President Xi Jinping visited primary-level officials and residents in Tianjin ahead of the Spring Festival. Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, extended Chinese New Year greetings to the Chinese people of all ethnic groups, compatriots in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan, and overseas China. Xi wished the Chinese people, both at home and abroad, good health, a happy family, and good luck in the Year of the Dragon, and wished the motherland peace and prosperity.
On the morning of Feb 1, Xi arrived at Diliubu village in Xinkou township, Xiqing district, as soon as he got off the train. In late July and early August last year, extremely heavy rain in North China caused floods in the Haihe River Basin that inundated much of the Dongdian flood storage and detention area in Tianjin. Xi was briefed on the damages the flood had caused to Tianjin as a whole and to Xiqing district. He walked into a greenhouse to check out the growth of vegetables and asked farmers in detail about how their greenhouses were restored, how vegetables were replanted, and about the sales of their vegetables. He gave local people credit for their rapid response, self-reliance, and self-motivation, as they proactively organized production to help themselves and seized the time to grow vegetables in as many fields as possible when the flood had ever subsided. He thanked them for their hard work in providing urban residents with more vegetable choices.
Xi walked into the house of Du Honggang, a villager with four generations of his family living under one roof. Xi sat down with the family to learn about their life and calculated the financial losses the family had suffered from the flood, their revenue from post-flood production, and the additional income from employment. Du told the general secretary that the family's more than 10 mu (about 0.67 hectares) of corn fields and vegetable patches were damaged by the flood, but with the help of the Party and the government, they were able to recover quickly, and their vegetable greenhouses, in particular, were swiftly repaired, allowing them to have a good harvest of vegetables in season. With the Spring Festival around the corner, the family has stocked up a satisfactory variety of festive items, and thanks to a series of cultural events arranged by the village, people are all in a cheerful mood. Quoting a Chinese idiom about national prosperity and social harmony, Xi noted that a country is prosperous only when its people live in peace, saying that the CPC Central Committee, as well as Party committees and governments at all levels, are concerned about everyone's safety and well-being at all times. He also expressed the hope for villagers to rebuild their homes and create a happy life with their own hands.
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