Editor's note: The 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China concluded with a blueprint mapped out for China's future development in the next five years and beyond. CGTN is publishing "How China Works – Charting the Future," a special series delving deep into a key report adopted at the congress to see how the country can fulfill the goals and tasks on the new journey of the new era.

In the new development stage, our country is experiencing a profound level of change in its domestic and external environment and faces many new matters of consequence. We should understand them fully.

We must understand our strategic goal of common prosperity and know how to make it happen.

Under socialism, our expectation is that the country will progressively unleash and develop the productive forces, create and accumulate social wealth, and at the same time prevent polarization and make more substantive progress in promoting well-rounded human development and common prosperity for all.

We should make the "cake" of social wealth bigger through the concerted efforts of all our people; then we should properly handle the relationship between growth and distribution by institutional means so as to share the "cake" fairly. This will take a long time, and we should create the conditions, improve the relevant institutions, and take steady steps towards this goal.

In promoting high-quality development we should prioritize employment, which is pivotal to people's wellbeing.

We should make greater use of the functions and roles of distribution. We should properly handle the relationship between efficiency and equity and put in place a basic institutional framework in which distribution, redistribution and third distribution coordinate with and complement each other. Distribution according to work should continue as the mainstay, and we should increase the share of work remuneration in primary distribution and improve distribution based on factors of production.

We should ensure the adjusting role of redistribution and make it more targeted by better leveraging taxation, social security and transfer payments. We should bring into play the role of third distribution, and guide and support enterprises and social groups with both the will and the capacity to participate actively in public welfare and charity undertakings, but we will not allow charitable donations to be coerced by means of moral blackmail.

We should respect the principle of doing what we can to the best of our ability, focus on improving public services, provide basic public services in a targeted manner in education, healthcare, elderly care, housing and other fields that concern the people the most, and ensure subsistence for those in difficulty. We should not set expectations too high or make unrealistic commitments.

(Source: Part of Xi Jinping's speech at the Central Economic Work Conference, December 8, 2021.)

This episode is presented by Li Jianhua