XV. Improving the Party's Leadership
Leadership by the Party provides a fundamental guarantee for further deepening reform comprehensively to advance Chinese modernization. We must acquire a deep understanding of the decisive significance of establishing Comrade Xi Jinping's core position on the Party Central Committee and in the Party as a whole and establishing the guiding role of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era. We must be more conscious of the need to maintain political integrity, think in big-picture terms, follow the leadership core, and keep in alignment with the central Party leadership. We must stay confident in the path, theory, system, and culture of socialism with Chinese characteristics. We must uphold Comrade Xi Jinping's core position on the Party Central Committee and in the Party as a whole and uphold the Central Committee's authority and its centralized, unified leadership.
We must maintain a keen awareness of the need to use the Party's self-reform to steer social reform and continue to apply both the spirit of reform and rigorous standards in conducting Party self-governance. We will improve the systems and regulations for the Party's self-reform and continue working to purify, improve, renew, and excel ourselves. All this will enable our Party to remain the strong leadership core in building socialism with Chinese characteristics.
(57) Upholding the Party Central Committee's centralized, unified leadership over the endeavor to further deepen reform comprehensively
The Party Central Committee exercises leadership over the general design, coordination, and overall advancement of all our reforms. We will refine the mechanisms through which the major decisions and plans of the Central Committee are implemented, in order to ensure full compliance with its orders and prohibitions. Party committees (leading Party members groups) at all levels are responsible for implementing the Central Committee's decisions and plans, planning and advancing reforms in their regions and departments, encouraging pioneering efforts and innovations based on their own situations, and creating new experience that can be applied elsewhere. Continuing to follow the Party's mass line in the new era, we will fully incorporate social expectations, the people's wisdom, the views of experts, and primary-level experience into the design of reforms. We will set reform agendas with a focus on solving prominent problems and improve the mechanisms for drawing up key reform plans. We will uphold truth, correct errors, and discover problems and remedy failings as they arise. We will improve reform incentives and better guide public opinion so as to foster a favorable environment for reform.
(58) Deepening institutional reforms related to Party building
With a focus on boosting the whole Party's drive, initiative, and creativity for reform and development, we will improve the systems and mechanisms for Party building. We will further arm ourselves with the Party's new theories and set up sound long-term mechanisms for reinforcing commitment, acquiring knowledge, improving conduct, and enhancing performance through learning. We will further reform the management system for officials and personnel and firmly follow the right approach to selecting and appointing officials. Officials who are politically committed, highly responsible, determined to pursue reform, outstanding in performance, and honest and clean, must be selected; and the problem of officials acting arbitrarily or lacking the willingness, courage, or ability to deliver must be addressed. We will see that officials have a correct understanding of what it means to perform well and improve the mechanisms for effectively preventing and correcting any misguided views about achievements. We will apply the "three distinctions" to encourage officials to forge ahead in a pioneering spirit and demonstrate enterprise in their work. We will make an ongoing effort to ensure that officials can be demoted as well as promoted and make a stronger push to replace those who are no longer suitable for their posts. We will improve the mechanisms for providing regular training, and basic training in particular, for officials, give them more professional training opportunities, and temper them through practice, in order to make them fully capable of advancing modernization initiatives. The tenure system for leading officials will be refined and fully applied, and the handover system for the heads of leadership teams will be improved. We will strengthen the political and organizational functions of Party organizations. We will look into effective ways of Party building in new types of economic and social organizations and among groups in new forms of employment. We will improve the mechanisms for guiding and managing Party members and giving full play to their roles. We will also refine Party rules and regulations, increase their authority, and fully enforce them.
(59) Intensifying efforts to improve conduct, build integrity, and combat corruption
Mechanisms for conducting concrete, targeted, and regular political oversight will be improved. We will steadfastly implement the central Party leadership's eight-point decision on improving conduct and refine our systems and mechanisms for preventing and tackling pointless formalities and bureaucratism. We will continue to streamline and standardize meetings and documents, as well as all types of demonstration initiatives, evaluations, standards inspections, festival celebrations, expositions and exhibitions, and forums; strictly control the total number of community-level inspections, examinations, and evaluations; and raise the quality of research and studies. Great effort will be made to address the excessive frequency of all these activities. We will formulate lists of duties for towns and townships (urban sub-districts) and refine the long-term mechanisms for reducing their burdens. We will set up mechanisms for carrying out regular and intensive education on Party discipline and better exercise four forms of oversight over discipline compliance, thus ensuring we make full use of Party discipline as a guide, restraint, guarantee, and incentive.
We will improve the mechanisms for coordinating efforts to ensure that officials do not have the audacity, opportunity, or desire to be corrupt and work hard to eradicate the breeding grounds and conditions for corruption. We will improve the mechanisms for investigating and addressing instances of both misconduct and corruption, intensify efforts to uproot corruption in sectors with a high concentration of power, funds, and resources, and strictly investigate and deal with any collusion between government officials and businesspeople that undermines the political ecosystem and economic development. We will refine the mechanisms for taking joint punitive actions against major bribe givers and adopt more measures to effectively prevent and control new and disguised forms of corruption. We will take stronger steps to handle false accusations. We will improve the mechanisms for pursuing fugitives, preventing escape, and retrieving stolen assets. We will see that a culture of integrity prevails in the new era.
Party and state oversight systems will be improved. We will ensure that principal and oversight responsibilities for full and rigorous Party self-governance are assumed. We will improve the supporting systems for more effective oversight of leadership teams and their heads. We will improve the mechanisms for applying checks over the allocation and exercise of power and oppose privilege-seeking mindsets and behavior. We will work to coordinate discipline and law enforcement with the administration of criminal justice. We will improve the working institutions and mechanisms for discipline inspection. We will optimize the functions of oversight, inspection, review, and investigation agencies, improve the discipline inspection and supervision systems for departments under vertical management, and work to see that discipline inspection and supervision teams are dispatched to all central government-administered enterprises. Institutional reforms for primary-level oversight will be deepened. Steps will be taken to advance national anti-corruption legislation, revise the Supervision Law, and formulate a law on countering transnational corruption.
(60) Ensuring the implementation of reforms with relentless perseverance
The whole Party must take pragmatic, resolute, and effective steps to ensure implementation of the Party Central Committee's decisions and plans on further deepening reform comprehensively. We need to work in concert from top to bottom across all departments and regions to set the tasks, timelines, and priorities for reform in a well-conceived way, and designate competent departments for implementing each reform initiative and clearly define their responsibilities. The implementation of major reforms will be subject to oversight and inspection, and the litmus test of reform will lie in how well it performs, what it delivers, and how much satisfaction it brings our people.
Chinese modernization is the modernization of peaceful development. In diplomatic work, China remains firm in pursuing an independent foreign policy of peace and is dedicated to promoting a human community with a shared future. We will stay committed to the common values of all humanity, pursue the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, and the Global Civilization Initiative, and call for an equal and orderly multipolar world and universally beneficial and inclusive economic globalization. We will deepen institutional reforms related to the work of foreign affairs and get involved in leading the reform and development of the global governance system. We will resolutely safeguard China's sovereignty, security, and development interests and foster a favorable external environment for further deepening reform comprehensively to advance Chinese modernization.
Let the whole Party, the entire military, and Chinese people of all ethnic groups rally more closely around the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core. Let us hold high the banner of reform and opening up, pool all wisdom and strength, and forge ahead with enterprise. Let us work hard toward the Second Centenary Goal of building China into a great modern socialist country in all respects and strive to advance the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation on all fronts through Chinese modernization.
