The top leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) yesterday started a pivotal meeting expected to further firm Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) grip on power.
About 400 members of the party’s Central Committee gathered in Beijing for the four-day plenary, which is being held behind closed doors.
Xi opened the meeting with a work report and “explanations on a draft resolution on the major achievements and historical experience” of the party through its 100-year history, Xinhua news agency reported.
The resolution would set the stage for the 20th National Party Congress next year, at which Xi is widely expected to declare that he will serve a third term in office, cementing his position as China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong (毛澤東).
State media has hailed Xi’s leadership in the run-up to this week’s meeting, with Xinhua saying he is “a man of profound thoughts and feelings, a man who inherited a legacy but dares to innovate, and a man who has forward-looking vision and is committed to working tirelessly.”
Xi’s tenure has been marked by a sprawling anti-corruption crackdown and repressive policies in regions like Xinjiang and Hong Kong.
He has also created a leadership cult that has quashed criticism, stamped out rivals and introduced his own political theory — known as Xi Jinping Thought — to schools.
Chris Johnson, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic International Studies, told the Sinocism podcast that the new resolution could mark an opportunity for Xi “to tidy up ... some of the bits from history that he doesn’t like,” including the excesses of economic reforms in the 1990s.
The Central Committee resolution would mark the third of its kind in the history of the CCP. The first, passed under Mao in 1945, helped cement his authority over the CCP four years before it seized power. The second, under Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) in 1981, saw the regime adopt economic reforms and recognize the “mistakes” of Mao’s ways.
The latest could see Xi “do in effect to Deng what Deng did to Mao, which is to criticize the excesses of Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening policies,” Johnson said.
The timing is significant, coming a year before Xi is expected to secure an unprecedented third term in office at a twice-a-decade congress.
“Xi Jinping has already started to rewrite the history of the party in school books, universities, and the press... greatly reducing the failures — Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution — and glorifying his action as general secretary of the party,” said Alice Ekman, senior analyst in charge of the Asia portfolio at the EU Institute for Security Studies.
The new resolution is “clearly part of Xi Jinping’s efforts to prolong his presence at the head of the party,” she added.
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