By Eryk Bagshaw
Singapore: The party started with typical Chinese fanfare. Steelworkers stacked six high and 20 deep lifting the Chinese flag to the podium, farmworkers breaking out into song and a dance from each ethnic minority.
It was the middle of winter in 2018, but Xi Jinping wanted to celebrate. Only eight months earlier he had removed presidential term limits. Now on the 40th anniversary of China’s era of reform and opening up, he would start to lock in his own vision for its future.
Xi quoted Mao Zedong as he addressed the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. “After several decades, the victory of the Chinese people’s democratic revolution, viewed in retrospect, will seem like only a brief prologue to a long drama,” he said.
China has been blanketed in stories about Xi Jinping’s life for weeks. Credit: Sanghee Liu
The Mao quote from the end of the country’s civil war in 1949 is one of Xi’s favourites. When he repeated it last year he added for emphasis: “What’s past is prologue”.
Now, Xi, aged 68, emboldened by his unrivalled power, economic success and nationalism, is writing the main act in his own image.
On Thursday, more than 300 Chinese Communist Party officials approved Xi’s version of history at a tightly guarded conclave in Beijing. Over four days they mapped out how he and the party moulded the country, saved it from crisis and put it on a path to prosperity.
“Establishing comrade Xi Jinping’s position as the core of the central committee as well as the whole party was of decisive significance in advancing toward the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” a communique from the Plenum released on Thursday night said.
Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy said the discussions were part narrative, part politics. “These decisions will alter China’s past and future,” said Wu. “It is Xi’s landmark.”
The first century of the CCP was celebrated in July. Xi will now be able to dominate the second.
“History is not about the dusty past,” said researchers Adam Ni and Yun Jiang from China Neican. “It’s about the power to decide the future”.
The resolution was approved on the back of three years of education campaigns based on his own policies and ideas – “Xi Jinping Thought” – and a history of Xi’s achievements published in state media daily over the past few weeks.
The son of a revolutionary, Xi rose from sleeping on a pile of fleas to transforming his country’s economic, diplomatic and military fortunes. In his 38 years as a member of the CCP, he has gone from building wells for villagers to shaping his own philosophy: “happiness is the result of struggle”.
That struggle would move from the rural fields of Liangjiahe, through corruption purges, and culminate in an economic shift that would see the rapid pursuit of capitalist wealth during the last few decades transformed into the goal of “common prosperity” for the next century.
“The Chinese nation has made the great leap from standing up to getting rich to becoming strong,” the Politburo draft resolution on history said ahead of the final meeting.
Xi visits the Drepung Monastery in Tibet. Credit: AP
Now in the last year of what was supposed to be Xi’s second and final term, China has become the only superpower challenger to the United States, largely contained COVID-19, crushed multi-party democracy in Hong Kong and has its sights set on unification with Taiwan.
“The Party Central Committee, with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core, has united and led the entire Party and people of all ethnicities across the nation,” the Politburo draft said.
Wu said the timing of Xi’s resolution between the first and second centuries of the CCP and the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic offered Xi “very good legitimacy”.
“Even if we did not have COVID he would have found some other achievement to justify his rule for the next decade,” he said.
Trey McArver, a partner at policy research firm Trivium China, said the historic resolution was an official proclamation that Xi is taking the country in a new direction.
“Xi’s efforts will also present the first real systemic challenge to capitalist democracy since the end of the Cold War. If Xi is successful, he may very well initiate [...] a Chinese-led global order. If Xi fails, he could very well bring down the party – and the PRC [People’s Republic of China],” he said.
“Buckle up, we are in for some momentous changes.”
The resolution will pave the way for Xi to either extend his presidency into a third term when he faces the party congress in 2022 or revive a 40-year-old title that will stop him from having to deal with any future leadership tussles: Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party.
That title was held by Mao for 27 years. It was eliminated in the tumultuous years after his death to prevent such a concentration of power from repeating.
A bookstore selling “Xi Jinping Thought” in Beijing. Credit: Sanghee Liu
Ling Li, a Chinese political scholar at the University of Vienna, said the party chairman is the only office of power that is held by an individual who is not bound by the founding organisational principle of the party – collective decision-making. It would also allow Xi to groom an heir by making his current official position of General Secretary vacant.
“The reactivation of the party chairmanship would seem to provide the best solution for Xi, as it would allow him to achieve two goals simultaneously: to continue to rule and to micromanage the succession process,” Li wrote in the Made in China Journal in November
“A truly compelling signal that this might be the plan is the unfolding of an exceptionally intensive and vigorous national ideological campaign to establish ‘Xi Jinping Thought’.”
The party used the same playbook when it created the same office for Mao, culminating in the Resolution of Several Historical Issues in 1945. At the end of the campaign, Mao – then largely seen as a practical leader but not a thinker, had become a leading Chinese-Socialist theorist – legitimising his control over all aspects of the CCP.
Xi Jinping at the centenary of the CCP in July. Credit: AP
Li said you can question the intentions that Xi has for the country’s future “but no one can deny he has a vision”.
“He has a blueprint for the party to lead the country to material prosperity and civilisational rejuvenation by 2049,” she said.
Wu said Xi was not just aiming for a third term.
“I think he is aiming much higher. Basically, he needs to build up a consensus that he is even greater than Deng Xiaoping and Mao. I think this resolution will have this kind of narrative.”
But Wu does not see a need for Xi to resurrect the chairman title because he faces no threats to his leadership, has already changed the constitution to remove presidential term limits and at 68 could continue ruling unchallenged for a decade or more.
“I don’t think he needs to find a tricky position for him to continue his term,” he said.
A stall selling CCP memorabilia in Beijing. Credit: Sanghee Liu
The last leader to deliver a historical resolution was Deng in 1981. Too close to memories of Mao’s brutal final years, he never became chairman, but he did become Paramount Leader. Until Xi, he was undisputedly the most important leader after Mao, reshaping the market economy to help deliver four decades of economic growth.
Qu Qinghsan, a member of the Central Committee that passed the resolution and the director of the CCP’s Institute of Party History and Literature, said it would “boost morale and firm up conviction” as China faces rising internal and external risks.
“Under the strong leadership of the Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at the core we will rally the entire Party like a piece of unbreakable iron and march forward in lockstep,” he said on Friday.
Qu said the resolution would educate the wider population on enhancing the party’s political work and “understanding the importance of discipline”.
The Central Committee also took aim at the United States on Friday and used a press conference on the resolution to accuse the superpower rival of dividing the world and failing its citizens.
“Democracy is not an exclusive pattern of Western countries,” said Jiang Jinquan, the director of policy research for the Central Committee.
“Electoral democracy in Western countries is ruled by capital. It is a game for the rich.”
The comments suggest Beijing is becoming increasingly assertive in pitching its alternative model of governance to other developing countries around the world.
Xi has long harboured intentions of making an impact beyond China’s borders.
In a speech to the Great Hall of the People five years before the historic resolution, Xi took aim at American author Francis Fukuyama’s claim that the end of the Cold War in the 1990s meant that western liberal democracy was the final form of government - and therefore “the end of history”.
“History has not ended, nor can it possibly end,” Xi said. “The Communist Party of China and Chinese people have every confidence in their ability to provide a Chinese solution to aid the exploration of a better social system for humanity.”
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