Experience shows Party's model is right

Ian Goodrum, a United States national who has spent five years in China, said he has "only seen a sliver of the country", but that small amount has already revealed that the country has come a long way despite arduous struggles.

The Communist Party of China has led the country's steady progress by breaking down major development goals into more specific objectives over time and fulfilling them with concrete efforts, said Goodrum, a writer and editor with China Daily, at the Vision China event on Wednesday.

As a result, the concepts and policies the CPC has put forward, though seeming "more abstract" at first, will ultimately "guide changes that have a profound impact on real, living people", Goodrum said.

"These policy prescriptions begin conceptually ... more immediate ambitions carry with them a set of precise objectives, and as these are reached the more long-term ideas are fleshed out in the same way their antecedents were," he said.

"This practice creates continuity across years and decades, ensuring the country stays on a level track. With the gradual inclusion of benchmarks, it also functions as a motivator for local governments and an accountability mechanism for the system as a whole."

The evolution of the concept of building a "moderately prosperous society" over the past several decades proves Goodrum's point.

The concept, which dates back to the era of former leader Deng Xiaoping, became China's First Centenary Goal and developed into a series of detailed targets that the country strove to meet, including doubling its 2010 GDP figure by 2020.

The last decade has seen the country realize the goal successfully as the Party began to chart the road map for accomplishing the Second Centenary Goal of building China into a great modern socialist country.

The Party has put forward the "two-step" approach, setting a two-phase timeline for meeting the Second Centenary Goal.

For the first phase, running 2020-35, China aims to basically achieve socialist modernization by realizing a wide range of specific development objectives.

According to the report to the 20th CPC National Congress, which concluded last month, these objectives include raising the country's per capita GDP to that of a mid-level developed country, lowering carbon emissions after peaking by 2030, and guaranteeing equitable access to basic public services.

"These will serve as the rubric for government performance in the coming years, and define the country's progress in a tangible way," Goodrum said, adding that the CPC is, and will continue, working to ensure the lives of China's people remain on a continuous track of improvement.

"While it is a near certainty that the future will bring with it new and even more complex questions, we can say with some confidence that those questions will be answered — because that's precisely what past and present experience tell us," he said.