Party Centenary and a Moderately Prosperous Societ

A “moderately prosperous society” (xiaokang) has been the ideal social condition the Chinese nation has pursued since ancient times. At the start of reform and opening-up Deng Xiaoping put forward the idea of a “moderately prosperous family,” and by the end of the 20th century people’s living standards had reached a moderately prosperous level overall. The 16th Party Congress later proposed building a moderately prosperous society in all respects, and the 18th Congress set the goal of completing it. The hardest task lay in the countryside, especially in poor areas. In 2013 Xi Jinping first proposed “targeted poverty alleviation” at Shibadong Village in Xiangxi, Hunan. The country then launched a campaign to eliminate poverty, and over 1,800 Party members and officials, including Huang Wenxiu, died on the front line. In 2020 all 98.99 million rural poor people under the current standard were lifted out of poverty and all 832 poor counties were removed from the poverty list, meeting the UN 2030 Agenda poverty-reduction target ten years early. On 1 July 2021 a grand meeting celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party was held at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, where Xi Jinping declared that, through the sustained efforts of the whole Party and people of all ethnic groups, the first centenary goal had been achieved: a moderately prosperous society had been built in all respects across China, and absolute poverty had been eliminated for the first time in history. In November the Sixth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee adopted the Resolution on the Major Achievements and Historical Experience of the Party over the Past Century, the third historical resolution in the Party’s history.