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elegates from all over China praised a five-year progress report delivered by the country’s most powerful politician while at the same time throwing their support behind a series of strategies meant to catapult China into becoming a “moderately prosperous county.”

Communist Party of China (CPC) General Secretary Xi Jinping, who also fills the position of president of China, presented his report to the 2,280 delegates at the Great Hall of People on Wednesday to mark the opening of the 19th National Congress of the CPC.

On Thursday, the second day of the congress, delegations representing governments and other organizations all over the country — the four municipalities of Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Chongqing directly controlled by the central government, plus 22 provinces, the five autonomous regions of Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Guangxi, Xinjiang and Tibet and others representing Beijing-based state-owned enterprises, financial sector bodies and the party’s major departments — participated in open sessions held to allow them to comment on Xi’s report and deliberate over a report from the party’s 18th Central Committee.

Like all their colleagues, the delegation from Fujian province, which had 41 members and was led by You Quan, the secretary of the provincial CPC Committee, supported the report made by Xi, who once worked in the Fujian city of Fuzhou, which not only covered past progress, but also his thoughts about making China a modern socialist country by 2050.

After voicing their support for their leader, the delegates from Fujian, from which many overseas Chinese in Indonesia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia originated, called for the reunification of Taiwan, which Beijing considers a renegade province, with mainland China.

Some of the delegates from the Fujian city of Xiamen, which directly faces Taiwan across the Formosa Strait, called for more coordinated development with the island territory, using the province’s geographical advantage to make better connections with Taiwan.

Fujian being a coastal province, its delegates also discussed their interest in the various physical connectivity efforts being made through the so-called Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Xiamen CPC secretary Pei Jinjia said he supported further facilitation and liberalization of trade and investment, explaining that implementing the BRI represented a balance between “going out and inviting in.”

“Developing a free-trade zone is my main focus today,” he said.

“Such business reform makes it easier to register, with the goal of being more convenient and efficient. We will follow the World Bank’s standards.”

Wang Ning, the CPC secretary of the Fujian capital of Fuzhou, said his city represented the starting point of the maritime connectivity that was proposed by Xi when he was working there.

Wang said he also strongly supported the development of a free trade zone to spur job creation.

“We will also learn from other cities about how to build a new coastal city,” he said.

Other than the session attended by the delegation from Fujian, there were 14 simultaneous discussions in the morning and 15 more in the afternoon.

In one of them, a delegate from Sichuan said the development of infrastructure in his southwestern province, especially for transportation, had significantly improved in the past five years.

“In the past, transportation was so bad because of the mountains,” the delegate said.

He said that in spite of the challenges, the province had transformed into a hi-tech center that included aerospace technology industries, as Sichuan supplies many important parts and components for the manufacture of China’s C919 narrow-body jetliner, namely airplane nose sections, avionics systems, in-flight entertainment systems, interior lighting and radios.