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A large screen in Beijing, China, shows Chinese President Xi Jinping speaking at the sixth plenary session of the 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Thursday. (Reuters/Yonhap News)

“The ideas of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ in the new Xi Jinping era are said to have made great strides in Sinicizing Marxism. How should we understand this?” said a reporter for Xinhua News Agency.

“[The new ideas] are an enormous theoretical achievement combining the basic principles of Marxism with China’s concreteness and reality and its outstanding traditional culture. They are an important theoretical crystallization of the historic achievements and transformations since the 18th [National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, where Xi came to power],” commented Wang Xiaohui, deputy head of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee Publicity Department.

The atmosphere at a press conference held Friday morning to explain a recent resolution on the “major achievements and historical experience of the Chinese Communist Party’s 100-year struggle” was reminiscent of the same kind of dull “theory lessons” the party has staged in the past.

It was the country’s third “historical resolution,” adopted at the sixth plenary session of the party’s 19th Central Committee that ended on Thursday.

The Q&A session, which was directed by government-run media, seemed like a carefully staged production designed to explain “socialism with Chinese characteristics in the Xi Jinping era,” which the party has been declaring as a guiding philosophy since the 19th National Congress in 2017.

There was a Q&A exchange about the “common prosperity” that Xi has been calling for — with an explanation that this would “not be a matter of forced donations” — but no remarks on the strategic competition underway with the US.

In his remarks ahead of the press conference, Wang Xiaohui, deputy head of the Central Committee Publicity Department, declared: “The first establishment of the philosophical leadership of the new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics under Xi Jinping holds decisive meaning as a great historical process of revival of the Chinese people, reflecting the shared hope of the party, the nation, and the Chinese people.”

“No difficulties or frustrations can thwart the progress of the Chinese people; no threat of challenge can stop the great revival of the Chinese people,” he asserted.

Wang signaled the aim of leveraging this philosophy — which has taken on even greater significance with the latest historical declaration — to complete a great revival of the Chinese people, with efforts toward the “construction of a powerful nation” by 2049, once Xi wins a third consecutive term as leader at the 20th National Congress to be held around fall of next year.

This basic understanding of the situation may explain why the announcement made public the day before differed from the first and second resolutions in not including any content about the Cultural Revolution or the Tiananmen Square incident, which are regarded as the party’s main missteps.

The lengthy document, which stretched to 7,000 characters, was half devoted to underscoring the achievements of the Xi regime since it came to power in 2012 — putting the finishing touches on a rosy Communist Party narrative spanning a century.

Jiang Jinquan, who as head of the party’s Central Committee Policy Research Office is seen as one of Xi’s chief brains, also made it clear that China intends to follow a different path from the West. He distinguished between Chinese “people’s democracy” and Western “electoral democracy,” claiming that Western democracy is “not true democracy, but the democracy of those with money.” He also said that “not all forms of democracy around the world can be uniform.”

He went on to quote the Chinese phrase “shui tu bu fu” — an expression literally meaning “water and earth do not agree,” that is used metaphorically to show that everyone has their own path that is right for them. He denounced the Summit for Democracy that the US is aiming to hold next month as an attempt to “suppress other countries and divide up the world.”

As China arms itself with a Xi-centered philosophy and makes clear its plans to chart its own path, this spells an even darker fog for the political situation in East Asia, the backyard of the US-China conflict.

Explaining the significance of the latest resolution, one Chinese foreign affairs source told Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper that Xi had adopted “the right course in not allowing the US to sabotage our development model, and in becoming stronger as a way of ensuring that.”

By Gil Yun-hyung, staff reporter; Jung In-hwan, Beijing correspondent

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]