Xi, villagers share insights into song on role of unity

Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, wrote back to Party members in a village in northern China on Sunday to send the villagers Lunar New Year's greetings.

In his reply to Party members in Beizhuang, a village in Xibaipo township, Pingshan county, Hebei province, Xi, who is also Chinese president and chairman of the Central Military Commission, encouraged all Party members there to unite and work with the villagers to make life even more prosperous.

Xibaipo was an old revolutionary base area of the CPC, where the Party leadership was located from May 1948 to early 1949, and where it made important plans for its future work and prepared for the CPC's new role as the ruling party.

It was in Beizhuang that the popular revolutionary song Unity is Strength was first sung 78 years ago before it spread to the rest of the country, becoming a song enjoyed by hundreds of millions of people, Xi said in the letter.

He quoted the first sentence of the song's lyrics, which means "unity is strength, which is as strong as iron and steel".

In June 1943, a group of revolutionary artists working in Beizhuang wrote the upbeat, catchy and motivating song and created an opera with the same name.

Recently, Party members in the village wrote to Xi to brief him on how they were inspired by this song to win the battle against poverty.

In the letter, they expressed their resolve to further promote unity and lead the villagers to seek rural vitalization and lead a better life.

In the reply letter, Xi said he is glad that the village's Party members have led the villagers to pass on the revolutionary spirit, unite and work hard and lift the village out of poverty.

The history of the CPC over the past 100 years has seen the Party uniting and leading the people to strive for a better life, and the officials and villagers in Xibaipo have a deeper understanding of this, Xi wrote.

Xi expressed his hopes that the village's Party members would respond to the call of the CPC Central Committee, give full play to their vanguard and exemplary role, better unite the villagers, think and work as one, and make life even more prosperous on the new journey of building a modern socialist country in an all-around way.