——Quoted in "Speech at the Symposium to Commemorate the 69th Anniversary of the Victory of the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War" and other articles

■Interpretation

The Chinese have long had a deep understanding of the importance of reform and innovation. There are similar sayings in the "Book of Songs" that "although Zhou is an old state, its life is renewed", and "Han Feizi" said that "if the world is different, things are different, and things are different, and things are different". Seeking change, development, and progress is the fundamental direction for China to explore the path of prosperity and strength. Engels once asserted that socialism is "a society that is constantly changing and reforming". As the saying goes, "reform and opening up is only in progress, not completed." With the rapid changes in the world and the rising demands of the people, the time and space constraints of reform will be further strengthened, and the challenges and difficulties in promoting reform will increase day by day. However, it is all the more necessary to realize that there is no way out of reform, and it is impossible to reform without reform. In this sense, today's reform must keep up with the ardent expectations of the masses of the people, race against the risks in the transition period, and race against the time window for solving problems. Only by overcoming the "fatigue of reform", preventing the "misgivings of reform", daring to gnaw hard bones, daring to wade into dangerous waters, and daring to break through the barriers of ideological concepts and the barriers of solidified interests, can we firmly grasp the leading power of reform, always grasp the initiative in development, let the people enjoy more fruits of reform, and let the country achieve faster development and progress.

■Original text

Shennong's no, the Yellow Emperor, Yao, and Shun's work, through its changes, make the people tireless, and the gods turn it into a god, so that the people are appropriate. If you are poor, you will change, and if you change, you will be able to do it for a long time. It is based on "God blesses, auspicious and no disadvantage".

——(Yin Zhou to Qin and Han) "Zhou Yi and the Department of Resignation"

■Definition

"If you are poor, you will change, and if you change, you will be able to do it for a long time", which means that things will inevitably change when they reach the point of exhaustion, and change will be accessible, and if they can be accessible, they will be eternal. It speaks to an unbreakable truth: everything in the world has a process of occurrence, development and decline, and when it reaches the stage of decline, it is necessary to seek change to find a way out. If you blindly stick to the old ways and don't want to change, you can only draw the ground as a prison and sit still; On the other hand, if we can adapt to environmental changes and make corresponding adjustments, we can survive the desperate situation and turn the danger into a disaster. This is where the idiom "if you are poor, you think about change".

This sentence also had a great impact on later generations. In the late Qing Dynasty, in order to reform the law, the bourgeois reformers put forward the principle of "those who change, the axiom of ancient and modern" on the basis of the ancient precept of Yi Chuan, in order to criticize the feudal diehards for conformism and expound the principle of changing the law and trying to survive, which played a role in enlightening modern China.