Xi Jinping’s Historians Can’t Stop Rewriting China’s Imperial Past
A vast effort to draft an official history of the Qing dynasty is in limbo as China’s leader demands it be bent to his vision
Chun Han Wong
For decades, Chinese scholars have been toiling at the party’s behest to draft an official history of the Qing, China’s last imperial dynasty, which the Manchu ethnic group led for nearly 270 years before its collapse in the early 20th century. Beijing has devoted thousands of researchers and millions of dollars to the task, producing a draft that runs into the tens of millions of characters over more than 100 volumes.
However, an ideological hardening under Chinese leader Xi Jinping has set back the publication of the epic tome already more than a decade overdue—underscoring how the Communist Party has tightened its grip on history to advance its goals.
The Qing era is central to the Communist Party’s claims to have saved China from its “century of humiliation,” inflicted on it by foreign powers, stretching from the Qing’s defeat in the Opium Wars—the first of which began in 1839—to the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. The legitimacy of China’s current borders, largely inherited from the Qing, is also closely intertwined with territorial claims from that period.
Party vetters, including a top historian backed by Xi, issued sweeping criticisms of the draft “Qing History” last year, saying it strayed too far from official views and requesting changes to better align the past with Xi’s vision for the future, according to people familiar with the project.
The criticisms centered on political issues including the assertion that the draft “doesn’t speak for the people,” one of those people said.
The Shenyang Imperial Palace, used during the early Qing dynasty, was built in 1625. Photo: Yao Jianfeng/Zuma Press
As it grapples with the critiques, the group managing the project, the National Qing History Compilation Committee, is also racing against time. Many leading researchers on the project have reached their twilight years and, in some cases, already died—including the committee’s director.
The saga reflects the crucial yet politically fraught role that history plays in China under Xi. Leaning into his country’s preoccupation with its past, Xi has enforced what he calls a “correct outlook on history,” aimed at fortifying his “China Dream” of national renaissance and autocratic rule. In practice, this means promoting nationalistic narratives that cast the Communist Party as the sole guarantor of China’s inexorable rise, while quashing alternative views about the past that contradict official canon.
Xi, in sweeping aside the relatively tolerant intellectual climate that prevailed before he took power in 2012, has left historians wrong-footed, according to people familiar with the Qing History project.
“This is a product made for one customer but sent to another customer,” said one of those people. The shift in China’s ideological landscape since the project’s launch two decades ago meant that some theoretical frameworks that historians used “are no longer valid or politically correct,” the person said.
China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism, which oversees the project, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Historical extent of China
Circa 1800 during
the Qing dynasty
Circa 1600
during the
Ming
dynasty
Note: Representations of Ming and Qing territories are approximate, as territorial boundaries weren't definitively or precisely demarcated at the time.
In a Chinese tradition dating back to antiquity, each dynasty would compile an official history of the preceding one. The Communist Party first explored the idea of compiling a Qing history in the early years of Mao’s rule, with the aim of superseding an incomplete draft published in 1928. The project started taking shape with Premier Zhou Enlai’s blessing, only to be derailed by the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution.
Party leaders revived the project in 2002, in response to lobbying by influential academics including Dai Yi, an esteemed Qing historian at Beijing’s Renmin University, who became the inaugural director of the National Qing History Compilation Committee.
Participating scholars say they documented everything from politics and territorial issues to finance under Qing rule. Drafts also featured discussions of Qing-era literature, opera, performance arts such as acrobatics and juggling, and famous craftsmen of the period. “What we hope to present to the people is a comprehensive and profound work brimming with details,” Dai told a Chinese newspaper in 2019.
Dai and his colleagues spent years ferreting out errors in early drafts, including a typo that listed one Manchu prince’s birth as coming 18 years before his father’s.
Dai insisted that the manuscript analyze Qing rule over border regions in a way that upholds national unity, one of his deputies recalled in a 2021 essay. After the Philippines filed a legal challenge in 2013 against Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea, Dai requested the addition of a segment on maritime matters that—consistent with Chinese government narratives—explained how the Qing exercised sovereignty and control over those waters and the islands there, the deputy wrote.
Xi’s influence loomed large. As party chief, he paid close attention to the project and requested updates several times, according to Dai, who said he submitted materials for the Chinese leader to review. In 2016, Xi instructed the compilation team to speed up their work while maintaining strict quality checks, recalled Dai, who, in turn, told senior colleagues to be more stringent in reviewing chapters on sensitive issues—including borders, oceans, ethnicity, religion and diplomacy.
Dai’s team submitted a manuscript for review in late 2018. Formal vetting began the following year under the auspices of the Communist Party’s propaganda department, the state-run Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and the Chinese Academy of History, an institution set up at Xi’s behest and led by a Qing specialist, according to publicity material about the process. Xi told reviewers to ensure “quality comes first, make constant improvements and conduct strict checks,” the material said.