十七大报告全文英汉对照 Report to the Seventeenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China on Oct

II. The Great Historical Course of Reform and Opening Up

We will soon be celebrating the 30th anniversary of the start of reform and opening up. In 1978, the Party held the historic Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee, which ushered in the new historical period of reform and opening up. Since then, the Chinese Communists and the Chinese people have, in an indomitable enterprising spirit and with their spectacular practice of innovation, composed a new epic recounting the Chinese nation’s ceaseless efforts to make progress and become stronger, and historic changes have taken place in the visages of the Chinese people, socialist China and the CPC.

Reform and opening up represent a great new revolution carried on by the people under the Party’s leadership in a new era to release and develop the productive forces, modernize the country, bring prosperity to the Chinese people and achieve the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation; to promote the self-improvement and development of China’s socialist system, inject new vitality into socialism, and build and develop

socialism with Chinese characteristics; and to improve the building of the Party as it leads contemporary China in development and progress, preserve and enhance its vanguard nature, and ensure that it is always in the forefront of the times.

We must never forget that the great cause of reform and opening up was conducted on a foundation laid by the Party’s first generation of central collective leadership with Comrade Mao Zedong at its core, which founded Mao Zedong Thought, led the whole Party and the people of all ethnic groups in establishing the People’s Republic and scoring great achievements in our socialist revolution and construction, and gained invaluable

experience in its painstaking exploration for laws governing socialist construction. The victory in the new-democratic revolution and the establishment of the basic system of socialism provided the fundamental political prerequisite and institutional basis for every inch of development and progress in contemporary China.

We must never forget that the great cause of reform and opening up was initiated by the Party’s second generation of central collective

leadership with Comrade Deng Xiaoping at its core leading the whole Party and the people of all ethnic groups in the endeavor. In a precarious situation left by the “cultural revolution” (1966-76), the second generation of central collective leadership, persisting in emancipating the mind and seeking truth from facts and displaying immense political and theoretical courage, made a scientific appraisal of Comrade Mao Zedong and Mao Zedong Thought, thoroughly repudiated the erroneous theory and