Xi wraps up New Year tour

President turns his people-centered talk into actions during travels

President Xi Jinping pledged to not leave a single person behind in the process of building a well-off society during his four-day inspection tour of mountainous Sichuan province.

Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, stressed the importance of implementing the spirit of the 19th CPC National Congress as well as the spirit of recent conferences on economic and rural work during the tour, which ended on Tuesday.

While visiting the homes of poor ethnic Yi villagers in Zhaojue county, Xi asked them about their lives and discussed poverty alleviation with local officials and villagers.

The CPC will not leave any ethnic group, any family or any person behind in the process of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects, Xi told the villagers.

After hearing Ji Hao, a 10-year-old girl of Yi ethnicity, sang a song about how beautiful the national flag is, Xi said he hopes all the country's children will lead happy lives.

Xi stressed the importance of building Party branches at rural, grassroots levels for reducing poverty in mountainous areas. The Party secretary and work teams dispatched to villages should set a goal of helping people to have better lives, he said.

He said he was glad to see that the livelihoods of the ethnic Yi people are improving daily. He said that talents are important in rural areas to help enrich the areas.

In building socialism, the CPC's goal is to enable people of all ethnicities to lead happy lives, Xi said.

When Xi was leaving the village of Huopu in Jiefang township, the village's Party secretary presented him a chaerwa, a traditional ethnic Yi costume, to express their love and gratitude. Villagers sang an Yi song to bid the president farewell.

Xi then traveled to Tianfu New Area in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan, where he called for building the newly approved new area into a bulwark for economic opening-up in inland areas.

Xi visited an electronics technology company in Chengdu and urged the company to develop military-civil integration and improve the capability of innovation.

"I am a servant of the people. My job is to serve the people," Xi said on Monday while talking with people in Zhanqi, a village in Chengdu's Pidu district.

"We will safeguard the asset of the Communist Party of China to provide a happy life for the people," he said.

Before going to Zhanqi, Xi visited Yingxiu, Wenchuan county, the epicenter of the 8.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Sichuan on May 12, 2008.

There he saw the ruins of a middle school and laid flowers in memory of more than 80,000 people killed in the quake and the heroes who died during rescue work.

Xi said the ruins must be protected to become a base for education in patriotism.

He also saw the changes in Yingxiu over the 10 years since the quake and visited a tea-making workshop and a restaurant, where he helped brew buttered tea, cooked fried pork and ground soybeans to make bean curd.

During the visit, Xi told villagers that China would continue to revitalize the countryside.

"The development of the countryside is not just about developing industries or materials, but about spiritual and cultural lives," he said.

At a conference on Tuesday attended by officials of Sichuan province, Xi said the 19th CPC National Congress has set the direction for the Party and country's development.

The whole Party and country should learn and implement the spirit of the congress, carry out the tasks of reform, development and stability, and make policies that benefit the people, he said.

Noting that the country's development has been transferred from a high-speed period to high-quality period, Xi urged more effort to deepen supply-side structural reform and boost innovation.

The president highlighted the importance of a people-centered development philosophy, saying the government should resolve such issues as education, employment, health, social security and stability for the people.

The whole Party must safeguard the authority of the CPC Central Committee and its centralized and unified leadership, Xi said.

This was the sixth consecutive year Xi visited the front lines of China's war against poverty in his Lunar New Year inspection tour.

He visited northwestern Gansu province in 2013, northern Inner Mongolia autonomous region in 2014, northwestern Shaanxi province in 2015, eastern Jiangxi province in 2016 and northern Hebei province in 2017.

The poor have been Xi's foremost concern. In his 2018 New Year speech, the word "people" appeared most frequently, and he emphasized the "wellbeing" of the Chinese people, displaying his people-centered governance philosophy.