This study aims to explore the structural reasons behind the continued existence of the Chinese Communist Party's ideology after the Reform and Opening up, as well as its resurgence during the Xi Jinping era. In contrast to existing research, which largely emphasizes that ideology was replaced by "pragmatism" or "technocratic governance" after the Reform and Opening up, the core argument of this paper is that ideology, as an institutional resource, never disappeared under the Leninist system of the CCP. Rather, it has continued to serve flexible political functions behind the surface of "de-ideologization." This paper does not merely reject the judgment of a "post-ideological era" but instead argues that ideology, as a tool for policy coordination and a foundation of ruling legitimacy, has gradually developed into a theorized academic system and has been reactivated under specific conditions. This paper takes the ideological discourse of four successive CCP leaders since 1978 as the object of study. Drawing on primary sources such as Party Congress reports, leaders' speeches, and theoretical study materials, supplemented by existing academic analyses and comparative qualitative research, it compares the major ideological texts in terms of functional positioning, institutional embeddedness, and semantic structure. These texts include Deng Xiaoping Theory, the Important Thought of the Three Represents, the Scientific Outlook on Development, and Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era. In addition, this study adopts a joint modeling method using entropy value, centrality, and citation density to calculate the entropy of different leaders' discursive systems across ten thematic domains (Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, Party Building, Economy and Reform and Opening up, National Security, Cultural Confidence, Social Governance and Livelihood, Ecological Civilization, National Defense and Military Construction, Unification and National Sovereignty, Global Strategy and Foreign Policy), as well as the citation density of leaders' names and ideological terms. Finally, by analyzing the sub-entropy values related to the theme of "economic development," the study evaluates whether certain ideological expressions are more inclined toward development-centered discourses. At the same time, the study also incorporates theoretical tools such as the Sinicization of Marxism and contemporizing to examine how leadership transitions and the structural survival of ideology work together to drive this transformation and further analyzes whether this mechanism possesses replicability and theoretical universality in institutional evolution.
Yangjianxin Zhou (Sun,) studied this question.