That declaration was, AFAIK, before China got its first nuclear bomb. Chinese rhetoric changed significantly after they acquired nuclear weapons and worked through the implications of having and using them...
It hasn't changed enough. They're still just as prone as Russia to throw bodies at a problem until it goes away. They're deliberately purging hundreds of thousands a year either outright or working them to death in the labor camps. Many of the senior leadership are contemporaries of Mao and hold the same attitude. That ghoul murdered almost 100 million through his so called "Cultural Revolutions," engineered famines, and widespread ecological collapse his ignorant policies created. There are no birds in China, most of the life cycle are missing entire species and are dying every year as the pollution rises. Wild animals and fish are near non-existent, entire forests have turned desert because the birds and insect species they relied on died out.
Ignorant reforestation efforts have done more damage leading to erosion and inadvertently salting the earth and local water tables. Do you know what they did instead of hiring help? They covered it up by spray painting dead grass and trees green. Making the drought and famine worse because they forced the farmers to plant trees on his farm instead of the food his village needed. Literally ordered farmers to dig up their crops and plant the trees the CCP brought in.
When the floods were happening CCP henchmen damaged village sandbag dikes and more substantial earth and stonework dams to divert the floods from the Tier 1 cities. When caught by the villagers the bastards taunted them and threatened them with arrest and torture. The villagers beat and hanged several before a thug broke and admitted they were city police sent by the local government. This later turned out true when netizens matched several of the men with the identities of low level agents the local MSS office and Tongs.