A deputy to the 14th National People's Congress (NPC), who is also a two-time Olympic champion, on Thursday attributed her accomplishments to the rapid development of the motherland.
Speaking during a group interview ahead of the opening meeting of the fourth session of the 14th NPC at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Xu Shixiao, Olympic gold medalist of the women's double canoe 500m event at the Tokyo and Paris Olympics, and a NPC deputy from east China's Jiangxi Province said that it is the idea of winning glory for the country that drives her to fight at increasingly higher levels of competition.
"When I wore the national team uniform, my dream wasn't just to participate in the Olympics; I wanted to stand on the highest podium and let the five-star red flag flutter in the wind. And so, step by step, I made my dream come true, growing from a naive teenager into an world-class athlete. In recent years, the country's rapid development has provided us with a stage to showcase our talents. At the Paris Olympics, the Chinese sports delegation achieved its best results ever in overseas competitions; this is the confidence that comes from the strength of our motherland," said Xu.
Looking ahead, Xu said that she has proposed to utilize inactive city spaces for people to do sports and volunteered to get more people involved in sports by using her long years of experience in training.
"As an athlete and a deputy to the National People's Congress, I actively fulfill my duties by drawing on my years of training experience and propose to revitalize idle urban spaces and promote a nationwide fitness boom. I hope that more and more people will join me in sport activities and gain good health and happiness through sports," she said.
Motherland's rapid growth offers stage to show one's talent: NPC deputy
A veteran agricultural scientist and deputy to the National People's Congress (NPC), China's national legislature, shared his decades-long mission to reduce the country's reliance on food imports and safeguard its food security by developing high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties.
Gao Derong, a researcher from the Lixiahe Regional Institute of Agricultural Sciences in east China's Jiangsu Province, detailed his relentless pursuit of better wheat varieties while taking a question at a press conference on the sidelines of the ongoing "two sessions", a major event in China's political calendar.
He has dedicated more than 30 years to wheat breeding and succeeded in the fight against Fusarium head blight, a serious fungal disease of cereals, including wheat and other small-grain crops, by implanting "disease-resistant genes" inside seeds.
"After 30 years of countless and repeated trials, we finally developed our first Fusarium head blight resistant variety in 2021. It exhibits strong disease resistance and high yield, with a yield of up to 600 kg per mu (0.066 hectare) in a demonstration plot. This means farmers can use fewer pesticides, produce more wheats, and secure a more stable harvest," said Gao.
Addressing the tight rotation schedule in the rice-wheat rotation system in south China, his team developed time-smart varieties like "Yangmai 25," which can be sown as late as December and still achieve a yield of 6,00 kg per mu.
"We have also cultivated a high-quality weak-gluten wheat variety tailored for biscuits and pastries, reversing China's long-standing reliance on imports. These grain varieties, like elite guard teams, help us hold our rice bowl firmly and contribute to securing our food security," Gao said.
As an NPC deputy, Gao extends his research from the lab to the field, gathering farmers' concerns alongside experimental data.
"My duty as a deputy is also written in the fields. 'Can we construct high-standard farmland at an accelerated pace?' 'Can we have more targeted agricultural subsidies?' These are the voices I often heard in the fields, which I carefully recorded like experimental data and transformed into suggestions," he said. Gao said he will continue working to enable the land to yield more grain, help farmers increase their incomes, and contribute to ensuring national food security.
This year's "two sessions," the annual meetings of China's top political advisory body and national legislature, opened in Beijing Wednesday and Thursday, respectively. As the world's second-largest economy embarks on the inaugural year of its 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030) period, these gatherings will serve both as a review of past achievements, and as a strategic compass guiding the nation's future development.
NPC deputy vows to fortify China's food security through seed innovation
