Chinese President Xi Jinping has stressed efforts to promote the building of a Beautiful China in all respects and accelerate the advancement of modernization featuring harmony between humans and nature. Photo: CCTV News

Chinese President Xi Jinping has stressed efforts to promote the building of a Beautiful China in all respects and accelerate the advancement of modernization featuring harmony between humans and nature.

Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, made the remarks at a national conference on ecological and environmental protection held from Monday to Tuesday.

The next five years is a crucial period for building a Beautiful China, which should be placed in a prominent position in building a great modern socialist country in all respects and advancing national rejuvenation, Xi said.

The country should support high-quality development with a high-quality ecological environment and promote the modernization featuring the harmonious co-existence between human and nature, he noted.

Xi said that the country's ecological conservation has undergone historic, transformative and comprehensive changes both in theory and practice, with significant strides made in building a Beautiful China.

Noting that China's economy and society have entered a stage of high-quality development marked by faster progress in promoting green and low-carbon growth, Xi called for a higher standpoint, a broader perspective and stronger efforts in planning and advancing ecological and environmental protection on the new journey, as well as writing a new chapter of ecological conservation in the new era.

Xi stressed properly handling the relationships between high-quality development and high-level protection, between tackling major challenges and coordinating governance, between natural recovery and human-assisted restoration, between external constraints and internal driving forces, as well as between "dual carbon" commitments and self-determined actions.

Authorities must remember to maintain human-nature harmony when planning development, Xi said. High-level environmental protection should be realized to create new driving forces and advantages for development continuously, build a green, low-carbon and circular economy, effectively reduce the resource and environmental costs of development, and increase the potential and sustainability of development, he noted.

While effective measures should be taken to solve the outstanding ecological problems, ecological and environmental protection work should be carried out in a more systematic, holistic, and coordinated manner, Xi said.

The methods of natural recovery and human-assisted restoration should both be adopted in a comprehensive way in accordance with local circumstances, so as to find the best ways for ecological protection and restoration, he said.

He urged efforts to protect the ecological environment with the strictest regulations and laws, and stimulate the internal impetus of the whole society to jointly care for the ecological environment. In terms of China's commitments and actions on carbon peaking and carbon neutrality, Xi said China's commitments are unswerving, but the path towards the goals as well as the manner, pace and intensity of efforts to achieve them should and must be determined by the country itself, rather than swayed by others.

Environmental protection will continue being a major focus of the work of the CPC. In a report delivered by Xi to the 20th National Congress of the CPC in October 2022, Xi said China will advance the Beautiful China Initiative and take a holistic and systematic approach to the conservation and improvement of mountains, waters, forests, farmlands, grasslands and deserts.

Global Times