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Culture is a country and nation's soul. Our country will thrive only if our culture thrives, and our nation will be strong only if our culture is strong. Without full confidence in our culture, without a rich and prosperous culture, the Chinese nation will not be able to rejuvenate itself. We must develop a socialist culture with Chinese characteristics, inspire the cultural creativity of our whole nation, and develop a great socialist culture in China.

Socialist culture with Chinese characteristics is derived from China's fine traditional culture, which was born of the Chinese civilization and nurtured over more than 5,000 years. It has grown out of the revolutionary and advanced socialist culture that developed over the course of the Chinese people's revolution, construction and reform under the Party's leadership; and it is rooted in the great practice of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

To develop socialist culture with Chinese characteristics means to develop a socialist culture for our nation – a culture that is sound and people-oriented, that embraces modernization, the world, and the future, and that both promotes socialist material well-being and raises socialist cultural-ethical standards. In developing this culture, we must follow the guidance of Marxism, base our efforts on Chinese culture and take into account the realities of contemporary China and the conditions of the present era. We should ensure that this culture serves the people and serves socialism. We should follow the principle of letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend, and encourage creative transformation and development, so as to add new luster to Chinese culture.

We must continue to adapt Marxism to China's conditions, keep it up-to-date and enhance its popular appeal. We will develop socialist ideology that has the ability to unite and the power to inspire the people to embrace shared ideals, convictions, values and moral standards. We will better arm ourselves with theory and increase the public appeal of the Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era. We will work harder to study and develop Marxist theory, work faster to develop philosophy and social sciences with Chinese characteristics, and develop new types of think tanks with distinctive Chinese features.

We will maintain the right tone in public communication, give priority to improving means of communication and to creating new ones, and strengthen the penetration, guidance, influence and credibility of the media. We will provide more and better online content and put in place a system for integrated internet management to ensure a clean cyberspace. We will implement the system of responsibility for ideological work, and further consolidate our positions and improve management in this field. We will distinguish between matters of political principle, issues of understanding and thinking, and academic viewpoints, but we must oppose and resist various erroneous views with a clear stand.

Core socialist values represent the contemporary Chinese spirit and are a crystallization of the values shared by all Chinese people.

We will focus on fostering a new generation capable of shouldering the mission of national rejuvenation. We will offer them better guidance, expose them to practice and provide institutional guarantees. We will draw on core socialist values to guide education, efforts to raise cultural-ethical standards, and the creation, production and distribution of cultural and intellectual products, and see that all areas of social development are imbued with these values and that they become part of people's thinking and behavior. To this end, we will encourage extensive public involvement, making our officials take the lead and starting with families and children.

We will draw on China's fine traditional culture, keep alive and develop its vision, concepts, values and moral norms, and do so in a way that responds to the call of our era. With this we will see that Chinese culture maintains its appeal and evolves with the times.

(Source: Extract from Xi Jinping's report at the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China on October 18, 2017.)

This episode is presented by Ning Yan.