China’s Communist Party has issued a rare new accounting of its history that seals Xi Jinping’s place in the pantheon of the country’s greatest leaders. The document’s repercussions go beyond just rewriting the past: It sets up Mr. Xi to wield lasting influence over the country’s future as he seeks a precedent-breaking third term next year.
Mr. Xi is just the third Chinese leader, after Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, to produce a resolution on the party’s history. While Mao’s resolution in 1945 and Deng’s in 1981 both excoriated dissenting views of the party’s past, Mr. Xi’s refrains from any overt political attacks on his predecessors. Instead, as Oxford University historian Rana Mitter explains, it seeks to portray the party’s century-long history as a “continuous trajectory of revolutionary change”—one that Mr. Xi is uniquely suited to inherit and perpetuate.