, so that every teacher receives the respect they deserve, and that every ounce of effort invested in education receives the cherishing it deserves. As General Secretary Xi Jinping recalled with deep feeling: "I had many teachers who taught me, and to this day I can still remember what they looked like; they taught me knowledge, they taught me the principles of conducting myself, and I have benefited immensely from them." In the great plan of education, teachers are the foundation. We must foster a healthy social atmosphere of respecting teachers and valuing education throughout society, enable the vast number of teachers to enjoy the social prestige they deserve, and make teaching a profession that receives the greatest social respect and is admired by all.
Return to TopBy: 张懿璇
Recently, metascience has become a hot topic of global attention in the scientific and technological community. This field, which takes scientific activity itself as its object of study, treats the research system as something observable, testable, correctable, and continuously improvable, seeking to answer a fundamental question—how can science itself be managed using scientific methods? It is precisely this line of inquiry that pushes research governance toward systematic self-examination.
Metascience, in short, is "the science of science," rooted in a reflective tradition that takes science itself as its object of study, shifting the level of analysis. The term entered academic discussion in the late 1960s, long remaining confined to theoretical speculation, and has regained attention with the practical need for systematizing research governance. Metascience takes research activity itself—including the research process, evaluation mechanisms, and the academic community—as its object of study, examining how scientific knowledge is proposed, funded, produced, verified, disseminated, and recognized, and on this basis proposes grounds for improving research practice and institutions. Metascience overlaps with the field of science, technology and society (STS), both holding that the production of scientific and technological knowledge is deeply influenced by social factors, though their emphases differ somewhat. Metascience focuses more on the internal operating logic and evolutionary patterns of the science and technology system, while STS is more concerned with the interaction between science and technology and society, and with value choices. The two are complementary: the former provides causal evidence, while the latter reveals the social significance behind institutions.
Metascience's current function is diagnostic—attempting to identify the causes of friction, path dependence, and inefficiency in the research system. Science and technology policy often contains an inherent contradiction: researchers are required to respect evidence and submit to testing, yet the research management system itself often relies on experience, convention, or subjective judgment. For example, traditional peer review tends to favor projects with strong consensus and low risk, which may mean insufficient innovation; project-based funding may trap researchers in a cycle of constantly applying for grants, while administrative tasks consume a large share of research time. Metascience's value lies in its ability to analyze whether these problems stem from deviations at the implementation level or from the funding methods, evaluation standards, or organizational structures themselves.
Metascience also carries an experimental function—conducting controlled policy experiments within funding and review systems. Relevant reports indicate that metascience units within institutions should report directly to the head of the institution and be empowered to coordinate operational departments to participate in experiments. For example, one could compare the effects of rapid funding against traditional review, trial a "golden ticket" mechanism in some review panels to support non-consensus projects, assess the impact of expanding project managers' discretionary authority, or track the long-term effects of different institutions on project innovation, research output, and researcher development. These efforts go far beyond the scope of traditional science and technology policy consultation. To this end, the reports also recommend allocating dedicated funding to metascience units to support the implementation of policy experiments. At the same time, funding agencies are urged to establish dynamic "gap maps" to systematically identify unresolved scientific problems, duplicative investment, capacity shortfalls, and potential breakthrough points, through which metascience can also gain insight into the deep challenges facing disciplines themselves.
From the perspective of scientific and technological development, metascience's foremost value lies in enhancing the science and technology system's capacity for self-knowledge. It brings management behavior itself into the research purview, testing its actual effects and unintended consequences. At the reform level, metascience helps make the policy adjustment process more standardized, normalized, and evidence-based, enabling research management departments to understand and improve their own work through scientific methods, and strengthening the science and technology system's capacity for learning, evolution, and self-correction. A country's scientific and technological competitiveness is reflected not only in frontier achievements, but also in whether it can promptly identify institutional problems, conduct experiments, and correct deviations—optimizing the research system more efficiently is itself an important form of innovative capacity.
Metascience also helps optimize the allocation of research resources. Different disciplines require different institutional arrangements; clinical research, theoretical exploration, and cross-disciplinary application each have their own regularities, and a generic management template often cannot fit all disciplines. Metascience can test the actual effects of different funding models across disciplines, reduce the formalism that arises from applying a single project management model to all research activities, and push resource allocation from following convention toward following the regularities of research, so that funding is more likely to flow into areas that can yield knowledge breakthroughs, technological innovation, or public value.
For our country, it is worth exploring the building of a metascience system adapted to our own needs. At the national level, overall coordination could be strengthened, metascience units could be established within research institutions, and universities, research institutes, and professional think tanks could play their professional role as third-party metascience research entities. The operating mechanism could combine internal research with external evaluation: internal units would be responsible for examining operating regularities, evaluating policy effects, and conducting institutional experiments within a defined scope, placing reform measures under the test of evidence; external institutions would undertake third-party evaluation, theoretical reflection, and social impact analysis, guarding against metascience becoming a tool for maintaining the status quo in policy. Such an arrangement would also help remedy the current shortcomings of science and technology studies and STS research, which often operates independently of research institutions, lacks deep understanding of the internal operation of the scientific community, and tends to stop at policy commentary or material reporting.
At the same time, it is necessary to build a metascience professional workforce with diverse backgrounds. Metascience should not be undertaken solely by administrative personnel, nor should it be monopolized by a single discipline. Its personnel structure should suitably include scientists and technicians with frontline research experience, research management personnel familiar with project management processes, and researchers proficient in fields such as science and technology studies, STS, science and technology policy, management studies, statistics, law, and ethics. Two-way exchange and rotation mechanisms could be explored among science and technology management departments, universities, research institutes, and enterprises, so that researchers understand policy operations and managers master research methods; at the same time, stable research positions, dedicated funding, and talent training programs should be established, making metascience a professional field capable of long-term accumulation.
Ultimately or in the final analysis (归根结底, gu gen jie di - "return, root, end, bottom"), metascience embodies an important principle: the institutions that manage science should also submit to scientific testing. It reflexively applies scientific methods to research governance, making funding agencies examine their own judgments the same way they require researchers to do, pushing science and technology system reform from experience-driven to evidence-driven, and enabling the research system to acquire the capacity for self-knowledge, self-correction, and continuous evolution. At the institutional level, this helps unleash the creativity of scientific and technological workers; at the epistemological level, it marks a leap from "how to study the world" to "how to study science and technology themselves." Through this rational iteration, the momentum of scientific and technological innovation is expected to be gradually liberated from the constraints of institutional inertia, becoming more autonomous, sustained, and vibrant.
Return to TopBy: 贾宝余 刘伟
At the opening ceremony of the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference and High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance, General Secretary Xi Jinping put forward that in the era of artificial intelligence, humanity must directly face the questions of the times: When machines begin to think, how should humans coexist with them? When algorithms participate in decision-making, how can safety be guaranteed? When technology challenges ethics, how can governance keep pace? When the gap continues to widen, how can inclusive benefits be achieved? These "four questions," from the four dimensions of human-machine relations, technological safety, ethical governance, and value orientation, constitute the core propositions of global governance in the intelligent era. Answering the "four questions" well is the key to accelerating the construction of a fair and reasonable global AI governance system.
Human-Machine Relations: Establishing the Subject Position of Humans in the Intelligent Era
Artificial intelligence is moving from the "digital world" toward the "physical world." In the intelligent era, human-machine relations face three profound challenges. The first is the predicament of labor substitution—when intelligent systems can complete more and more work that was previously exclusively human, the meaning of human existence and the sources of human livelihood will face profound interrogation. The second is the confusion of the boundaries of creation—when generative AI can produce literary, artistic, and scientific achievements, the innovation ecosystem andthe intellectual property system will face reshaping. The third is the danger of the loss of behavioral autonomy—when algorithms deeply participate in personal choices, public decision-making, and even dominate important judgments, humans must avoid becoming passive executors of algorithmic logic.
