Chinese President Xi Jinping has received a major boost after the country’s political elite held a closed-door meeting with the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The meeting took place in Beijing and lasted for four days.
During the meeting, politicians adopted a “rare historical resolution” praising the president’s “crucial importance” in the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, according to The Guardian.
The Central Committee is the party’s highest body and is elected every five years.
The meeting itself is standard procedure, but the resolution may be historic. Analysts believe that the meeting will shape domestic policy and society for decades to come, according to the newspaper.
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“The Big Three”
The CCP is the leading party in China and is considered the world’s largest political party with 85 million members. The historic resolution will be the third since the party was founded in 1921.
The earlier resolutions took place in 1945 when Mao Zedong set the goals for the party, and in 1981 when Deng Xiaoping criticized the party’s previous goals under Mao’s rule.
Senior researcher at NUPI, Bjørnar Sverdrup-Thygeson, tells Dagbladet that the meeting held by current head of state Xi Jinping seems to be his attempt to establish himself as one of the “big three” in modern Chinese history.
SENIOR RESEARCHER: Bjørnar Sverdrup-Thygeson is a senior researcher at NUPI. Photo: NUPI
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– To achieve this, he uses a similar strategy as the other two “big ones”, says Sverdrup-Thygeson and refers to the former heads of state Mao and Deng.
In short, it is about the summit adopting a resolution that defines consensus on the Communist Party’s place in history and where to go next. This has traditionally been a particularly important platform for political power in China.
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New rewriting
Currently, it is the resolution under Deng that is best known – then Mao’s government was heavily criticized, and China was opened up and the economy developed.
Sverdrup-Thygeson believes that what is coming now is a new rewriting of history, where one probably equates the two epochs in history to a greater extent. One should not criticize Mao on the basis of Deng – or vice versa. It will, according to Sverdrup-Thygeson, give some increased legitimacy to everything that took place during Mao’s time.
– As in many authoritarian regimes, how to write the past is intensely and closely linked to the political future. When Xi now takes this step, everyone reckons that it is part of the preparations he is making to become the first Chinese head of state in recent times, which goes beyond the measured two periods that have been common until now, says the senior researcher.
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Authoritarian rotation
Some of the political changes during the Deng resolution were about not allowing a man too much power. As a result, it was enshrined in the constitution that China’s leader only sat for two terms before the baton went on.
Current President Xi is now nearing the end of his second five-year term in power.
– Xi has already removed the restriction on periods in the constitution, and in that context there will be a further authoritarian shift in China, says Sverdrup-Thygeson.
He adds that the board can go from a principle of collective leadership during Deng’s time, to a more top-down leadership under Xi.
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