(3) We must link respecting people's initiatives with strengthening and improving the leadership of the Party, exercise governance for the people, closely rely on the people, make every endeavor for the well-being of the people, and exercise the core leadership of the Party through bringing people's role in creating history into full play.
Over the past 30 years, while upholding the Marxist scientific principle that people create history, we have stood in great earnest for the fundamental interest of the overwhelming majority of the people, drawn on their wisdom, and given the fullest play to their enthusiasm, initiative and creativity. Meanwhile, we have strengthened and improved the Party's leadership, winning the full trust and support of the people, and consistently exercised the core leadership, providing the basic political guarantee to mobilizing immense strength to carry out reform and opening up as well as the socialist modernization drive.
The Chinese people are the source of strength for the Party and form the foundation for our victory. Reform and opening up are integration of people's and Party's political strategy. This is therefore the cause of the millions of Chinese people themselves. We uphold the notion of serving the people wholeheartedly and fully relying on them to do our work, and carry forward the fine tradition of "from the masses, to the masses," turning the Party's correct proposals into people's voluntary action. We advocate the consistency between respecting the law of social development and respecting the principal status of the people in history, the consistency between striving for the lofty ideals of the Party and working for the interests of the overwhelming majority of the people, and the consistency between accomplishing the Party's work in all aspects and bringing more benefits to the people. We base the formulation of all our guiding principles and policies on the support, approval, liking and consent of the people, and use three essential criteria as the basic judgment, namely, whether these principles and policies contribute to developing socialist productive forces, whether they contribute to enhancing the national capacity of socialist China, and whether they contribute to improving the livelihoods of the people. We must continue to seek the people's opinions of our policies, learning about what they need and asking them for advice. We must guide the people with the correct theories, lines, policies and guiding principles that we have advanced and implemented, while endeavoring to gain the driving forces from their creations through practice and from their requirements for development. We must respect the principal position of the people in the country's political life, give play to their initiatives, and implement the important policy of respect for work, knowledge, talent and creation. We must rely on the working class wholeheartedly, bringing into play the role of the working class, the peasantry and other workers as the primary force for promoting social productivity, and supporting people from other new ranks and classes to play their role in the cause of building socialism with Chinese characteristics, so that people from all walks of life can dedicate themselves to the great cause of reform and opening up with enormous enthusiasm. We must uphold the fundamental purpose of serving the people wholeheartedly, build the Party for public interest, exercise governance for the people, bring benefits to them through reform and development, and work hard to realize, safeguard and expand the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the people. We must always be of one mind with the people, share a common fate with them, and derive nourishment from their creation through practice in order to enrich and perfect the views and ideas of the Party. In this way, the CPC will forever stand in the forefront of the times in the historical course of the profoundly changing world, serve as the backbone for people of all ethnic groups in the historical course of withstanding risks and ordeals from home and abroad, and form the core of strong leadership in the historical course of building socialism with Chinese characteristics.