-- At a grand gathering Thursday in Shanghai, President Xi Jinping called for new roles and new missions for Shanghai's Pudong as the country celebrates the 30th anniversary of the area's development and opening-up.
-- The coming 30 years, from now to the middle of the 21st century, will be a time for China to build a great modern socialist country, Xi stressed, calling on Pudong to play new roles and accomplish new missions in the new march.
-- Xi urged the achievement of major innovations in basic science and technology and major breakthroughs in key and core technologies, and called for accelerated creation of world-class industrial clusters in sectors including integrated circuits, bio-medicine and artificial intelligence in Pudong.
SHANGHAI, Nov. 12 -- Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday called for new roles and new missions for Shanghai's Pudong as the country celebrates the 30th anniversary of the area's development and opening-up.
Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, delivered an important speech at a grand gathering in Shanghai.
Efforts should go into making Pudong a pioneer of reform and opening-up at a higher level, and a vanguard in fully building a modern socialist country, Xi said.
Pudong should also strive to become an example that highlights the Chinese people's confidence in the path, theory, system, and culture of socialism with Chinese characteristics, he said.
Aerial panoramic photo taken on Oct. 25, 2020 shows a view of the Lin-gang Special Area of Pudong New Area in Shanghai, east China. (Xinhua/Fang Zhe)
DEVELOPMENT VANGUARD
When China announced the strategic decision to develop and open up Pudong in 1990, the area consisted of farmland and was considered far less-developed compared with its neighbor across the Huangpu River, Puxi.
"A single bed in Puxi is preferable to a room in Pudong." This was a popular saying in Shanghai back then.
Within 30 years, Pudong has become one of the country's most prosperous districts, with its regional GDP surging by more than 210 times since 1990.
The area is now home to over 1,000 financial institutions, over 300 regional headquarters of multinationals, and more than 240 foreign-invested research and development centers.
"The achievements of Pudong over the past 30 years offer the most telling evidence of the strength of the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics, and are a vivid demonstration of the country's reform, opening-up, and socialist modernization," Xi said at the gathering.
The significance of Pudong's development and opening-up went beyond its own prosperity. Over the years, the area has turned into a destination for policymakers to pilot policies that were later tried out across the country.
