Agency: China’s top leader will most likely take center stage in a new official summation of Communist Party history. The document is likely to exalt Xi, 68, as a peer of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping before his expected re-election at a party congress late next year.
The summation is sure to become the focus of an intense indoctrination campaign — in schools, culture and censorship laws — that will shape China’s politics and society for decades. It will also insulate Xi from criticism and give his policies the gravitas of destiny.
Context: No Chinese leader in recent times has been more fixated than Xi on history and legacy. The new history devotes over a quarter of its 531 pages to his nine years in power.
Quotable: “This is about creating a new timescape for China around the Communist Party and Xi in which he is riding the wave of the past towards the future,” said Geremie Barmé, a historian of China based in New Zealand. “It is not really a resolution about past history, but a resolution about future leadership.”
