That China’s era of reform ended under Xi Jinping is hardly surprising. What may surprise many people is that Xi himself keeps saying it.
On July 1, at the celebration marking the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Xi said that through the “great practice of revolution, construction, reform, and the New Era,” the party led the people through untold hardships and successfully opened up and upheld the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics. That sentence amounts to a declaration: China’s reform era has ended.
Of course, this is not the first time Xi has used such a formulation, one designed to put himself into the grand narrative of CCP history. As early as his 2021 speech marking the party’s centenary and in the CCP’s third historical resolution, Xi had already divided the party’s history into four stages: revolution, construction, reform, and the New Era. This time, he simply restated that narrative in more compressed language and further gave it the stamp of official approval.
By Xi’s reckoning, the revolutionary stage runs from the party’s founding in 1921 to the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. The construction stage runs from 1949 to the beginning of reform in 1978. The reform stage runs from 1978 to Xi’s rise to power in 2012. After that comes the New Era, which continues to the present.
Under the older CCP narrative, the party’s history was generally divided into three stages: the revolutionary period, when it fought for power; the socialist construction period after victory; and the period of reform and opening up that began under Deng Xiaoping. The last of these was officially described as ongoing, even permanent. Xi himself has repeatedly said reform is always “on the road.” As a result, many people were left with the impression that the reform era was very long indeed, almost open-ended.
But Xi has insisted on cutting out a separate period from the old official narrative of reform and naming it the New Era. His purpose is to highlight his own work in remaking the CCP and to separate himself from his predecessors Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao and to some extent even from Deng.
In CCP politics, the division and naming of historical periods are never based purely on history itself. They are always bound up with the politics of power. Whoever represents a stage occupies an irreplaceable place in party history.
Mao Zedong alone owns the stages of revolution and construction not simply because he held supreme power during those periods but because he is treated as their central figure. Even though Mao committed catastrophic errors during the construction period, including the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution—which even the official history partially recognizes—that does not prevent orthodox CCP history from placing both the revolutionary and the founding-of-the-state narratives under his name.
Deng, however, cannot own the glory of the reform era as cleanly as Mao dominates revolution and construction. Officially, Deng is the architect of China’s reform. The path he designed gave the CCP a second source of legitimacy, and he was praised as the chief architect of China’s reform, opening up, and modernization. But the reform era cannot belong to Deng alone; it must be shared with Jiang and Hu, under whom China’s market reforms and globalization deepened further. In the official narrative, both men also contributed to China’s reform path. Thus, the glory of reform is shared by all three, though Deng clearly occupies the highest place among them.
The New Era, by contrast, belongs only to Xi.
By naming the period since he took power in 2012 the New Era, Xi is clearly seeking to elevate his own historical achievements and status. He does not want future historians to understand him as merely an extension of reform and opening up, as just another leader after Deng or just another general secretary after Jiang and Hu. He wants a historical era of his own. And he has been able to do this without objection because, by remaking the party, he has become the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao.
The four-stage division of CCP history is a narrative of power. By placing the New Era alongside revolution, construction, and reform, Xi has opened a historical stage that he does not have to share with anyone else. His own expectations are clear: In CCP history, he wants to stand after Mao but before Deng.
For now, Xi still does not dare challenge Mao’s historical position. This is a leader, after all, who is still on all the currency—and whose portrait looms over Tiananmen Square.
Nor does Xi need to challenge Mao. His real task is to surpass Deng.
Deng launched reform and opening up and addressed the question of how China could become rich. Xi, by contrast, wants to address the question of how China can become strong. In Xi’s historical imagination, strength is clearly more important than wealth.
The New Era under Xi is meant to push party history into a fourth stage. Just as the construction era replaced the revolutionary era, and the reform era replaced the construction era, the New Era is meant to replace the reform era. In this way, Xi turns himself from the heir of the reform era into its terminator and the founder of a new era. His contribution to the party can then be placed on a level approaching Mao’s.
Although Xi has declared the reform era over, this does not mean the New Era will have no reforms or that the Chinese leadership will stop talking about reform. Quite the opposite: The official line still loudly promotes reform, and the Third Plenum of the 20th Central Committee issued a decision on further comprehensively deepening reform.
But outsiders need to understand that the same word now carries a very different meaning. Today’s official “reform” is reform inside the New Era, under Xi’s values, not reform as a historical stage. It is instrumental reform, not reform as a political value.
Reform was the core of political legitimacy, the name of a governing line, the marker of an era. Reform itself carried a sense of purpose; it was a value in its own right. Reform inside the New Era, by contrast, is merely a tool and a means, a policy technique serving the goals of the New Era. It is subordinate to political power, national security, party leadership, and Xi’s definition of Chinese modernization.
China has continued to use the language of reform over the past decade, even as the spirit and temperament of the government have changed severely. The reform era emphasized slogans such as “emancipating the mind” and “crossing the river by feeling the stones,” development as the overriding principle, allowing some people to get rich first, opening to the outside world, learning from the West, and integrating with the world. The language of the New Era speaks of the party’s comprehensive leadership, security, struggle, self-reliance, common prosperity, Chinese modernization, the rise of the East and decline of the West, and changes unseen in a century.
One moved China from closure toward openness. The other moves China from openness back toward control. One allowed the market and society to release their energy. The other seeks to bring society and the market back under the party’s order.
Deng’s reform was, in essence, a retreat from the Mao era. It was an admission that the old system could not continue and that economic and social space had to be liberated from politics. Xi’s reform, by contrast, is essentially about taking back the power, resources, and space released after Deng and placing them once again under the party’s centralized and unified leadership.
So, the word “reform” remains, but the soul of reform has changed. The reform era has been sealed off by Xi and written into Chinese history. It will still be commemorated by the official narrative, but it no longer defines China’s present or future.
The present and future have been defined as the New Era—and the New Era belongs to Xi alone.