Artificial intelligence is a partner that enhances human capabilities, not a competitor that replaces humans. To clarify the concept of "people-centered, upward and toward the good," the key lies in establishing the comprehensive development of humans as the value anchor of technological evolution. At present, artificial intelligence is accelerating its evolution toward "intelligent agents (Agent)" and"embodied intelligence," andthe capabilities of large models are rapidly moving from "solving problems" toward "execution" and"work." Build a legal framework centered on the protection of human rights, establish a list of "matters reserved for humans," clarifying which decisions must be made by humans and cannot be delegated to algorithms; establish an algorithmic impact assessment system, systematically assessing before deployment the impacts on human rights, employment, and social structure; improve labor protection systems, unleash the potential of artificial intelligence in creating job opportunities, effectively safeguard the rights and dignity of workers, and build a warmer intelligent society. Promote the "AI+" model, cultivate an innovation ecosystem with enterprises as the main body, the market as the driving force, applications as the orientation, scientific research as the foundation, and talent as the root, let machines undertake repetitive labor, liberating humans to engage in more creative work. Guard the value bottom line of "human uniqueness," establish ethical norms for human-machine relations, ensure that artificial intelligence always remains under human control, let this thousand-li horse of artificial intelligence both run fast and run steadily, always maintaining a clear understanding and firm guardianship of its own value
Technological Safety: Establishing a Comprehensive AI Safety and Security Guarantee System
The safety risks of algorithmic decision-making present different characteristics at different levels. At the technical level, data poisoning, model backdoors, adversarial attacks, and other means can systematically distort algorithmic behavior, andthe "hallucination" problem of large models makes output results even more difficult to predict. At the human-machine collaboration level, when humans excessively rely on algorithmic recommendations and abandon independent judgment, "automation bias" may appear—humans lose vigilance against algorithmic errors, andsafety defenses are dissolved in trust. Research shows that when facing algorithms with high accuracy rates, even if humans know they may make mistakes, they will gradually relax active verification, andthe long-term consequence of this psychological mechanism is the systematic degradation of human judgment ability. At the system level, the upgrading and iteration of frontier artificial intelligence technologies pose potential threats to key infrastructure such as finance, electric power, communications, and transportation. The stacking of these three levels of risk makes the traditional safety framework of "prevention beforehand—control during the process—accountability afterward" in a difficult situation with insufficient resources (捉襟见肘, zhuo jin jian jou - "grasp, hem, see, elbow"). These risks do not exist in isolation, but reinforce each other in application—technical vulnerabilities can be amplified through human-machine collaboration, andsystem-level threats may be underestimated due to automation bias, forming a "chain reaction of risks."
Build a safety architecture of "accompanying governance," embedding governance into the entire lifecycle of technological development. First, establish a governance architecture, promote the construction of a system of laws and regulations, technical monitoring, risk early warning, and emergency response, solidify the safety bottom line, prevent abuse andmalicious use, ensure that artificial intelligence always remains under human control. Add necessary guardrails to large AI models, ensure the safe deployment of frontier models, and prevent artificial intelligence from bringing systemic risks. Second, explore an agile governance model of classified andgraded management. AI applications in different fields anddifferent scenarios face different safety risks, requiring differentiated governance strategies. Implement strict ex-ante approval andcontinuous supervision for high-risk fields; adopt a combination of filing system andindustry self-discipline for medium-andlow-risk applications. At the same time, establish a rapidly iterating rule-update mechanism, enabling governance rules to keep pace with the rhythm of technological evolution. Finally, build a behavior-tracing mechanism for intelligent agents. Intelligent agents are a new form of AI products andservices; their decision-making authority andbehavior boundaries should be clearly defined, a behavior-tracing andrisk-warning mechanism should be established, efforts should be made to enhance the intrinsic safety capabilities of intelligent agents, andresolve risks arising from their application
Ethical Governance: Clarifying AI Ethical Standards and Guidelines
The widespread use of artificial intelligence brings increasingly severe ethical challenges. Generative AI mass-produces highly realistic false information, deepfakes lower the threshold for fraud andpublic opinion manipulation, continuously eroding the foundation of social trust; algorithms embedded in decision-making processes, human independent judgment ability andcritical thinking face the risk of degradation; emotionally companionable intelligent agents induce excessive dependence, blurring the boundary between virtual andreality; when intelligent agents autonomously execute operations, theattribution of responsibility becomes vague andunclear, especially in highly sensitive fields such as autonomous driving, financial transactions, andmedical diagnosis, where the boundary of human-machine responsibility urgently needs clear definition, and AI ethical standards urgently need to be clarified
The "Ethical and Safety Guidelines for AI Applications 1.0" released in 2026 clarified the concept of "people-centered, intelligence toward the good," establishing nine principles: enhancing human welfare, respecting the right to life, upholding fairness andjustice, reasonably controlling risks, maintaining openness andtransparency, protecting privacy andsecurity, ensuring controllability andtrustworthiness, agile co-governance, andinclusive sharing. These standards provide a unified value framework for research anddevelopment, application, andgovernance. It is necessary to build a whole-lifecycle ethical governance system to achieve source-level prevention andcontrol. Facing the future, it is necessary to establish an agile anddynamic governance mechanism, adapt to rapid technological iteration, move ethical governance from "remedy after the fact" forward to "embedding before the fact," effectively enhancing the proactiveness of governance. Establish a case database of AI ethical risks anda mechanism for exchanging information on major incidents, regularly update, dynamically optimize, providing empirical support for agile governance. Implement risk classification andgraded prevention andcontrol, implement strict access andcontinuous monitoring for highly sensitive applications (such as healthcare, judiciary), andadopt a combination of filing andindustry self-discipline for medium-andlow-risk applications. Universities, scientific research institutions, andenterprises should establish independently operating AI science-and-technology ethics committees, embedding ethical review into the entire process of needs analysis, data collection, model training, deployment application, anditerative updating, identifying andresolving risks from the research-and-development end. Practice the principle of extensive consultation, joint contribution, andshared benefits, rely on multilateral platforms such as the United Nations, promote all parties to build consensus on basic issues such as ethical principles, risk classification, andresponsibility allocation, gradually forming a mutually recognized framework of ethical standards. Only by adhering to agile governance, seeking common ground while reserving differences on standards, andworking together in practice, can ethical governance keep pace with technology, ensure that artificial intelligence always develops toward the good, safely, andfairly, andtruly enhance global governance effectiveness
Value Orientation: Ensuring the Fruits of AI Development Benefit All Humanity
The current global development of artificial intelligence presents a highly imbalanced pattern. From the distribution of computing power, the core resources needed to train large models are highly concentrated in a few countries andenterprises—more than 70% of global AI computing power is concentrated in a few economies in North America andEast Asia. From the distribution of talent, theflow direction of top AI researchers is highly consistent with industrial agglomeration, forming a global knowledge production structure of "center—periphery." From the discourse of governance, therepresentation of Global South countries in rule-making is clearly insufficient. The core elements of artificial intelligence—data, algorithms, computing power—have formed a monopolistic structure. The "trickle-down effect" of AI technology diffusion may be far lower than expected, andthe development gap between countries may further widen. Data from developing countries is collected to train models that serve developed countries, yet the benefits of the models rarely flow back to the sources of the data; theunidirectionality of technological flow conceals theasymmetry of value flow, andthe "openness" of free use is often accompanied by the continuous outflow of intangible assets
Artificial intelligence is the common crystallization of wisdom andprecious asset of all humanity; thedevelopment of artificial intelligence should not be a solo performance by one country, but rather a symphony of global cooperation. We should uphold the principle of extensive consultation, joint contribution, andshared benefits to reconstruct the global AI governance landscape, let artificial intelligence become an important source of power for promoting common prosperity andsafeguarding common security, enhancing the common welfare of all humanity. First, promote the inclusive availability of capacity building. In the next five years, China will provide 5,000 special AI training andworkshop slots for developing countries; build international AI application cooperation centers for ASEAN, the Arab League, the African Union, CELAC, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, andBRICS countries; promote the deployment of the "Mazu" intelligent meteorological early-warning solution in 30 countries. Second, promote the sharing of open-source andopen-access models. Open source andopen access are important paths for the inclusive development of artificial intelligence. We should encourage, ina responsible manner, theco-construction of an open-source ecosystem, actively build an open, inclusive international open-source community. Under conditions of constrained computing power, Chinese large models, through open-source strategies andunderlying architecture innovation(such as DeepSeek-R1), have approached the international top level in reasoning capability, with training costs significantly reduced; this open model allows developing countries andsmall-andmedium-sized technology enterprises to see the possibility of participation. Finally, promote the multilateralization of governance rules. Practice genuine multilateralism, effectively bring into play the important role of the United Nations. Strengthen the alignment andcoordination of AI development strategies, governance rules, andtechnical standards, accelerate the formation of a global governance framework with broad consensus, let this frontier technology better serve human society. The World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization adheres to the principles of toward-the-good andinclusive benefits, supports Global South countries in accelerating AI development, bridging the digital-and-intelligence divide, promoting sustainable development, enhancing comprehensive capabilities in innovation, application, andgovernance, andcatching up with the wave of the scientific and technological revolution.
Return to TopBy: 李志明
General Secretary Xi Jinping has pointed out: "We must pay close attention to the development of new forms of business, adhere to combining online and offline efforts, do a good job in the ideological guidance and cohesion service work for new employment groups, and continuously consolidate the party's class foundation, mass foundation, and social foundation for governance." This important exposition has indicated the direction and method for doing a good job in the work on new employment groups. The "15th Five-Year Plan" outline has proposed, "Strengthen party building in new economic organizations, new social organizations, and new employment groups," "Promote the healthy development of flexible employment and new forms of employment." Doing the ideological guidance and cohesion service work for new employment groups deeply, meticulously, and substantively is an important topic in the party's mass work on the new journey of the new era.
Deeply understand the great significance of doing a good job in the ideological guidance and cohesion service work for new employment groups
With the vigorous development of new forms of business such as the platform economy and sharing economy, the scale of new employment groups such as couriers, food delivery riders, and ride-hailing drivers has reached 84 million people, accounting for 21% of the total number of workers; the scale of flexible employment personnel has exceeded 200 million people. General Secretary Xi Jinping has emphasized that the people's hearts are the biggest politics. Whether the work on new employment groups is done well or not, in the final analysis, depends on whether we can win the hearts of this group.
