"The fire burns hotter when more hands feed it." We have within the central leadership an effective mechanism featuring both division of labor and coordination. So we go about our respective duties while working in concert to get the job done properly.
-- Speech given by Xi Jinping at a joint interview by the press of the BRICS countries, March 19, 2013
The Fire Burns Hotter When More Hands Feed It
-- United as one, making great achievements together
"The fire burns hotter when more hands feed it, with few people nothing can get done." This folk saying was included in Selected Chinese Idioms and means that when many people act together and add firewood to a burning fire, the flame will leap up high. It is generally used to imply thinking the same thing and working toward the same purpose to form a consensus and combined forces.
Since the 18th CPC National Congress, the world has paid close attention to China's new leadership. During a joint press interview, Xi Jinping talked about the work to be done by himself and the new leadership team, and made symbolic use of this Chinese idiom to impart two levels of meaning: First, the traditional Chinese understanding of leadership is not pure individual existence, but rather individuals integrating into the whole, working together, and complementing one another. This is what leads to better results. Second, it clearly told everyone that China's top leadership was actually not what it was believed by the outside, with a "big boss" who called all of the shots. Instead, it was a collective leadership in which each member had clear duties but also worked closely together.
The job of the CPC is to work tirelessly to lead the Chinese people in development, build a modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, and harmonious, and realize the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. To realize the common dream of more than a billion people, everyone must do their part. This requires that more people identify with the value of this dream and jointly participate in the great cause of development and construction. If everyone does their part in realizing this dream, given enough time they can build a soaring tower.
"There is power in numbers and everything is easier with more help." This concept has been around in China for a long time. The deeper social cause of this is from the ancient Chinese social structure that focused on agriculture, and the more labor forces that were put to use at the same time, the greater the harvest. But the division of labor is increasingly minute in modern large-scale socialized production, and individuals have a stronger sense of self-identity. Systems theory and modern management theory tell us that the whole is not necessarily the sum of the parts, and the overall function may be greater or less than the mechanical accumulation of all subsystems or departmental forces. It is determined by whether the subsystems or departments have the same goal and also by whether their structure is reasonably formed. If people do not have the same mental identification or action guidance within a system, it will be a total mess with everyone working toward their own ends. Or, even if some systems do have highly unified thoughts and objectives, they might still be prone to internal strife if the members cannot complement each other's abilities and individual drive is not utilized.
Therefore, we must have a flail understanding of "the fire burns hotter when more hands feed it" than simply "there is power in numbers." Apart from having the same objective of building a strong, prosperous, democratic, culturally advanced, and harmonious socialist nation, we must also form a scientific operating mechanism and reasonable division of labor, as this is the only way in which we can finally create an indomitable force and let the fire burn even hotter.
(An excerpt from XI JINPING: WIT AND VISION -- SELECTED QUOTATIONS AND COMMENTARY, published by FOREIGN LANGUAGES PRESS in 2015)
