The Resolution on the Major Achievements and Historical Experience of the Party over the Past Century was adopted on 11 November 2021 by the Sixth Plenum of the 19th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), convened in Beijing from 8 to 11 November. It is the third document of its kind in CCP history, following Mao Zedong's 1945 "Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party," passed by the Seventh Plenum of the Sixth Central Committee on the eve of the Seventh Party Congress, and Deng Xiaoping's 1981 "Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People's Republic of China," adopted by the Sixth Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee. Each prior resolution had served to consolidate a paramount leader's authority by rendering an authoritative verdict on the past; the 2021 text performs the same function for Xi Jinping, who personally chaired the drafting group.
Procedurally, the resolution followed the standard Leninist sequence for major Party documents. The Politburo decided in March 2021 to place a historical resolution on the Sixth Plenum's agenda. A drafting group, headed by Xi with Wang Huning and Zhao Leji as deputies, conducted internal consultations through the spring and summer, soliciting comments from retired senior cadres, democratic parties, and provincial Party committees. A draft was circulated to the Politburo in October, then submitted to the approximately 370 full and alternate members of the Central Committee for the four-day plenum. The communiqué was released on 11 November and the full text was published by Xinhua on 16 November 2021, accompanied by an explanatory speech ("shuoming") delivered by Xi to the plenum.
The document is organized into seven parts and runs to roughly 36,000 Chinese characters. It divides the Party's century into four eras: the New-Democratic Revolution under Mao (1921–1949), Socialist Revolution and Construction (1949–1978), Reform and Opening Up and Socialist Modernization (1978–2012), and the New Era of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics inaugurated by the 18th Party Congress in 2012. The bulk of the text—more than half by length—is devoted to the achievements of the New Era under Xi's leadership across thirteen domains including Party-building, economy, rule of law, ecology, national defense, "One Country, Two Systems," and major-power diplomacy. It formally codified the "Two Establishes" (liang ge queli): establishing Xi's status as the "core" of the Central Committee and the whole Party, and establishing the guiding role of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.
Contemporary reception centered on what the resolution did and did not say. Unlike Deng's 1981 resolution, which assessed Mao as "70 percent correct, 30 percent wrong" and explicitly repudiated the Cultural Revolution, the 2021 text avoided sharp negative verdicts on predecessors and offered only restrained criticism of pre-2012 governance, referencing problems of lax discipline and ideological drift addressed by Xi's anti-corruption campaign launched at the 18th Congress in November 2012. Foreign ministries in Washington, Tokyo, Canberra, and Brussels read the document as preparing the political ground for Xi's norm-breaking third term, which was duly secured at the 20th Party Congress in October 2022, where the Party Constitution was amended to further entrench the "Two Establishes" and "Two Safeguards."
The historical resolution should be distinguished from a Party Constitution amendment, a Central Committee communiqué, and a work report to a Party Congress. A communiqué is a short summary issued at the close of a plenum; a work report is the quinquennial programmatic statement delivered by the General Secretary; constitutional amendments alter the Party's binding charter. A historical resolution is rarer and weightier: it claims to settle the Party's interpretation of its own past, foreclosing internal contestation over historical questions and binding future cadres to a fixed narrative. It is closer in genre to an ecclesiastical creed than to ordinary policy output.
Several controversies attend the text. Sinologists including Joseph Torigian, Tony Saich, and Frank Pieke have debated whether the 2021 resolution genuinely matches the canonical weight of the 1945 and 1981 documents, given that those earlier resolutions resolved acute factional crises while the 2021 version was promulgated from a position of consolidated power. Critics inside and outside China have noted that the resolution effectively pre-empts any future "reversal of verdicts" (fan'an) on the Xi era, mirroring the protective function Mao's 1945 text performed for the Yan'an Rectification. The treatment of Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin—neither named for criticism but neither credited with comparable ideological contributions—has been read as a deliberate hierarchization of leaders.
For the working practitioner, the 2021 resolution is a primary source for decoding the ideological vocabulary of the Xi era and the formal status of senior leaders. Mastery of its language—"two establishes," "two safeguards" (liang ge weihu), "common prosperity," "great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation," "self-revolution"—is necessary for parsing speeches by State Council ministers, PLA commanders, and Chinese ambassadors, and for interpreting the communiqués of subsequent plenums. Embassy political sections in Beijing and analysts at institutions such as MERICS, the Mercator Institute, RAND, and the Lowy Institute treat the resolution as the doctrinal baseline against which subsequent shifts—whether in economic policy, Taiwan strategy, or cadre management—are measured.
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On 11 November 2021, the Sixth Plenum of the 19th CCP Central Committee, chaired by Xi Jinping in Beijing, adopted the third historical resolution, codifying the "Two Establishes" and Xi's status as the Party's core.