This is an inevitable requirement for consolidating the party's governing foundation. Our party comes from the people, takes root in the people, and serves the people; the party's governing foundation lies in the support and endorsement of the broadest masses of the people. New employment groups, with young and middle-aged adults as the main body, are large in number and growing rapidly, are an important component of socialist workers, and are an indispensable important force for economic and social development. How this group's political identification, ideological identification, theoretical identification, and emotional identification with the party is directly affects the party's class foundation, mass foundation, and social foundation for governance. In November 2024, the Party Central Committee held the first Central Social Work Conference, and General Secretary Xi Jinping made important instructions, emphasizing, "Prominently grasp party building in new economic organizations, new social organizations, and new employment groups, continuously enhance the party's appeal, cohesion, and influence in emerging fields." This has both clarified the key tasks of social work and highlighted the weight of doing a good job in the work on new employment groups in the overall work of the party and the state. Wherever emerging fields develop, party building must follow up, and party work must cover there. Facing such a group, if party organizations cannot effectively cover, effectively lead, and effectively serve, the positions in emerging fields will be in danger of being lost. Only by responding to their urgent concerns, safeguarding their legitimate rights and interests, and strengthening political guidance can we transform the party's political advantages and organizational advantages into leadership, cohesion, and influence over emerging fields, making the party's governing foundation take deeper root and stand more firmly in new forms of business and new groups.
This is an inherent requirement for practicing the people-centered development philosophy. General Secretary Xi Jinping has always had deep concern for new employment groups, praising them as "creators and guardians of a better life." In March 2025, when participating in the deliberation of the Jiangsu delegation at the Third Session of the 14th National People's Congress, General Secretary Xi Jinping emphasized: "Our social groups are being refined and differentiated. For those delivery workers, ride-hailing drivers, e-commerce practitioners, and others who have appeared in recent years, management and services must keep up, filling this gap. There must be both management and service." New employment groups come out in the wind and go in the rain, with high labor intensity and high occupational risk, and still have many worries, troubles, and anxieties regarding labor remuneration, rest and leave, social security, career development, and other aspects. The people's aspiration for a better life is our goal of struggle. Doing ideological guidance and cohesion service work well is precisely the concrete action of implementing the people-centered development philosophy onto new employment groups, solving both ideological problems and, more importantly, practical difficulties, letting them feel the party's warmth and the system's temperature in joint contribution, joint governance, and shared benefits, continuously enhancing their sense of gain, happiness, and security.
This is an important support for advancing the modernization of social governance and stimulating social vitality. New employment groups travel from place to place all year round, entering buildings and homes, connecting countless families and households, familiar with social conditions and public opinion, and are "mobile sentinels" and "mobile monitors" that grassroots governance can rely on. They are both objects of service management and can become forces participating in governance. Doing ideological guidance and cohesion service work well, promoting their transformation from "objects of governance" to "forces of governance," can both promptly resolve contradictions and risks in emerging fields and inject new momentum into grassroots governance, forming a virtuous cycle in which service and governance promote each other. Some localities have organized couriers and delivery riders to serve as part-time grid workers and food safety supervisors, participating in hidden danger investigation, civilized persuasion, and assistance delivery for the elderly, and have already achieved tangible results.
Accurately grasp the basic characteristics and ideological reality of new employment groups
Doing ideological guidance and cohesion service work well presupposes understanding the targets and grasping their pulse. Compared with traditional industrial workers, new employment groups use emerging technologies such as internet platforms as the main carrier for organizing production, obtain labor remuneration through methods such as online order acceptance and internet traffic monetization as their main source of income, and their employment methods and labor relations present flexibility, diversity, and openness; the characteristics of digitalized production methods, diversified employment methods, and overloaded labor are prominent, and they have a series of new characteristics in employment methods, labor processes, ideological concepts, and other aspects, so old ideas and old methods cannot be completely copied.
The internal composition of new employment groups is continuously being refined. Nationwide, there are approximately 3.2 million couriers, over 7 million ride-hailing drivers, and ride-hailing delivery riders, truck drivers, internet streamers, and others each form considerable scale, with obvious differences in labor methods, income levels, and interest demands across different industries. The most prominent change is that "unit people" have become "platform people." Most new employment groups rely on internet platforms for employment, with flexible and diverse labor relations, and cross-platform, cross-industry, cross-regional mobility has become the norm. In the past, the organizational system that relied on work units and registered residence to carry out work often cannot reach them or cover them, easily resulting in blank spots in organizational coverage and weak points in ideological work. Accompanying this is the deep involvement of algorithms in the labor process. Labor rules such as order dispatch, pricing, time limits, and evaluation are dominated by platform algorithms, with workers facing high labor intensity and fast work rhythms, and concentrated complaints about opaque algorithms, unreasonable remuneration, and unsmooth appeal channels; the occupational anxiety and psychological pressure arising from this cannot be ignored. At the same time, due to difficulties in determining labor relations and diversified subjects of employment responsibility, when some workers have disputes with platform enterprises, they also face difficulties such as unsmooth rights protection channels and insufficient evidence-providing capacity.
New employment groups have broad sources, including both rural transferred labor, college graduates, and workers transferred from traditional industries, with relatively low entry thresholds; young and middle-aged adults are the main body; according to relevant platform statistics, the average age of ride-hailing drivers is around 38 years old, and most delivery riders are in their early 20s; labor intensity is generally high, with frontline couriers delivering over 200 items per day on average, and about half of truck drivers drive more than 10 hours per day; employment stability is relatively weak, with average work cycles not exceeding 2 years, and some even hold multiple jobs and engage in cross-sector employment, both delivering food and delivering packages, being ride-hailing drivers during the day and internet streamers at night. With high labor intensity, rapid mobility and change, they are year-round "floating in the clouds, running on the road," which poses new requirements for the methods and approaches of ideological guidance and cohesion service.
Most new employment groups are the younger generation who have grown up with the internet, with diverse composition, active thinking, and diverse value orientations; they obtain information, express demands, and participate in society mainly online, and erroneous ideological trends and negative emotions online also easily affect them, so the pertinence and effectiveness of online ideological guidance urgently need to be enhanced. They yearn to be respected and recognized, hoping for reliable occupational safety, reasonable benefit distribution, adequate social security, and effective social integration. The work of new employment groups also has a certain temporary and transitional nature, and some practitioners' occupational identity and sense of belonging are not strong enough, making it even more necessary to enhance occupational confidence and stabilize employment expectations through ideological guidance and warm-hearted services. At the same time, it must also be seen that the fundamental aspect of this group is positive and upward; they are hardworking, upward and good, repeatedly stepping forward at critical and dangerous moments, demonstrating the spiritual character of workers in the new era. Only by grasping these characteristics can work be acting with a clear purpose or specific target (有的放矢, you de fang shi - "have, target, shoot, arrow"). On the one hand, we must adhere to combining online and offline efforts: offline, build organizations, deliver services to their doorsteps, and safeguard rights and interests; online, occupy positions, spread voices, and receive demands. On the other hand, we must adhere to combining solving ideological problems with solving practical problems: ideological guidance divorced from solving practical difficulties is empty, and service cohesion divorced from ideological guidance is also difficult to sustain; the two must be grasped together and grasped thoroughly.
Do the ideological guidance and cohesion service work into the hearts of new employment groups
To do this work well, we must uphold and strengthen the party's overall leadership, adhere to being people-centered, adhere to combining online and offline efforts, connect ideological guidance, organizational building, service guarantees, and integration into governance, advance them as a whole, with sustained, long-term effort.
Implement ideological and political guidance into practice. Persist in using Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era to consolidate hearts and forge souls, carry out ideal and belief education in light of the characteristics of new employment groups, deepen the publicity and education of core socialist values, vigorously promote the spirit of labor, the spirit of struggle, the spirit of dedication, the spirit of creation, and the spirit of diligence and thrift. Methods and approaches must keep up with the reality that new employment groups have more "screen-to-screen" than "face-to-face" interactions, moving theoretical classrooms online, integrating learning content into their fingertips, promoting flexible and effective learning forms such as "ten minutes before shifts" and"micro classes at stations," using language and forms they can understand, remember, and apply to explain principles, preventing rigid indoctrination and indiscriminate flooding. Combine solving ideological problems with solving practical difficulties, conveying the party's care in resolving worries and difficulties, enhancing political identification, ideological identification, theoretical identification, and emotional identification in a gentle and subtle manner, guiding the broad masses of workers in new forms of employment to unswervingly listen to the party's words and follow the party.
