BEIJING, October 12 (Xinhua) -- The China of 2020 envisioned by China's Communist leaders was first introduced to the world as a "well-off society" in a Party report in 2002 and changed to a "moderately prosperous society" in an annual government work report two years later.
This quiet change in the translation of "xiao kang", an ideal society originally conceived during the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC-25 AD) and borrowed by the Communist Party of China to inspire a national drive toward Socialism, could just be a correction of a previously inaccurate translation.
But the self-rectification by those at the helm of the world's most populous nation is constant.
The connotations of the political catchphrase "building a xiao kang society in all round way" put forward in 2002 at the Party's 16th National Congress has been fleshed out by constant policy recalibrating, says Zhou Tianyong, deputy director of the Research Office of the Party School of the CPC Central Committee.
"This makes the goal more attainable and more appealing," he says, days before the opening of the 17th National Congress of CPC, which will decide policies for the country's future.
The late Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping's declarations that "To get rich is glorious" and "Poverty is not Socialism" unleashed a great zeal for economic reform. China has impressed the world by slashing the number of its people in abject poverty from 250 million to 20 million and a GDP rise triple the international average for 29 straight years.
Judged from the GDP figures alone, China could probably usher in the "xiao kang" society much soonerer as the country reached half of its economic growth target in a quarter of the projected period, economist Zhuang Jian with the Asian Development Bank points out.
The "xiao kang society" was envisioned as moderately prosperous with the per capita GDP tripling from the 2002 figure to US$3,000 by 2020. To achieve the target, the country only needs to keep annual economic growth at a minimum of seven percent. Last year, China's per capita GDP broke the US$2,000 mark while its economy registered a double-digit growth for the fourth consecutive year.
"The central issue is will China's sizzling economy sustain itself? To answer the question, you have to take a long-term approach and examine what has been neglected and deserves more emphasis," says Zhuang Jian.
SARS, as Premier Wen Jiabao, a CPC member for 42 years, once revealed to foreign journalists, was the crucial trigger to such examination which has resulted in serious considerations on more coordinated development.
The unexpected disease outbreak that killed 346 Chinese and infected 5,327 in the six months to June 2003 was the first global emergency ever handled by the CPC leadership with Hu Jintao as the newly-elected general secretary. Some observers regard the event as the activator of the "scientific concept of development", which is hailed as the latest fruit of Marxism-Leninism in China.
