CPC Plenum | Paving the way for the next helmsman

The latest plenum leaves Xi Jinping in a dominant position ahead of next year’s 20th National Congress, when he will complete 10 years at the helm and mark the start of his third term

On November 11, China’s Communist Party, after a four-day behind-closed-doors meeting of its Central Committee called its sixth plenum, passed what it called a “Resolution on the Major Achievements and Historical Experience of the Party over the Past Century”.

As unexciting as a wordy resolution of a “plenum” may sound, few things have mattered more in the history of Chinese politics over the past few decades. Indeed, it was a resolution from another plenum in 1978 that set China on the course of economic reforms after the chaos of the Maoist years, and ushweered in an extraordinary period of growth.

How history may remember the CPC’s latest plenum is an altogether different question. This was only the third such “historical resolution” passed by the party in its 100-year history.