Youth With “Four Virtues”

On May 26, 1980, Deng Xiaoping wrote an inscription to the China Youth Daily and The Counselor magazine: “I hope children across the country will be determined to be ideal, moral, educated, and disciplined people, and determined to contribute to the people, contribute to the motherland, and contribute to mankind.” Subsequently, he repeatedly put forward the requirement to cultivate younger generation with “four virtues”. Younger generation with “four virtues”, as the life development goals of young people in the socialist period and the comprehensive requirements for citizens' qualities, are the specific provisions for the “well-rounded people” in the new period of socialist construction. Cultivating socialist younger generation is an important Marxist thought on people. Marx and Engels pointed out that the future communist society needs free and well-rounded younger generation.

Lenin pointed out that the purpose of training and education for the younger generation is to cultivate knowledgeable, ethical, and disciplined communists, and only by enriching their minds with all the knowledge created by human beings can they become communists. Socialism cannot be built in a country full of illiteracy. In the early days of the founding of New China, Mao Zedong put forward the requirements of “good health, good study, and good work” for young people, and later put forward the slogan of “being both socialist-minded and professionally competent” and the educational policy of “enabling the educated to develop in moral education, intellectual education, and sports, and become educated workers with socialist consciousness”. After the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh CPC Central Committee, in accordance with the new situation and tasks, Deng Xiaoping, on the basis of summing up the experience and lessons of talent training since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, put forward the goal of cultivating younger generation with “four virtues”. In his speech to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China on July 1, 2001, Jiang Zemin further proposed cultivating citizens as one of the fundamental tasks of developing socialist culture. Under the new historical conditions, Xi Jinping emphasized the importance of cultivating and educating people with ideals, culture and morals from the height of national ideals, Chinese characteristics, Chinese roads, and foundation of national culture, promoting the Party’s important theoretical development in ideological and ethical progress, cultural and moral construction. Cultivating citizens with “four virtues” is an urgent need for building socialism with Chinese characteristics and realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. The Reform and Opening-up and the development of socialist modernization have created conditions for the improvement of people's ideological and moral quality and scientific and cultural quality. At the same time, it also puts forward higher requirements for the improvement of the quality of the whole nation and the all-round development of people.

Deng Xiaoping said: “Our country, the strength of the country, and the size of the economic development stamina are increasingly determined by the quality of workers and the number and quality of intellectuals.”

“Four virtues” is an organic unity, in which ideals, ethics, and discipline are requirements for citizens' ideological and moral qualities. Ideal is the goal, morality is the basis for realizing ideals, discipline is the performance of lofty ideals and good morals, and the guarantee of ideals and morals, and literacy is the requirement for citizens' scientific and cultural qualities, which provides intellectual support for modernization.