Xi Jinping and China's new era

Serve the people

Xi considers employment "pivotal" to people's well-being. He supports e-commerce and the new economy, which create jobs that never existed before.

Every day in China, about 16,500 new enterprises are established, and 40,000 people find new jobs in towns and cities.

In total, China has created more than 80 million new urban jobs over the past seven years, equal to the entire German population.

China now has the world's largest courier delivery service market, employing more than 3 million people, who send everything from meals to fridges around the country. Earlier this year, Xi paid a surprise visit to a tiny delivery station in Beijing and chatted with a group of deliverymen.

This closeness to the people is not a singular event. For the past seven years, Xi has spent time with regular people before every Chinese New Year: giving them festival gifts, observing festive traditions such as food preparation, and asking about their lives and welfare.

"CPC members must wholeheartedly serve the people," Xi often reminds Party cadres.

This connection with the people can be traced back to a time when Xi lived and worked in a remote village in Shaanxi province as an adolescent and young adult for seven years.

He has said that he understands the hardships of the people because he once lived in an impoverished corner of the country. He has been known to check the toilets and washrooms of ordinary homes, offer advice on garbage sorting, and show concern for students' poor eyesight.

In 2013, Xi put forward "targeted poverty alleviation" and set a goal to eliminate extreme rural poverty by 2020, a deadline that is 10 years earlier than the goal set by the United Nations.

Over the past seven years, more than 82 million Chinese people left poverty behind. Xi said extreme poverty "would be historically solved in the hands of our generation".

Kishore Mahbubani, a professor at the National University of Singapore, said the most outstanding achievement of China in the last 70 years had been the dramatic improvement in the living conditions of the people.

Reviewing China's long history, Mahbubani said even at previous peaks of glory, the bottom 50 percent of the population had to struggle to make ends meet. But today even low-income people have access to nutritious food, education, healthcare, housing, employment and even the ability to travel.

"There is no doubt that, in terms of the living conditions of the people, the past 70 years have been the best years in China's history," he said.