Promote effective coverage of party organizations and party work. Wherever there are masses, there must be party work. In light of the work methods and activity scope of new employment groups, leverage the respective advantages of localities, industries, and enterprises, innovate the establishment methods and activity forms of party organizations, promote the extension of party organizational coverage and work coverage to platform enterprises, outlets and stations, transportation routes, and online live-streaming rooms. Strengthen and improve the education, management, supervision, and service of mobile party members, explore methods combining places of departure and places of arrival, and combining offline and online, so that every party member is included in organizational management and does not fall behind. Some localities have carried out activities such as "organizations seeking party members, party members seeking organizations," using data comparison from platform enterprises and screening at outlets and stations to find out and manage party members who have long been drifting outside organizations;these practices are worth summarizing and promoting. Effectively leverage the bridge-and-link role of mass organizations such as trade unions, Communist Youth League organizations, and women's federations, transmit the party's warmth through mass organizations to new employment groups, achieving full coverage of the party's voice and uninterrupted party work
Safeguard rights and interests according to law and provide meticulous care services. Service is the best cohesion, and protection is the most solid guidance. The General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council have issued the"Opinions on Strengthening Service Management for New Employment Groups," clearly proposing the goals of achieving full coverage of party organizations and party work for new employment groups, gradual standardization of labor employment, significant improvement in the employment environment, and strong protection of legitimate rights and interests by 2027, and making arrangements for standardizing labor employment management according to law, strengthening the protection of legitimate rights and interests, strengthening algorithm governance on internet platforms, improving the level of public services, and other aspects. We must grasp implementation, standardize labor employment according to law, promote the reasonable determination of labor remuneration and the protection of rest rights, urge platform enterprises to standardize algorithms and improve transparency, improve social security systems suited to the characteristics of new employment groups, expand pilots for occupational injury protection, steadily advance participation in the housing provident fund system, so that workers have remuneration for their labor, medical care when ill, and support in old age. Coordinate the use of party-mass service centers, trade union stations, driver homes, and other positions, advance the construction of friendly scenes in communities, commercial districts, office buildings, industrial parks, transportation hubs, and other places, help solve practical problems such as accommodation, meals, parking, and passage. Improve mechanisms for collecting and responding to demands, uphold and develop the "Fengqiao model" in the new era, promote cross-departmental, cross-regional, and government-enterprise coordinated handling of high-frequency demands and common problems, strive to ensure that every demand they make is handled by someone and every demand is advanced according to law, using tangible sense of gain to unite hearts. In December 2025, the State Council reported to the NPC Standing Committee on the protection of the rights and interests of flexible employment and workers in new forms of employment, clearly proposing to promptly introduce measures for the protection of the rights and interests of workers in new forms of employment, and the level of institutionalization and rule-of-law protection of the rights and interests of new employment groups will be further improved
Guide new employment groups to integrate into social governance. We must strengthen positive publicity, encouragement, and guidance, deeply explore and publicize advanced models among new employment groups, organize vocational skills competitions and job contribution activities well, create an atmosphere in the whole society of respecting labor and respecting new employment groups, enhance their sense of occupational honor and social identity. Improve working mechanisms and incentive mechanisms, encourage and guide new employment groups to participate in grassroots governance and volunteer services, support them to participate in industry governance according to law, orderly reflect reasonable demands, and play a social supervision role, so that "urban runners" become participants and contributors in urban governance, realizing self-worth in serving society. At the same time, encourage localities to explore points-based management, linking participation in governance and volunteer service with evaluation and commendation, skills training, and career development, mobilizing the enthusiasm of new employment groups to participate in governance, forming a vivid situation of "the party unites me, I contribute to society."
Doing the ideological guidance and cohesion service work for new employment groups cannot be achieving success in a single step (一蹴而就, yi cu er jiu - "one, stomp, and, achieve"), requiring long-term persistence and continuous advancement. We must unite more closely around the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core, deeply study and implement General Secretary Xi Jinping's important expositions, adhere to combining online and offline efforts, do the work to the wheels, to the stations, to the front of the screens, into the hearts of every worker in new forms of employment, closely unite and gather the 84 million workers in new forms of employment around the party, continuously consolidate the party's class foundation, mass foundation, and social foundation for governance, and gather mighty strength for completing the economic and social development goals of the "15th Five-Year Plan" period and advancing Chinese modernization
〔The author is Deputy Director of the Teaching and Research Department of Society and Ecological Civilization at the Party School of the CPC Central Committee (National Academy of Governance)〕
Return to TopBy: 周美林
Health is the most important indicator of a happy life; health is the 1, and everything else is the 0s that follow it — without the 1, no number of 0s has any meaning. The Third Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China formally proposed "implementing the health-priority development strategy." On March 6, 2026, when General Secretary Xi Jinping participated in the joint group discussion of members from the Chinese Peasants' and Workers' Democratic Party, the Jiusan Society, the medicine-and-health sector, and the social-welfare-and-social-security sector at the Fourth Session of the 14th CPPCC National Committee, he pointed out that we must uphold the Party's leadership over health work, uphold the people-first and life-first principles, uphold the health-priority development strategy, uphold the public-welfare nature of basic medical and health services, and emphasized that taking the path of health development with Chinese characteristics cannot waver. Implementing the health-priority development strategy, in essence, means basing ourselves on the situation and tasks of economic and social development in the new era, placing the protection and promotion of the people's health in a priority position within the overall economic and social development, planning as a whole and advancing systematically, so as to achieve a benign coordination and mutual promotion between health and the economy and society.
In the current period, implementing the health-priority development strategy is of great significance. First, it is an urgent need to respond to complex health challenges and build a solid safety bottom line. Our country faces a complex situation in which multiple disease burdens coexist; the threat of traditional infectious diseases persists; chronic diseases have become the main factor affecting residents' health, and their onset shows a trend toward younger ages. At the same time, the acceleration of population aging, ecological-environmental changes, and lifestyle changes have made new health risks increasingly prominent. Only by placing health-priority development at a strategic height can we systematically build a strong public health system, effectively prevent and defuse various health risks, and firmly hold the bottom line of the people's life safety. Second, it is an important engine for promoting high-quality economic development and releasing the potential of domestic demand. Implementing the health-priority development strategy can not only increase the effective labor supply by improving the population's health level and extending healthy life expectancy, but can also, taking the health industry as a breakthrough, cultivate and strengthen new growth points such as biomedicine, medical devices, health-and-elderly-care, and smart healthcare, and promote the deep integration of health with elderly care, tourism, food, the internet, and other industries. Treating health investment as core investment in economic and social development can realize a virtuous cycle between expanding domestic demand and improving people's livelihoods, injecting new momentum into building the new development pattern. Third, it is an inherent requirement for promoting social fairness and justice and realizing common prosperity. There are still gaps in high-quality medical resources between urban and rural areas and between regions, and some people's burden of seeking medical treatment remains not light. Implementing the health-priority development strategy is conducive to upholding the public-welfare nature of basic medical and health services, promoting the sinking of resources and the downward shift of the center of gravity, and narrowing the health-service gaps between urban and rural areas, between regions, and between population groups. Through institutional arrangements ensuring that all the people fairly obtain basic medical and health services, it helps prevent falling into poverty due to illness (因病致贫, yin bing zhi pin - "because of, illness, lead to, poverty") and falling back into poverty due to illness (因病返贫, yin bing fan pin - "because of, illness, return to, poverty"), enabling the fruits of development to benefit all the people more and more fairly, and enhancing the cohesion and sense of happiness of society as a whole.
In recent years, our country has already achieved positive results in implementing the health-priority development strategy. First, upholding institutional guidance, the institutional system for health-priority development has been accelerated and improved. The CPC Central Committee and the State Council issued the "Healthy China 2030" Planning Outline, and the State Council issued the National Health "15th Five-Year Plan" Planning, clarifying the phased goals and key tasks. The Basic Medical and Health Promotion Law of the People's Republic of China was formally implemented, establishing the legal status of health-priority development at the legal level. The health-impact-assessment system is being accelerated in exploration and establishment, and has already been piloted in some regions, accumulating useful experience for its full rollout. A health-priority development institutional framework, guided by planning and guaranteed by law, has basically taken shape and is increasingly improved. Second, upholding investment guarantees, financial support for health has continued to strengthen. The proportion of our country's total health expenditure in GDP rose from 6.2% in 2016 to 6.7% in 2024, with the scale of health financing steadily expanding, providing solid financial support for the development of the undertaking. Fiscal investment has continued to tilt toward grassroots levels and public health; the per-capita subsidy standard for basic public health service funds has increased year by year;the operational guarantees for county-level medical and health institutions have been continuously consolidated;and the economic burden on the people seeking medical treatment has been gradually reduced. Third, upholding people-first principles, key health indicators have steadily improved. Average life expectancy has steadily increased;key indicators such as the infant mortality rate and the maternal mortality rate have continued to decline;and the overall level has moved into the forefront among countries with upper-middle income and populations exceeding one hundred million. The health levels of urban and rural residents have improved in tandem;health equity has continued to improve;and the sense of gain, sense of happiness, and sense of security from building a Healthy China have continued to strengthen.
