Editor's note: This podcast series explains how China works. It features key excerpts from Xi Jinping's speech at an event on July 1 to celebrate the centenary of the Communist Party of China. In the speech, Xi looked back on the lessons of history and explored the Party's role in China's journey to becoming a moderately prosperous society.

To realize national rejuvenation, the Party united and led the Chinese people in endeavoring to build a stronger China with a spirit of self-reliance, achieving great success in socialist revolution and construction.

By carrying out socialist revolution, we eliminated the exploitative and repressive feudal system that had persisted in China for thousands of years and established socialism as our basic system. In the process of socialist construction, we overcame subversion, sabotage and armed provocation by imperialist and hegemonic powers and brought about the most extensive and profound social changes in the history of the Chinese nation. This great transformation of China from a poor and backward country in the East with a large population into a socialist country laid down the fundamental political conditions and the institutional foundations necessary for realizing national rejuvenation.

Through tenacious struggle, the Party and the Chinese people showed the world that the Chinese people were capable of not only dismantling the old world but also building a new one, that only socialism could save China, and that only socialism could develop China.

(Source: Extract from Xi Jinping's speech at the ceremony marking the centenary of the Communist Party of China in Beijing, capital of China, July 1, 2021.)

This episode is presented by Luo Laiming.