The Communist Party of China (CPC) will soon inaugurate the third stage of its self-improvement educational drive, this time targeting members at grass-roots units.

More than 26 million Party members in some 800,000 grass-roots units, mainly at village levels, are required to go through the drive from the end of November 2005 through June 2006, which aims at improving the vanguard character of the Party, according to a CPC conference held Monday.

According to the conference, General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee Hu Jintao recently made instructions on this stage of the educational drive, which will guide work in this process.

In his instructions, Hu ordered CPC village organizations to tackle outstanding problems with the organizations and their members and concretely address the major concerns of the masses with the theme of "building socialist new villages" in their minds.

Building the "new villages", a task created at the fifth plenary session of the 16th CPC Central Committee in October, involves progress in production, quality of life, civilized ways of living, cleanliness of environment and democratic administration.

The three-stage educational drive began in January this year. The first stage, which ran from January through June, involved Party organizations at and above county levels. The second stage, which ran from July through December, involved urban and township grass-roots Party organizations.

During the drive, all 69.6 million CPC members are asked to study important documents of the Party to consolidate their political faith, identify shortcomings in themselves and other members around them and take steps to address these shortcomings.

(Xinhua News Agency November 29, 2005)