It must still be recognized that the contradiction between the people's ever-growing health needs and the unbalanced and insufficient development of the undertaking remains prominent, and medical and health resources are unevenly distributed between urban and rural areas and between regions. The situation for infectious-disease prevention and control remains severe and complex;the pressure of chronic-disease prevention and control continues to increase;and issues such as mental health and occupational health require high attention. The health-impact-assessment system has not yet been fully implemented on the ground, and healthy lifestyles have still not been popularized. To this end, it is necessary to strengthen planning guidance and institutional support, fill the shortcomings in public health and grassroots-level services, advance the modernization of health governance, and ensure that all tasks are implemented and produce results.
Accelerate planning and institutional development. First, anchor the strategic goals and strengthen the articulation and implementation of plans. Closely centering on goals such as completing the building of a Healthy China by 2035, major health indicators entering the ranks of high-income countries, and achieving a higher level of equalization and homogenization of basic medical and health services between urban and rural areas, incorporate core indicators and key tasks into the medium-and-long-term plans for economic and social development, ensuring that health-priority development advances in the same direction and in sync with the country's macro strategy. Second, transform the development model and promote the implementation of health-priority development and the achievement of results. Accelerate the advancement of building a Healthy China, promote the development model of medical and health undertakings to pay more attention to taking health as the center, the service system to pay more attention to improving quality and efficiency, reform and governance to pay more attention to systemic coordination, and accelerate the formation of production, lifestyle, and economic-and-social-development models conducive to health. Third, improve the institutional system and consolidate the long-term mechanism of health-priority development. Taking institutional development as the main line, deepen the reform of the medical-and-health system, improve and perfect the five basic systems of hierarchical diagnosis and treatment, modern hospital management, universal medical insurance, drug supply guarantees, and comprehensive supervision;improve health-promotion policies and institutions, promote the coordinated articulation of health-related institutions with economic-and-social-development policies, realizing the transformation from policy-driven to institution-guaranteed. At the same time, establish a monitoring-and-evaluation mechanism, decompose and assign the goals and tasks to various regions and departments, clarify the timetable, roadmap, and division of responsibilities, dynamically track and promptly optimize, ensuring that a Healthy China is completed on schedule.
Accelerate filling shortcomings and weaknesses. First, fill the shortcomings in public health and improve the public health system. Implementing the health-priority development strategy, deepen the integration of medicine and prevention, the coordination of medicine and prevention, and social co-governance, strengthen the prevention and control of major infectious diseases, improve and perfect the public health system, effectively enhance the capacity to respond to and handle major public-health emergencies, and weave a dense and tight public-health protection net. Second, fill the shortcomings in grassroots-level services and build a high-quality and efficient service system. Implement the project to strengthen grassroots medical and health services, improve the hierarchical diagnosis-and-treatment system, build a high-quality and efficient medical-service system, deeply advance the Healthy China Action and the Patriotic Health Campaign, advocate healthy and civilized lifestyles, and continuously improve the service capacity and level of grassroots-level medical and health institutions. Third, fill the shortcomings in industrial development and talent, and strengthen support guarantees. Vigorously develop new quality productive forces in health, support the high-quality development of industries such as high-end medical equipment, biomedicine, brain-computer interfaces, and biomanufacturing, and lead the upgrading of the health industry with scientific-and-technological innovation. Continuously increase the training of professionals in shortage specialties, take grassroots levels as the focus, continuously strengthen the medical-and-health talent team, providing solid talent and intellectual support for health-priority development.
Accelerate advancing the modernization of health governance. First, uphold the Party's leadership over health work, improve the work pattern of unified leadership by Party committees and joint management by the Party and government, implement the system of hospital director responsibility under the leadership of the Party committee, strengthen Party building in the industry and the construction of medical ethics and medical style, and deepen the rectification of corruption problems. Second, improve investment and coordination mechanisms, and strengthen factor guarantees. Establish and improve a long-term investment mechanism for health that is compatible with the level of economic-and-social development and fiscal affordability;newly increased financial resources must give priority to guaranteeing the development of the health undertaking, and its expenditure growth rate should be clearly higher than the growth rate of recurrent fiscal expenditure in the same period, effectively strengthening the operational guarantees for county, district, and grassroots-level medical institutions. Establish and improve a cross-departmental coordination mechanism for integrating health into all policies, and improve the mechanism for the coordinated development and governance of medical care, medical insurance, and medicine. Third, improve the rule-of-law supervision and inspection-and-assessment systems. Improve the rule-of-law system for health, strengthen comprehensive supervision over the pharmaceutical-and-medical industry, incorporate major health indicators into the assessment indicators for Party committees and governments, establish a normalized, routinized inspection-and-assessment mechanism, ensuring that all tasks are implemented and produce results.
(The author is the Party Committee Secretary of the Capacity Building and Continuing Education Center of the National Health Commission)
Return to TopBy: 曾雪婷
Urban waterfront spaces are important landscapes and public spaces of a city, encompassing water bodies such as rivers, lakes, seas, and canals, as well as the natural and man-made environments surrounding them. They not only provide residents with places for leisure and recreation, but also serve as carriers that uphold urban ecological security, inherit regional historical and cultural heritage, drive the economic vitality of the area, and showcase the city's distinctive character and temperament. The "Action Plan for the Protection and Construction of Beautiful Rivers and Lakes (2025—2027)" proposes to "respond to the public's aspiration for beautiful rivers and lakes, and in accordance with laws and regulations advance the construction of waterfront leisure greenways, waterfront parks, and other water-friendly public facilities, so as to meet the people's needs for access to water." This deployment organically unifies ecological protection goals with the supply of public services, actively responding to the people's expectations for urban waterfront spaces.
In recent years, various localities have cumulatively built more than 5,500 happy rivers and lakes (items),, creating for the people a large number of high-quality urban waterfront spaces where they can get close to nature and enjoy life. From the perspective of spatial utilization, various localities have driven urban renewal through river channel governance, and through demolishing illegal structures and vacating land, opening up broken sections, and returning the banks to the people, have pushed urban waterfront spaces from closed toward open, and a number of river and lake shorelines that were once "facing water but hard to reach the water" are being transformed into public spaces that are approachable and accessible. For example, Beijing's Liangma River, through river channel governance driving urban renewal, has its shorelines integrated with the green spaces, neighborhoods, and commercial districts along the route; the waterfront once occupied by walls, railings, and parking lots has gradually become a leisure destination where citizens can see green from their windows and reach water upon stepping out their doors, and swimming in the water is increasingly becoming a scene of daily life in more and more cities. From the perspective of functional integration, more and more urban waterfront spaces are superimposing ecological, commercial, cultural, sports, and other scenarios together;flood detention and storage zones become park green spaces for citizens' leisure during the non-flood season, slow-walking trails are built beside sluice gates, and water conservancy facilities are moving from a single flood-control function toward composite utilization, becoming public spaces where citizens are willing to go and stay. For example, in Ningbo, Zhejiang, the flood detention and storage zones along the Yao River and Fenghua River are planned in coordination with urban park construction, and during the non-flood season they are opened as large waterfront parks integrating ecological wetlands, leisure trails, children's playgrounds, cultural entertainment, and other functions, while during the flood season they revert to their flood detention and storage function, realizing the dual function of "being the citizens' living room in normal times and the city's safety valve during floods." The open utilization of urban waterfront spaces is moving from scattered pilot projects toward contiguous advancement, and from shoreline connectivity toward functional composite. From the perspective of ecological quality improvement, various localities coordinate water environment governance with water ecological restoration, the quality of river and lake water environments is steadily improving, and the scene of clear water and green banks (水清岸绿, shui qing an lv - "water, clear; banks, green") with fish swimming in the shallows is reappearing in more and more cities, with a number of urban waterfront spaces becoming green living rooms where citizens can get close to nature and share the ecological dividend. For example, in Chengdu, Sichuan, taking the comprehensive governance of the Jinjiang River basin as the starting point, the city continuously advances sewage interception and dredging, ecological water replenishment, and landscape enhancement, restoring the millennium-old splendor of "the clear Jinjiang River flowing ten thousand li," and along the Jinjiang River has built multiple wetland parks and water-friendly plank roads, where the scene of egrets dancing gracefully (白鹭翩跹, bai lu pian xian - "egret, dance")with lush water plants has returned to citizens' daily lives, and the ecological picture of harmony between humanity and nature (人水和谐, ren shui he xie - "man, water, harmonious")is slowly unfolding.
