On September 12, 1997, Jiang Zemin’s report to the 15th Party Congress set goals for two dates. By the hundredth year of the Party, the economy would be more developed. By the middle of the century, the hundredth year of the People’s Republic, China would basically achieve modernization.
Chinese Wikipedia traces the Two Centenary Goals (两个一百年) to this report. On July 1, 2021, Xi Jinping declared: “We have achieved the first centenary goal.”
On March 12, 2026, the National People’s Congress approved the outline of the 15th Five-Year Plan. The Party’s proposals for the plan had been adopted at the Fourth Plenum in October 2025. People’s Daily wrote that carrying out the plan would lay “a more solid foundation for basically realizing socialist modernization by 2035.”
The same article described one line running through all the plans: “From the First Five-Year Plan to the 14th Five-Year Plan, the consistent theme has been to build our country into a modern socialist country.”
Article 5 of the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region: “The socialist system and policies shall not be practiced in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, and the previous capitalist system and way of life shall remain unchanged for fifty years.” (五十年不变)
The National Development and Reform Commission gives the schedule of the Three-North Shelterbelt Program (三北防护林): “The construction period is 1978 to 2050, in three stages and eight phases.”
Tian Ji, a general of Qi, often raced horses against the princes for high stakes. Sun Bin noticed that the horses on each side were not far apart in speed and fell into three classes. He told Tian Ji: “Race your lowest team against their best, your best against their middle, and your middle against their lowest.”
Tian Ji lost one race and won two, and he took the king’s thousand pieces of gold. Afterwards he introduced Sun Bin to the king, who made him his teacher in war. (Records of the Grand Historian)
人无远虑，必有近忧 A person without far-reaching thoughts will have troubles close at hand. (Analects)
十年树木，百年树人 Ten years to grow trees, a hundred years to grow people. Training people takes long investment.
舍车保帅 Give up the chariot to save the general. A term from Chinese chess. To sacrifice something secondary to protect what matters most.
From May 26 to June 3, 1938, Mao Zedong gave a series of lectures in Yan’an titled On Protracted War (论持久战). He rejected two views of the war against Japan: that China would win quickly, and that China would be conquered. The war would be protracted, he argued, and the final victory would be China’s.
In many old families, one character in each person’s name marks the generation. Since the early Ming, the descendants of Confucius have taken these characters from lists issued by the central government. Chinese Wikipedia gives the list for the 56th to the 105th generation, fifty characters in all. It begins 希言公彦承 and ends 永锡世绪昌.
Under the Qianlong Emperor, the court decreed that descendants of Confucius and of three other sage families must take their names from the granted characters, or they would not be entered in the family register.
The Ming founder set twenty characters for each line of his own descendants. According to Chinese Wikipedia, the former premier Zhu Rongji belongs to the generation 镕 in the line of the Prince of Min.
细水长流 A thin stream flows long. To keep at something steadily, or to plan carefully so that resources last.
放长线钓大鱼 Let out a long line to catch a big fish. To plan for the long term in order to gain more. The Handian dictionary adds that such a plan “cannot pay off at once.”
来日方长 The days to come are long. There is still a long time ahead. The Handian dictionary cites a letter by the Song official Wen Tianxiang as an example.
On October 25, 1978, at a press conference in Tokyo, a Japanese reporter asked Deng Xiaoping about the Diaoyu Islands. Deng said that the two sides had set the question aside when they normalized relations. “It does not matter if such a question is set aside for a while, even for ten years.”
He added: “Our generation is not wise enough. Our next generation will surely be wiser than us. They will always find a good way, acceptable to all, to solve this question.”