16th Party Congress and the “Three Represents”

In 2000, while inspecting Guangdong, Jiang Zemin first set out the requirements of the “Three Represents” in fairly complete form: that the Party always represent the development requirements of China’s advanced productive forces, the orientation of its advanced culture and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the people. The thought arose from the great practice of building socialism with Chinese characteristics and answered the questions of what kind of party to build and how to build it. In November 2002 the 16th National Congress of the Communist Party of China was held in Beijing. Jiang Zemin delivered a report titled “Build a Well-Off Society in an All-Round Way and Create a New Situation in Building Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.” The Congress established the “Three Represents,” together with Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory, as the guiding ideology the Party must uphold over the long term, and wrote it into the Party constitution. It noted that people’s living standards had reached a moderately prosperous level overall, but one that was low, uneven and very unbalanced, and called for concentrating efforts in the first two decades of the 21st century on building a higher-level moderately prosperous society benefiting well over a billion people. The Congress elected a new central leadership with Hu Jintao as general secretary. As the first national congress of the new century, it charted the course for building a moderately prosperous society.