“Serve the People” is the title of one of Mao Zedong’s most famous articles. And this simple phrase also goes to the heart of the style of work that the Communist Party of China seeks to promote.
This video, released by CGTN to coincide with Xi Jinping’s recent election to serve as the President of China for a third term, shows how the Chinese leader has practiced and come to personify this way of working since his early years.
It begins with his being sent, as a teenage ‘educated youth’, to the poor village of Liangjiahe in Shaanxi province. He rose to become the village party secretary and led the local people to take a whole series of innovative measures to boost food production. Yet he only ate white rice once in the whole of the seven years that he lived there.
The documentary follows the future national leader through his work in Zhengding, a poor area in Hebei province, where he started his political career and encouraged the development of rural research teams and of a semi-suburban economy, to Fujian, where he encouraged local people to become ‘sci-tech’ experts, and to his leadership of disaster relief work in Zhejiang.
Against this historical background, we also see the people’s leader going, in Lenin’s memorable words, “lower and deeper to the real masses” in all parts of the country. Particularly striking are his revisits to the places and people where and with whom he worked in the past. When the film culminates with him taking the oath of office of President last month, with clenched fist raised, one can well appreciate how this accords with the deeply-felt wish of the Chinese people from all ethnic groups.
The CGTN video is embedded below.
