ABSTRACT
In November 2021, the Chinese Communist Party approved the Resolution on the Major Achievements and Historical Experience of the Party over the Past Century. Together with a first resolution on Party history published in 1945 and a second one passed in 1981, it forms a string of watershed documents, each of them inaugurating and legitimating a new ‘dynasty’ of Party rule. This chapter examines the three resolutions from a linguistic perspective as a distinct genre of Party literature and reveals three powerful mind-engineering functions. First, the resolution aim to reshape historical reality in ways that justify the transfer of rightful authority between leadership generations. Second, they serve as pedagogical tools to instill Party members’ with ‘true beliefs’ in the Party’s evolving ideological orthodoxy. Third, the genre primes for action by invoking audiences’ consent to the ‘correct’ interpretation of historical reality, while sanctioning ‘incorrect’ accounts of Party history.
