The Necessity of Upholding the Four Cardinal Principles in the Drive for the Four Modernizations To achieve the four modernizations and make China a powerful socialist country before the end of this century will be a gigantic task. What I want to talk about now is ideological and political questions. The Central Committee maintains that, to carry out China’s four modernizations, we must uphold the four cardinal principles ideologically and politically. This is the basic prerequisite for achieving modernization.