Xi first used the phrase in 2015 in a speech to the Central Leading Group for Comprehensively Deepening Reforms (中央全面深化改革领导小组), calling on the group to “dare to self-revolutionize” (勇于自我革命). The next summer, it featured in Xi’s speech for the 95th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party’s founding, and the following year it appeared in the report of the CCP’s 19th National Congress. Addressing the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (中紀委) in 2019, Xi “put forward the goal and tasks of the Party’s self-revolution, and discussed the requirements for realizing self-purification, self-improvement, self-innovation, and self-improvement,” according to an interview on the CCDI website.

From its onset, “self-revolution” was likened to “turning the blade inward to scrape away the poison” (勇于刀刃向内、刮骨疗毒) and “taking up the scalpel to remove our own tumors” (拿起手术刀来革除自身的毒瘤). Like any revolution, it is no dinner party, but a long, slow, and painful process to achieve “purity” and “eternal youth.” It is the ideological groundwork of the anti-corruption drive that Xi has made one of the hallmarks of his reign — the promise that the Party will “dare to face the problem, always stick to the truth, and correct its mistakes.”

The Second Answer

In 2021, “self-revolution” was enshrined in the CCP Central Committee’s Resolution on the Major Achievements and Historical Experience of the Party over the Past Century (中共中央关于党的百年奋斗重大成就和历史经验的决议). Commonly known as the “third historical resolution,” the document was only the third of its kind after “historical resolutions” adopted by Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. Xi and “self-revolution” were in illustrious company, but in remarks made at the time of the resolution, Xi elevated it — and himself — higher still, calling self-revolution “the second answer” (第二个答案) to the question of escaping historical cycles.

This put him and his idea on the level of one man alone: Mao Zedong, who offered “the first answer” in his 1945 “Cave Dwelling Dialogue.” Mao was asked by writer and politician Huang Yanpei (黃炎培) how he proposed to extricate China from the constant cycle of dynastic struggles and collapse — how, in other words, could the new political order he promised remain dynamic and avoid degradation through its internal failures? Mao’s answer to Huang rang with confidence: “We have found a new path,” he said. “It is called democracy. As long as the public maintains their oversight of the government, the government will not slacken in its efforts.”

Mao’s answer pleased Huang, a founding pioneer of the China Democratic League and the China National Democratic Construction Association, but Mao’s actual time in power was hardly defined by democratic oversight. Xi’s “second answer” is intended to supplement Mao’s rather than replace it, but by expressly stating that the Party can only be monitored by itself and change upon its own initiative, Xi waves away the democratic niceties of Mao’s first answer. If the Party is as “pure,” selfless, and capable of “self-correction” as the second answer suggests, it need answer to no one. It may, admittedly, make the occasional misstep, but there is no need to waste time and energy dissecting these: the Party, in its wisdom, will “self-correct” eventually. “The key” to self-revolution, as the People’s Daily wrote in an official commentary, “lies in the Party being in charge of the Party and governing the Party strictly.”

History Lessons

Saving the People’s Republic from the same fate that befell the Qing, the Ming, and every other dynasty before them, is “a difficult problem that has not been solved by China’s feudal dynasties in for thousands of years,” according to Wang Junwei (王均伟), a scholar at the CCP’s Institute of Party History and Literature. But for cautionary tales of what could happen to the Communist regime if it does not “self-revolutionize,” one needn’t look that far back. Xi’s political thinking is forged, in large part, by a much more recent historical: the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Before the disintegration of the USSR, China’s Communists believed that they had already escaped “the cyclical law of history,” which “could only occur in feudal dynasties or peasant uprising, and could not happen in socialist societies,” notes Feng Wuzhong (冯务中), a professor of Marxism at Xi’s alma mater, the prestigious Tsinghua University. Suddenly, they realized they had not yet “beaten history” — as Wang Junwei put it, Russia’s “painful lesson warns us that if the Marxist ruling party lacks the spirit of self-revolution… it will eventually be unable to escape the same tragic end.” While they didn’t offer their own answers, both Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao did raise the same historical question in 1993 and 2004, respectively.

Since 2021, “self-revolution” has only grown in profile. In early 2024, Xi introduced the “Nine Requirements” for realizing self-revolution at the third session of the 20th Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. In his speech (重要讲话) to the meeting, Xi Jinping announced that “the fight against corruption has won an overwhelming victory and has been comprehensively consolidated” — yet, at the same time, the situation “remains grim and complicated.” So which is it? How can these contradictory statements be reconciled?

The answer, as noted in our “Nine Requirements” definition, is that the protracted battle against corruption is not at all about corruption itself, but rather about the defense and consolidation of Xi’s power. The success of “self-revolution,” and therefore the prospect of the PRC achieving “eternal youth” and escaping the laws of historical entropy, rests on an audacious suggestion: that corruption will be solved by the same unaccountable power that birthed it, and that the PRC can escape the fate faced by all tyrants by concentrating power even more in their own hands.