Xi Jinping’s Historians Can’t Stop Rewriting China’s Imperial Past

China’s Communist Party often speaks proudly about what it claims to be 5,000 years of Chinese civilization. But its leaders are still struggling to decide what they should say about the past few centuries.

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.