What's in China's Sixth Plenary Session communiqué?
The communiqué of the Communist Party’s recent Sixth Plenary Session sets the tone for China’s domestic politics and society for decades to come. So what’s in it? And how does Xi Jinping compare to his predecessors Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping?
The prognostications of most China analysts turned out to be right, and speculation over whether President Xi Jinping had the base to pass what is only the third ‘Resolution on History’ of the CCP’s existence was unfounded. Still, those putting forward such analyses were correct to draw attention to the fact that this week’s meeting presented the last chance for political horse-trading among senior CCP officials before next year’s Congress, even though the headline result was only ever going to go one way: the Party’s is in full support of President Xi.
As the communiqué explains (read the full text in English here), the Party needed to review its history because it is about to embark on a new journey: what it calls the Beginning of a New Phase to Achieve the Second Centenary Goal, which is the Great Rejuvenation of China. It is important to note that the communiqué, which acts as a kind of executive summary to the Resolution (which FOCUS will explore in more detail in a future post), does not put forward a revisionist history of the Party, differentiating it from its predecessors.