It must still be recognized that, because to a certain extent there exist problems of emphasizing speed over quality in early-stage construction, lacking systematic planning and reserved space in mid-stage planning, and lacking coordination and synergy in later-stage management, urban waterfront space governance still faces real challenges. First, management and maintenance lag relatively behind. Some cities' waterfront spaces emphasize construction but neglect management and maintenance;after facilities are completed and handed over, there is a lack of routine upkeep, with problems such as damaged pavement, corroded facilities, deserted and neglected sites being relatively common, and chaos such as wild swimming, mixed pedestrian-vehicle traffic, and street vendors occupying the roadway sometimes rebounding;individual plank roads and water-friendly platforms have safety hazards due to years of disrepair, directly affecting citizens' safety and user experience. Waterfront places that should have been popular with citizens have, due to the absence of management and maintenance, become sanitary and safety dead corners where people "dare not go, do not want to go." Second, the dual-use function for normal times and emergencies has not been fully realized. As the rain belt shifts northward and extreme heavy rainfall increases, the frequency of rapid rises in river, lake, reservoir, and canal water levels has markedly increased, and some urban waterfront spaces, when planned and constructed, did not take into overall consideration leisure use in normal times and emergency flood control, with functional conversion lacking contingency plans and facility support, intensifying the pressure of flood-season safety risk prevention and control. When the flood season comes, "one closure settles everything," yet when torrential rain is about to arrive there is no warning at all, citizens' water-friendly activities are frequently interrupted, and the vision that "water-friendliness" and "safety" could both be achieved is difficult to land on the ground. Third, inter-departmental coordination is insufficient. The management of urban waterfront spaces involves multiple departments such as water conservancy, municipal affairs, landscaping, and transportation, with responsibilities and boundaries overlapping and ambiguous, and prominent problems such as inconsistent standards, non-interconnected information, and uncoordinated actions, making it extremely easy to produce the governance problem of "everyone manages yet no one manages," which lengthens the cycle from problem discovery to handling, allowing small hidden dangers to drag into major risks, constraining the overall improvement of urban waterfront space governance effectiveness. In this regard, there is an urgent need to push urban waterfront spaces from "well built" toward "well managed and well utilized."
Build a routine management and maintenance system. First, implement a segmented checklist management system, clearly defining, segment by segment, the standards, procedures, and responsible persons for facility inspection, repair, and renewal, relying on information-based means to establish dynamic management ledgers, achieving clarity of the bottom line, clarity of responsibility, and traceability, and incorporating management and maintenance effectiveness into the assessment and evaluation scope of the river and lake chief system, consolidating management responsibilities at all levels. Second, push management and maintenance forces to sink toward the front line, taking the coordinated linkage between river and lake chiefs and chief procurators as the starting point, improving the multi-department joint prevention and control mechanism, clarifying the responsibility boundaries of all parties, linking up urban management, water affairs, communities, volunteers, and other forces, implementing grid-based routine patrols, and building a supervision system that effectively connects routine patrols with emergency response. Third, deploy IoT sensing terminals to carry out structural health monitoring of facilities such as waterfront plank roads and water-friendly platforms, improving monitoring, warning, and early-response thresholds and response processes, achieving early discovery, early warning, and early handling of safety hazards, and preventing facilities from operating while defective. At the same time, improve the public participation mechanism, smooth the channels for reporting problems and reporting facility repairs online, establish a closed-loop management process of problem acceptance, assignment, handling, and feedback, and give play to the supplementary role of the public in routine supervision of facilities.
Strengthen the connection between normal-time and emergency dual use. First, in the compilation of territorial spatial planning and relevant special plans for water area protection, put forward binding requirements for the reservation of emergency functions and conversion conditions of urban waterfront spaces, coordinate and plan multiple goals such as flood control and drainage, ecological restoration, urban renewal, and livelihood security, strengthen the connection between plans and rigid transmission, maintain the continuity of construction and management, and prevent, from the source, the need for large-scale renovation of waterfront spaces after completion due to the absence of emergency functions. Second, when building or renovating public spaces such as waterfront greenways, water-friendly platforms, and waterfront parks, incorporate the functional conversion needs under emergency conditions into engineering design conditions, reserve flexible space in advance in aspects such as site vertical design, entrance and exit settings, and material reserve locations, clarify the functional conversion paths between normal use and emergency states, and incorporate conversion conditions into the scope of completion acceptance, ensuring that normal-emergency conversion is technically achievable. Third, implement tiered and categorized management of urban waterfront spaces according to flood risk levels and ecological sensitivity, configure safety prevention facilities such as warning signs and personnel evacuation passages in high flood-risk areas, improve convenience service facilities such as water-friendly platforms and slow-walking trails in medium-and low-risk areas, reasonably determine the scope of water-friendly activities, and dynamically assess and promptly adjust according to operational conditions, both holding the safety bottom line and meeting the people's needs for access to water.
Advance coordinated linkage. First, clarify the responsibility boundaries of departments such as water conservancy, municipal affairs, landscaping, and transportation, establish a multi-department joint meeting system and information sharing platform, and promote unified standards, interconnected information, and coordinated actions. Second, establish a through-mechanism connecting planning, construction, and operation management, synchronously clarify the operation management and maintenance entity, responsibility boundaries, and funding sources at the completion acceptance stage of urban waterfront space projects, achieving effective connection among planning, construction, handover, management, and maintenance in all links, and preventing facilities from falling into neglect after completion. Third, promote a collaborative model combining industry supervision with territorial management, grant frontline management and maintenance personnel in sub-districts and communities the authority for coordination and linkage, shorten the cycle from problem discovery to handling. At the same time, improve the social participation mechanism, guide coastal units, social organizations, and citizens to participate in routine supervision and collaborative governance, form a management pattern of government leadership, departmental coordination, and social participation, truly allowing urban waterfront spaces to continuously release the warmth of people's livelihoods.
Return to TopBy: 宋琳
The 2026 Central Document No. 1 proposes to "make coordinated efforts in providing services and safeguards for those working away from home and in supporting employment and entrepreneurship upon return to one's hometown." In recent years, against the backdrop of advancing the comprehensive revitalization of rural areas, the pattern of rural labor mobility in our country has undergone major changes, and entrepreneurship by those returning to their hometowns or villages has drawn growing attention. Various groups have voluntarily chosen to return to their hometowns or villages to develop industries and build the countryside, effectively revitalizing high-quality resources such as idle rural land, manpower, and industry, continuously consolidating the basic foundation of rural employment, and injecting a continuous and unending stream of fresh vitality into achieving high-quality and full employment in rural areas and promoting the comprehensive revitalization of rural areas. Supporting migrant workers, college graduates, veterans, and others to return to their hometowns or villages to start businesses is an important measure for implementing the employment-first policy, implementing the rural revitalization strategy, and consolidating and expanding the achievements of the battle against poverty.
At present, the comprehensive effects of returning to one's hometown or village to start a business in stabilizing rural employment, driving increases in farmers' incomes, activating development momentum, and other aspects are increasingly evident. First, the ranks of those returning to their hometowns or villages to start businesses continue to grow, and entrepreneurial talent continues to gather. Across the country, various types of people returning to their hometowns or villages to start businesses exceed 15 million, of whom the vast majority are engaged in agriculture-related fields, effectively resolving prominent difficulties such as rural brain drain and rural hollowing-out, and consolidating the talent foundation for stabilizing rural employment and promoting development. Second, industrial formats continue to enrich, and employment channels are effectively broadened. 46% of those returning to their hometowns or villages to start businesses are engaged in large-scale planting and breeding, 24.3% focus on local specialty planting and breeding, 10.5% devote themselves to agricultural product processing and circulation industries, and 6.9% develop creative industries such as leisure agriculture and ecological agriculture. Moreover, over 80% of the business formats belong to the type of integration of three industries, giving rise to a large number of localized, nearby employment opportunities, forming a sound development pattern of "one person starts a business, driving employment for an area," effectively absorbing idle rural labor force for local employment. Third, the employment structure continues to optimize, and the quality and efficiency of employment steadily improve. With the deepening advancement of agricultural modernization, the identity boundaries of the farming group have gradually weakened, their occupational attributes have continuously strengthened, and rural employment has taken on new characteristics of professionalization, specialization, and organization. New forces such as those returning to their hometowns or villages to start businesses account for 49.93% of the total contingent of high-quality farmers, of whom those with a high school education or above account for 63.22%, and 64.06% of practitioners hold professional titles for agricultural technicians, with high-quality, professional employment characteristics becoming increasingly prominent. Through large-scale, standardized operations, those returning to their hometowns or villages to start businesses promote the transformation of scattered, small-scale farmer employment toward standardized, professional employment, continuously optimizing the rural employment structure and improving the overall quality of rural employment.
At the same time, it should also be noted that, as the scale of returning to one's hometown or village to start a business continues to expand, some deep-seated constraints have gradually emerged, and the employment-driving effectiveness has not yet been fully released, prominently constrained by the following aspects. First, the safeguard system needs to be improved, and there are deficiencies in risk resistance. Agriculture-related support policies suffer from problems such as fragmentation, slow implementation, and weak supporting measures; some support policies are not fully implemented; the total supply of agricultural socialized services is insufficient and lacks targeting; the long-standing problems of difficult and expensive financing in rural finance persist, making it difficult to effectively hedge against the market risks and natural risks faced by agricultural production and management, directly affecting the stability of rural employment. Second, integrating into local rural society is rather difficult, and the sustainability of employment is relatively weak. Many new-generation people returning to their hometowns or villages to start businesses have long lived and worked in cities; their thinking patterns and living habits differ from those of rural society; they generally lack modern agricultural production and management skills; their sense of belonging to and identification with their hometowns is relatively weak; they find it difficult to balance market-oriented business rules with rural human-relations order, and are highly prone to problems such as secondary outflow and repeated mobility. Third, the development momentum of the main entities is insufficient, limiting their ability to drive employment. Most returning-to-hometown-or-village entrepreneurship projects are relatively small in scale, have low thresholds, and are highly replicable, with prominent homogeneous competition problems and insufficient core market competitiveness; in addition, the age structure of those returning to their hometowns or villages to start businesses is relatively aging, their innovation vitality and market adaptability are gradually declining, their projects' capacity for sustainable development is not strong, and their employment-driving effectiveness is clearly constrained.
