Full text of Hu Jintao's report at 18th Party Congress (4)

III. The Goal of Completing the Building of a Moderately Prosperous Society in All Respects and Deepening Reform and Opening Up in an All-Around Way

An examination of both the current international and domestic environments shows that China remains in an important period of strategic opportunities for its development, a period in which much can be achieved. We need to have a correct understanding of the changing nature and conditions of this period, seize all opportunities, respond with cool-headedness to challenges, and gain initiative and advantages to win the future and attain the goal of completing the building of a moderately prosperous society in all respects by 2020.

Basing ourselves on China's actual economic and social development, we must work hard to meet the following new requirements while working to fulfill the goal of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects set forth at the Sixteenth and Seventeenth National Congresses of the Party.

- The economy should maintain sustained and sound development. Major progress should be made in changing the growth model. On the basis of making China's development much more balanced, coordinated and sustainable, we should double its 2010 GDP and per capita income for both urban and rural residents. The contribution of scientific and technological progress to economic growth should increase considerably and China should become an innovative country. Industrialization should be basically accomplished. IT application should be significantly expanded. The quality of urbanization should improve markedly. Notable progress should be made in modernizing agriculture and building new socialist rural areas. The basic mechanism for promoting balanced development between regions should be in place. Opening up should be further improved and China's international competitiveness should increase significantly.

- People's democracy should be expanded. The institutions of democracy should be improved and its forms enriched. People's enthusiasm, initiative and creativity should be fully leveraged. The rule of law should be fully implemented as a basic strategy, a law-based government should be basically in function, judicial credibility should be steadily enhanced, and human rights should be fully respected and protected.

- The country's cultural soft power should be improved significantly. Core socialist values should take root among the people, and both the level of civility of citizens and the moral and ethical standards of the whole society should be significantly raised. More cultural works should be created; a system of public cultural services should be basically in place, and the cultural sector should become a pillar of the economy. Even greater progress should be made in taking Chinese culture to the global stage. By taking these steps, we will lay a more solid foundation for developing a strong socialist culture in China.

- Living standards should be fully raised. Equal access to basic public services should be generally achieved. The educational level of the entire population should be significantly raised and training of innovative professionals markedly improved. China should have a large pool of competent professionals and be rich in human resources, and it should basically modernize its education. There should be more employment opportunities. Income gaps should be narrowed, middle-income groups should keep growing, and the number of people living below the poverty line should drop by a large margin. Social security should cover all the people. Everyone should have access to basic medical and public health services. The system of housing for low-income groups should take shape, and there should be social harmony and stability.

- Major progress should be made in building a resource-conserving and environmentally friendly society. The establishment of functional zones should be basically completed, and a system for recycling resources should begin to take shape. Energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP as well as the discharge of major pollutants should decrease sharply. Forest coverage should increase, the ecosystem should become more stable, and the living environment should improve markedly.

To complete the building of a moderately prosperous society in all respects, we must, with greater political courage and vision, lose no time in deepening reform in key sectors and resolutely discard all notions and systems that hinder efforts to pursue development in a scientific way. We should set up a well-developed, scientific, procedure-based and effective framework of systems and ensure that operating institutions in all sectors are fully functioning. We should speed up improvements to the socialist market economy. We should improve the basic economic system in which public ownership is the mainstay of the economy and economic entities of diverse ownership develop together, and we should improve the system of income distribution in which distribution according to work is the main form that coexists with other forms of distribution. We should leverage to a greater extent and in a wider scope the basic role of the market in allocating resources, improve the system of macro-regulation, and perfect the open economy to ensure more efficient, equitable and sustainable economic development. We should work harder to enhance socialist democracy in a systemic way by adopting due standards and procedures, expand people's orderly participation in governance at all levels and in all fields, and ensure that all governance functions are performed in accordance with the law. We should accelerate improvement of the system for managing the cultural sector and the mechanism for cultural production and operation, establish the basic framework of a modern cultural market system, improve the system for managing state-owned cultural assets, and foster a cultural environment that encourages creativity. We should step up efforts to form a scientific and effective social management system, improve the social security system, and strengthen networks of community-level public services and social management. We should establish institutions and mechanisms to ensure that society is full of vigor, harmonious and orderly. We should move faster to set up a system for ecological progress, improve institutions and mechanisms for developing geographical space, conserving resources and protecting the ecological environment and promote modernization featuring harmonious development between man and nature.

Completing the building of a moderately prosperous society in all respects by 2020 is an arduous task, and all the comrades in the Party must work single-mindedly and with fortitude to reach this goal. The state should give more support to rural areas and the central and western regions to accelerate their reform and opening up, strengthen their capacity for development and raise their living standards. We should encourage areas with good conditions to keep taking the lead in pursuing modernization and to make greater contribution to nationwide reform and development.