Xi's speech "remarkable tour d'horizon" of China's modern-day success: U.S. expert

Chinese President Xi Jinping's speech celebrating the 40th anniversary of the country's reform and opening-up was a "remarkable tour d'horizon of the foundations of China's modern-day success," a renowned U.S. expert on China has said.

"The standout feature of his address was his ability to hone into two key, inter-linked ingredients of the 1978 opening-up and reforms" that have served China well, Sourabh Gupta, senior fellow at the Institute for China-America Studies in Washington, D.C., said in a written interview with Xinhua.

China held a grand celebration on Tuesday on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of its reform and opening-up, honoring 100 Chinese and 10 foreigners for their remarkable contributions to China's development over the past decades.

Gupta said he had identified two key ingredients: "the unswerving focus on flexibility and pragmatism over dogma and rigidity" and "the equally unswerving focus on innovation and experimentation to seek a better way forward."

The Chinese president also said that there was "no end to the development of practice," Gupta said.

"Theoretical innovations themselves must, first of all, be based on and be informed by practice. Equally, on the experimentation front, Xi noted that innovation was itself the life-blood of reform and opening-up," the expert said.

"In what I felt was his most powerful sentence, he exhorted his countrymen and women to 'grasp the essence and internal connection of the development of things with a profound historical perspective as well as broad international perspective,' while sticking with a problem-solving and goal-oriented approach," Gupta said.

Gupta said he thinks the celebration was about identifying the ingredients of China's remarkable post-1978 successes and then using these insights as a guide to inform future actions.

"The address was about capturing and relaying these intangibles to his national and international audience; it was not about satisfying a checklist of foreign demands," he said.