In order to effectively break through the bottlenecks of returning to one's hometown or village to start a business and fully unleash the endogenous potential of rural employment, it is necessary to base ourselves on the overall situation of comprehensively revitalizing rural areas and continuously consolidate the foundation for stabilizing rural employment and promoting revitalization.
Improve the institutional system and strengthen policy safeguards. First, strengthen the coordinated implementation of policies. Focus on the difficulties of returning to one's hometown or village to start a business, coordinate and integrate support policies in development and reform, finance, financial services, land, taxation, human resources, and other areas, build a systematic, integrated policy system, and resolve problems such as policy fragmentation and difficulty in implementation. Provide preferential treatment in areas such as entrepreneurial land use, water and electricity guarantees, project approval, subsidy disbursement, and old-age insurance, simplify procedures, clarify support standards, and effectively reduce the comprehensive costs of returning to one's hometown or village to start a business. Second, improve the supply of socialized services. Accelerate the construction of comprehensive service platforms covering the entire chain of agricultural production, regularly carry out services such as technical training, market matchmaking, policy consultation, and risk warning. Innovate the "Internet + agricultural services" new model, adapt to diversified operational needs, fill the capability gaps of those returning to their hometowns or villages to start businesses in production, operation, market operations, and other areas, and enhance the professionalization and refinement of agricultural socialized services. Third, optimize rural financial services. In view of the characteristics of agricultural entrepreneurship, namely light assets, long cycles, and high risks, launch differentiated financial products such as exclusive entrepreneurial loans and discounted-interest loans, simplify approval processes, reduce financing costs, increase credit lines, comprehensively strengthen the risk-resistance capacity of those returning to their hometowns or villages to start businesses, and provide solid financial support for the expansion of rural industries and the continuous expansion of employment positions.
Break through the integration difficulties and consolidate the consensus of hometown sentiment. On the one hand, properly handle the relationship between market-oriented operation and rural human-relations society. Take into account both the rules of market-oriented agricultural operation and the order of rural human-relations ethics, rely on diverse scenarios such as mutual assistance during busy farming seasons, joint construction of agricultural affairs, neighborhood assistance, and rural cultural activities, build rural mutual-assistance and cooperation networks, and effectively resolve the estrangement between industrial development and rural social relations. On the other hand, broaden the pathways for those returning to their hometowns or villages to start businesses to integrate into local society. Actively guide outstanding people returning to their hometowns or villages to start businesses to deeply participate in grassroots governance work such as villagers' self-governance, cooperative operations, rural public welfare construction, and cultivation of rural civility, fully leverage their advantages of broad vision, novel thinking, and proficiency in operation and management, and help improve the quality and efficiency of rural governance. Through all-round participation in local rural construction and development, continuously enhance the sense of belonging to one's hometown, sense of identity, and sense of value attainment of those returning to their hometowns or villages, thoroughly resolve the dilemma of identity marginalization, and strengthen their confidence and determination to take root in the countryside and maintain stable employment.
Focus on talent cultivation and activate endogenous momentum. First, carry out rural vocational education and training. Closely follow the actual conditions of rural industrial development and market employment demand, focus on key areas such as modern agricultural planting, deep processing of agricultural products, rural cultural tourism operations, and rural e-commerce sales, customize professional, practical training courses, fill the capability gaps of those returning to their hometowns or villages to start businesses in modern agricultural skills and digital operation capabilities, and adapt to the development needs of the new era agriculture. Second, build industry-university-research incubation platforms. Continuously deepen school-local and research-local cooperation, link up with universities and research institutes, provide all-round assistance such as technology research and development, project incubation, innovation guidance, and achievement transformation for those returning to their hometowns or villages to start businesses, promote the iterative upgrading, quality improvement, and efficiency enhancement of traditional agricultural industries. Third, strengthen the exemplary and leading role of typical cases of returning to one's hometown or village to start a business. Deeply explore and extensively publicize advanced typical cases of returning to one's hometown or village to start a business, carry out policy publicity and experience exchange activities in multiple forms, advocate and promote the entrepreneurial ethos of daring to venture, daring to create, being pragmatic, and hardworking. Guide practitioners to base themselves on local resource endowments, create distinctive, differentiated agricultural projects, effectively resolve the problem of homogeneous competition, and continuously release the radiating potential of returning to one's hometown or village to start a business in driving rural employment and increasing farmers' incomes.
Return to TopThe Oujiang River, eight hundred li long, cuts through the mountains, and on both banks stretch the rolling peaks of southwestern Zhejiang. This is the most remote mountainous area of Zhejiang, and since ancient times it has been said to have "nine parts mountains, half part water, half part farmland." In the past, guarding the green waters and green mountains yet being unable to turn them into gold mountains and silver mountains was the long-standing pain in the hearts of the people of Lishui. Today, a reshaping of the cadre contingent and a transformation of government functions centered on "skills" are quietly changing the fate of this red land.
In 2025, the growth rate of per capita disposable income of rural residents in Lishui ranked first in the province for the 17th consecutive year. Behind this weighty report card, there are active teams of "skill teams" composed of grassroots cadres—they use their specialized skills to activate sleeping rural resources, blazing a new path of common prosperity in mountainous areas.
A relay race spanning 20 years
As early as 2004, Qingyuan County of Lishui City took the lead in exploring "cultivating skill-oriented cadres, building a skill-oriented government." For over 20 years, Lishui has deeply advanced the reform exploration of"cultivating skill-oriented cadres, building a skill-oriented government," carrying it forward one term of leadership after another. In 2025, the Lishui Municipal Party Committee and Municipal Government issued the"Implementation Opinions on Deepening the Cultivation of Skill-Oriented Cadres and Building a Skill-Oriented Government in the New Era to Advance Rural Revitalization," elevating it to the city's "No.1 Brand" of grassroots Party building, innovatively constructing the"One Post, Two Capabilities, Two Evaluations" mechanism, promoting cadre capabilities to iteratively upgrade from"single-function performance type" to"compound development type."
"One Post" is the foundation, namely the specific position a cadre holds. "Two Capabilities" is the core, namely that cadres must both possess the"basic capability for post performance" to complete their own duties, and also master the"value-added capability for serving development" to directly serve industrial development and meet the needs of the masses. "Two Evaluations" is the guarantee, namely establishing a dual-track evaluation system of"basic effectiveness" and"value-added actual achievements" running in parallel, making"what was done, what was accomplished" the yardstick for measuring capability and the criterion for testing political achievements.
Targeting the capability shortcomings of mountain-area cadres who"understand administration but not industry, understand routine work but not the market," Lishui has categorized and established a56-item"value-added capability" guidance catalog: city-and-county-level organs focus on key fields such as ecological product value realization, fund-based investment attraction and capital operations, zero-carbon park construction; townships (subdistricts) focus on key and difficult tasks such as rural cultural-tourism planning, strong-village company operations; villages (communities) focus on practical skills such as"local specialty" brand building, e-commerce livestreaming. A"one person, one skill" recognition mechanism has been established, encouraging cadres to combine their posts and strengths, autonomously learn and master at least one value-added skill, closely aligning with development needs and the aspirations of the masses.
Today, this mechanism has covered all 9 counties (cities, districts),, 173 townships (subdistricts),, and over 220 city-and-county-level organs in the city, with more than 6,900 cadres learning skills according to need, strengthening skills through real combat, using skills in groups, delivering skills to the front line, and evaluating skills by achievements. The354 skill service teams composed of skill-oriented cadres are active on the front line of comprehensive rural revitalization; 1,227 experts from various fields have been hired into the talent pool to provide guidance and empowerment; over 300 front-line skill studios are rooted in the fields and villages. At the same time, Lishui has also built a systematic practical training platform, establishing the nation's first Rural Cadre Skills Academy, creating a"1 municipal academy + 9 county-level training centers + 39 skill practical training bases" system, developing over 300 high-quality courses in a targeted manner, with a three-tier skill practical training network connecting cities, counties, townships, and villages, providing platform support for cadre growth.
A small mountain village "takes flight" with a major aerospace IP
Xiaoshun Village, Shitang Town, Yunhe County, was once the site of the general factory of Zhejiang Iron Works during the War of Resistance against Japan, with profound red heritage. Yet, guarding red stories and green waters and green mountains, it had long been unable to find the key to opening the market. The turning point came from a special team. Shitang Town broadened its thinking, with the town Party secretary taking the lead, absorbing 15 core members including township cadres and rural operation teams, establishing the"Space Valley" industrial development planning skill service team, and specially inviting Wang Qiuyan, a military writer native to Yunhe, and others to serve as the team's skill mentors.
