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

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.

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.

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