Editor's note: This 100-episode podcast explains how China works. Exploring Xi Jinping Thought and how the Chinese president's approach has shaped the governance of China, the podcast recounts the country's growth story to help you truly understand its success and challenges.

We must adhere to the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics and continue to develop Chinese socialism. Forty years of reform and opening-up have taught us that the direction in which we advance decides our future; the path we have chosen decides our destiny.

To ensure our future rests in our own hands, we must be firmly committed to our ideal and path. Over the past 40 years of reform and opening-up, our Party has focused its theory and practice on upholding and developing socialism with Chinese characteristics. China is a vast country with over 5,000 years of history and a huge population. There is no manual to which we can refer in promoting reform and development, neither do we have any need for condescending instructors to lecture our people. 

Lu Xun, a famous 20th-century Chinese writer, said, "What is a road? It comes of trampling places where no road was before, of opening-up wasteland where only brambles grew." The path of socialism with Chinese characteristics will allow China to catch up with the times in great strides and play a leading role.

On the path ahead, we must act under the guidance of the Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era and the guiding principles of the Party's 19th National Congress held in 2017. We must have full confidence in our path, theory, system and culture, and keep reform and opening-up in the right direction. What to reform and how to reform must be assessed against the overall goal of improving and developing socialism with Chinese characteristics and modernizing our system and capacity for governance. 

We must reform what should be reformed and can be reformed; we must not reform what should not be reformed and cannot be reformed. We must remain committed to the Party's basic line, fulfilling the central task of economic development while upholding the Four Cardinal Principles and furthering reform and opening-up, in the great practice of socialism with Chinese characteristics. This is a long-term principle which we shall never abandon.

We must improve and develop the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics, and continuously build on our institutional strengths. Forty years of reform and opening-up have taught us that systems are of fundamental significance to the overall, stable and long-term development of the Party and the country.

Improving and developing the Chinese socialist system is key to China's progress. It provides a strong guarantee for unlocking and developing productivity, for releasing and enhancing social vitality, for maintaining the vigour of the Party and the country, for overall social stability, for the people to live and work in contentment, and for national security. It facilitates the establishment of dynamic systems and mechanisms that allow all elements such as labor, knowledge, technology, management and capital to fully function, and to bring forth all surging sources of social wealth.

On the path ahead we must, without hesitation, consolidate and develop the public sector, and at the same time, encourage, support and guide the development of the non-public sector. We must give full play to the decisive role of the market in resource allocation, give better play to the role of government, and invigorate all market entities.

We must ensure that the Party's leadership, the people's position as masters of the country, and law-based governance form an indivisible whole. We must uphold and improve the system of people's congresses the system of CPC-led multiparty cooperation and political consultation, the system of regional ethnic autonomy, and the system of grassroots self-governance. We must advance law-based governance, consolidate and develop the broadest possible patriotic united front, develop socialist consultative democracy, and provide institutional guarantees to ensure that the people are the masters of the country.

(Source: Extract from Xi Jinping's speech at a grand gathering to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the country's reform and opening-up, December 18, 2018.)

'Four Cardinal Principles' 

They refer to keeping to the socialist road and upholding the people's democratic dictatorship, leadership by the Communist Party of China, and Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.

(The explanation has been extracted from Xinhua News Agency.)

This episode is presented by Wang Mangmang.