In the early stage of project launch, the team had neither aerospace industry experience nor rural operation capability, and"learning while doing, doing while learning" became the only way forward. The cadres, like"treasure hunting," surveyed idle resources; from revitalizing idle old houses to build an aerospace science popularization exhibition hall, to independently designing the"Space Alley" and aerospace culture wall, to constructing an immersive space-walking space…all the designs were drawn by the cadres themselves and implemented by themselves. Based on ecological advantages and aerospace cultural heritage, they strung together red stories, aerospace literary IP, and mountain-and-water scenery into a chain, planning and advancing the"Xiaoshun·Jiangnan Space Valley" project. A21-meter-high model of the Long March 2F launch vehicle points straight into the sky; the Chang'e-5 lunar probe and the"Zhurong" Mars rover are restored in proportion; the simulated cockpit brings an immersive experience…in just a few short months, the"Jiangnan Space Valley" turned from blueprints into reality.
In April 2026, Xiaoshun Village held the inaugural Aerospace Science Popularization Culture Week, with an unending stream of visitors. In just three short months, the project drove employment for over 80 people and increased village collective income by more than 500,000 yuan. The research-study base, by introducing Yangtze River Delta science popularization resources and linking up with the Wenchang Space Launch Site, launched a"fixed + mobile" research-study package of"1 day in Xiaoshun, N days elsewhere," constructing a three-tier research-study system of"county-level base—provincial-level node—national launch site." A small mountain village with neither an aerospace research institute nor a launch site has nonetheless carved out a new integrated development path of"aerospace + literature + red."
High-quality development of the whole industrial chain of the Shelduck
Xinjian Town, Jinyun County, is a nationally renowned shelduck breeding base, but for a long time, the industry remained at the primary stage of"raising ducks and selling ducks, with meager profits," and even duck feathers were disposed of as waste.
The change began with the establishment of the"Ya Huoji"(Duck Buddy) skill service team. The team's members are mainly town cadres, and experts from the county agriculture and rural bureau and responsible persons from related enterprises have been hired as think-tank experts. Relying on the Sheng Yulai processing"Common Prosperity Workshop" and the Jinyun shelduck e-commerce"Common Prosperity Workshop," through the method of"setting posts along the chain, matching people according to need," eight categories of"buddy" posts have been established—breeding, disease prevention, farming, processing, feather creation, production and marketing—achieving whole-chain technical empowerment.
"In the past, when we did service work, we circled around the industry but could not exert force. Now, from breed preservation and seedling cultivation to processing and sales, we can talk to experts and farmers right to the point." A cadre said with emotion.
In the breeding link, the"breeding buddies" made connections, promoting cooperation between the Provincial Academy of Agricultural Sciences and Xinchang Agriculture to establish a"Shelduck Science and Technology Small Courtyard," advancing shelduck breed innovation and breed preservation and seedling cultivation, with three high-quality breed lines going out to the whole country from here. In the farming link, ecological intensive models such as dry rearing and cage rearing were promoted, a shelduck common prosperity park was built to high standards, achieving a win-win of scaled operation and increased income for farmers. In cooperation with the Ya Xianzi company, a traditional Chinese medicine epidemic-prevention formula was developed, reducing the incidence rate of shelducks by over 30%, and"antibiotic-free ecological" duck eggs doubled in value. In the processing link, the skill team joined hands with the College of Food Science and Engineering of Ningbo University to jointly advance the construction of a healthy braised-flavor project, successively developing over 60 products such as braised duck tongues and old duck stew.
In feather utilization, the"processing buddies," coordinating with the"feather creation buddies," transformed themselves into"feather matchmakers." With the Sheng Yu feather"Common Prosperity Workshop" as the core, they converted idle spaces in surrounding villages into six supporting processing points, "moving" simple processes such as sorting and cutting feathers "into" the villages. They introduced enterprises to overcome the processing technology for gray-and-white feathers, turning the gray-and-white feathers of Jinyun shelducks into badminton shuttlecocks meeting competition standards, with production costs reduced by half compared to traditional processes.
In 2025, the total output value of the whole industrial chain of the Jinyun shelduck exceeded 3 billion yuan, driving 25,000 duck farmers to increase their annual average income by over 20,000 yuan. The Jinyun shelduck also obtained Lishui's first meat product export qualification, achieving product going overseas.
From"single-village boom" to"cluster-wide common prosperity"
Chenjiapu Village, Sidu Township, Songyang County, relying on its unique cliff-dwelling ancient village landscape, has developed from a"hollow village" into an influential"internet-famous check-in spot." However, as traffic grew, it quickly faced new difficulties such as insufficient carrying capacity, short visitor stay times, and imbalanced development of surrounding villages.
In 2025, the township Party committee took the lead in breaking village boundary lines, forming the"Greater Chenjiapu Rural Cultural-Tourism Planning and Operation Team," and specially hired experts from the county Culture, Radio, Television, Tourism, and Sports Bureau and local homestay owner-operators as mentors, linking surrounding villages together through brand integration, activity planning, and resource coordination.
The team changed the convention of"entrusting third parties with planning," independently calculating visitor flows, demonstrating business formats, and delineating functional zones, leading the compilation of the"Greater Chenjiapu Cross-Village Coordinated Development Plan," determining a cross-village coordinated development model of"one core empowering, three poles complementing, corridors connecting, whole-region coordinating." With Chenjiapu Village as the visitor-flow radiation hub, it clarified differentiated development positioning such as Xiabao Village as the"youth entrepreneurship and innovation vitality pole," Pingtian Village as the"art empowerment pole," and Siyang Village as the"wellness and vacation pole," forming a development community with complementary business formats, connected functions, and shared benefits.
On this basis, the team innovated the"cluster-area joint operation" model, establishing a company with shareholding from multiple villages for unified operation, participating throughout the entire process in revitalizing idle assets, unified marketing of agricultural specialty products, and design of value-added services. With nostalgia as the theme, it created the cultural-tourism IP of"Encounter Nostalgic China in Chenjiapu," developed eight themed tourism routes such as"Ancient Village Exploration" and"Cloud-Top Slow Life," connecting the core nodes of the four villages, forming a full-chain closed loop of"food, lodging, transport, sightseeing, shopping, entertainment."
Skill upgrading has brought qualitative change in development. Since the beginning of this year, Sidu Township has received 570,000 visitor trips, a year-on-year increase of 85%. The"bonsai" of Chenjiapu Village's single hit attraction is growing into the"landscape" of four villages linked together.
The logic of change centered on"skills"
Three stories reflect the deep logic of the same transformation.
This is a reshaping of capabilities. From"One Post, Two Capabilities" to"Two Evaluations," Lishui has constructed a complete closed loop of cadre capability"definition—cultivation—evaluation—incentive." It has categorized and formulated guidance lists of26"value-added capabilities" for township cadres, 17"comprehensive capabilities" for village cadres, and 13"professional tackling capabilities" for city-and-county-level organ cadres. Through establishing"skill files" and"performance account books," cadre skill improvement is linked to rank promotion and honor incentives, cultivating a growth mindset, promoting cadres to shift from passively receiving training to actively seeking growth, and from"approval clerks" and"affairs clerks" to"service providers" and"partners."
This is an organizational transformation. The354 skill service teams are not permanent institutions, but"mission-type organizations" born of specific matters and evolving with them. Guided by specific projects, the teams break departmental boundaries, integrate cadres with diverse professional backgrounds, forming"task units" capable of fighting hard battles and responding rapidly. Each skill team has established a"five ones" support system of"substantive studio + expert think tank + empowerment training + operating mechanism + evaluation standards," hiring a total of 1,227 experts from various fields as think-tank members, promoting the optimization of governance structures and the improvement of service effectiveness, allowing administrative resources and industrial demand to be deeply coupled.
This is an upgrade of trust. When cadres master"real skills" such as rural cultural-tourism planning, brand operation, drone crop-protection operations, the masses naturally trust them and follow along. From"cadres work, masses watch" to"cadres lead masses to work together," skills have become the"bridge of hearts" that closely connects cadre-mass relations.
"Cultivating skill-oriented cadres, building a skill-oriented government" is not a simple matter of business training or institutional adjustment, but a reshaping of the cadre contingent and a transformation of government functions characterized by"empowering individuals, reshaping organizations, activating systems." In 2025, Lishui's skill service teams cumulatively tackled 651 projects in real combat, resolving over 20,000 urgent, difficult, anxious, and expectant problems of the masses, promoting the whole-industrial-chain development of 13"local specialty" industries across the city, including tea and edible fungi, with each achieving an output value exceeding 1 billion yuan.
Standing at a new historical starting point, Lishui will continue to deepen the"One Post, Two Capabilities, Two Evaluations" mechanism, strengthen the three-tier skill practical training network, promote cadres to temper their abilities and deliver solid achievements in real combat, and continuously stimulate the powerful endogenous driving force of common prosperity taking the lead in the old revolutionary base area.
(Organization Department of the Lishui Municipal Party Committee, Zhejiang Province)
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