[For Xi, who has amassed personal control of the party to a far greater degree than his immediate predecessors, the passage of a history resolution paves the way for him to break with precedent and take on a third term in power in late 2022. After scrapping presidential term limits in 2018, Xi hopes to fortify expectations of his continued rule by laying out a vision for China comparable in ambition to Mao’s and Deng’s.]
In an unusual flair of ceremony, a
meeting of the Central Committee, a decision-making body of 204 top officials,
will review — and almost certainly pass — a resolution on the “major
achievements and historical experiences” of the party’s first 100 years.
Only two previous leaders of China
have similarly adjudicated on party history: Mao Zedong, the founder of the
People’s Republic, and Deng Xiaoping, the strongman leader who unleashed market
reforms in 1978. Both used the process to solidify power, settle thorny
internal debates about the past and forge ahead with a new agenda.
For Xi, who has amassed personal control of the party to a far greater
degree than his immediate predecessors, the passage of a history resolution
paves the way for him to break with precedent and take on a third term in power
in late 2022. After scrapping presidential term limits in 2018, Xi hopes to
fortify expectations of his continued rule by laying out a vision for China
comparable in ambition to Mao’s and Deng’s.
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“It says a lot about his ambition
and how he views himself as leader,” said Jude Blanchette, who holds the
Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies. “The history resolution will mark a new epoch — one that Xi is
leading.”
The last history resolution, passed
in 1981, came at a difficult moment for the party. After Mao died in 1976, his
successors had to confront the legacy of the “great helmsman” at a time when
popular works of “scar
literature” were exploring the guilt and trauma of the Cultural Revolution,
during which Mao directed young zealots to wage a violent class war, resulting
in millions of deaths.
The resolution served to set
guardrails for criticism of the nation’s founder. It acknowledged Mao’s role in
the “the most severe setback” in the party’s history but ruled that his
achievements “far outweigh” his shortcomings.
There are few signs that Xi faces
comparable internal fissures or the need to explore dark periods of China’s
recent past, such as the massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen
Square in June 1989.
In recent years, Xi has railed
against attempts to challenge the party’s official history — efforts he calls “historical
nihilism” — and has passed laws that make slandering heroes of the past a
criminal offense.
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That makes this resolution distinct
from those before it, which aimed to resolve concerns over problematic periods
of the party’s history and dispel disagreements over a future path, said Deng
Yuwen, a former editor at the Study Times, an official Communist Party
publication, and now an independent commentator and government critic.
“There is no doubt that Xi’s ‘new
era’ will be the focus and the highest priority of the new historical
resolution,” Deng said in a video.
“There won’t be new content or new breakthroughs in evaluating history.”
Ahead of the plenum, there has been
a fresh wave of propaganda stressing Xi’s direct responsibility for recent
national achievements. The People’s Daily, the party’s newspaper of record, has
been running a series of front-page columns this past week on “crucial choices”
Xi made as he “personally planned, implemented and advanced” major policies.
Tuesday’s installment related how
Xi’s personal devotion to the coronavirus response at times left him unable to
sleep. “Every scientific judgment, every assessment of the situation, every
decision to reverse the situation — all needed great political courage and
wisdom,” the newspaper declared. “At the helm of this weighty ship was one
man.”
“The language is far bolder,” said
Manoj Kewalramani, a fellow for China studies at the Takshashila Institution
think tank in India who writes a newsletter deciphering
the newspaper’s messaging. “It’s no longer subtly telling you that Xi is in
command. It is closer to demanding fealty.”
Xi may not face a crisis like the
one triggered by Mao’s death, but he regularly speaks about profound changes to
the global order unseen in a century that create both threats and a “window of
strategic opportunity” for China’s rise.
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China has “ushered in great leaps
from standing up to getting rich and becoming strong,” Qiushi, the official
journal of party theory, wrote on Monday to explain the necessity of another
history resolution. Today, it said, the nation faces a challenging journey full
of unresolved issues that require the party to “figure out how we can continue
to succeed and better answer the problems of our age.”
Xi has set himself firmly at the
helm of efforts to bring about the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,”
it declared.
Within the last two years, his
personal philosophy — “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics in
a New Era” — has been embedded into policymaking from diplomacy to the
military and judiciary. This fall, his ideas were written into textbooks used
to teach children at Chinese elementary schools.
The focus on Xi’s individual role
has drawn comparisons to the personality cult of Mao. But observers of
Chinese politics often argue that Xi’s approach is different, shunning the
chaotic mass social movements of China’s early years in favor of building party
institutions around himself.
“As paradoxical as it may seem,
Xi’s ideology is centered around the idea of ruling according to the law,” said
Ling Li, a scholar of Chinese politics at the University of Vienna, who
has argued that Xi may resurrect a Mao-era “party chairman”
title next year as he enters his third term.
But that vision of using law to
rule is built not on judicial independence, but rather on melding party control
with China’s legal system. He has “championed an effort to build a new
party-state legal system where party rules and state laws coexist as an organic
whole,” Li said.
Xi’s robust control of Chinese
institutions is likely to be at the heart of an ambitious break from China’s
economic model of recent decades. In 2017, Xi declared that China had entered a
“new era,” and this year he ruled that his predecessor’s goal of building a
“moderately prosperous society” had been achieved.
As his expected third term
approaches, Xi has begun to disrupt huge portions of the Chinese economy with highly politicized regulatory crackdowns that
appear to be a significant rupture from the Deng-era mantra of development
being the “only hard truth.”
Instead, Xi has called for “common
prosperity,” signaling a new set of priorities for the country. On the emerging
agenda are issues such as environmental degradation, a demographic crisis and
rampant inequality, but at its core remains a desire to strengthen China by
doing away with what Xi sees as sources of division and instability, said
Andrew Polk, co-founder of the Trivium China consultancy.
“This isn’t Xi Jinping being the
bleeding heart,” he said at a recent event.
Pei Lin Wu in Taipei, Taiwan,
contributed to this report.
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