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A meeting of hundreds of members of China’s political elite, which is expected to further consolidate the power of president Xi Jinping, has opened in Beijing.
The closed-door, four-day meeting of the ruling Chinese Communist party’s central committee, known as the sixth plenum, is expected to produce a resolution on the history of the party, which analysts say will shape domestic politics and society for decades to come.
Xi opened the plenum on Monday with “explanations on a draft resolution on the major achievements and historical experience” of the party in its 100-year-history, state news agency Xinhua.
The historical resolution will be just the third since the founding of the party, following in the footsteps of Mao Zedong, who set out the aims of the party in 1945 with himself as the only true leader, and Deng Xiaoping, whose 1981 resolution condemned the failures of Mao’s rule while salvaging the party.
“The 1945 resolution affirmed Mao’s leadership in the CCP, and the 1981 resolution was about turning a new page from the decade-long destructive chaos of Cultural Revolution Mao created,” said Dali Yang, a China expert at the University of Chicago. “This year’s resolution will be somewhere in between – the party’s past and Xi’s future.”
The resolution will determine how Chinese history is taught and depicted, and dictate the context in which Xi’s authority and his policies are viewed as successes. The document comes in the centenary of the CCP’s founding and a critical time for Xi’s future leadership. Analysts say Xi hopes to cement his place in history as an epoch-making Chinese leader alongside Mao and Deng.
The sixth plenum is the last major meeting in China’s five year political cycle, and sets the stage for next year’s party Congress, where Xi is expected to seek an extraordinary third term as leader of the CCP after having previously abolished term limits.
The agenda of the meeting is top secret, with a communique of discussions and resolutions released after it has finished. At the 2016 plenum, the CCP bestowed Xi with the title of “core” leader, putting him on par with Mao and Deng but also emphasising the importance of collective leadership.
As China’s relationship with the west continues to deteriorate, many in western capitals now question what type of power China is going to become in the future. In July, Xi said his party had achieved its first centenary goal of building a moderately prosperous society for all and eradicated extreme poverty. He also vowed “unification” with Taiwan as an inevitable and crucial part of China’s “national rejuvenation”. As leader, Xi has run sweeping anti-corruption drives which purged many political enemies, launched brutal crackdowns on minority groups, introduced his own political theory – “Xi Jinping Thought” – to school students, and driven an increasingly expansionist foreign policy.
In the run-up to this week’s meeting, Xinhua has been in propaganda overdrive, highlighting Xi’s pivotal role in many aspects of China’s achievement. “Xi Jinping often visits farms, farmers’ houses … and even inspects pigsties and toilets to obtain first-hand information of people’s livelihood,” read one tweet. “President Xi attaches great importance to cultivation of morality and ethics throughout society …” wrote another.
John Delury, a historian at Yonsei University in Seoul and the co-author of Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the 21st Century, cautioned about putting too much emphasis on Xi in interpreting this week’s events.
“I fear we over-read Xi Jinping across the board and fall victim of the Chinese propaganda agencies,” Delury said. “If we use the 1981 resolution as the baseline, it was a collective effort to draw a line between the party under Deng and Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Since then, the story of the CCP-led China is one largely filled with economic growth and Beijing’s expanding role in international affairs, so the history is easier to resolve, as it were.
“Of course, since 1981 there was the 1989 Tiananmen massacre and in 2012 a massive corruption scandal involving the then-Chongqing party chief Bo Xilai, but my guess is that they are going to avoid them as much as possible, or fold them into a more triumphant narrative.”
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