Western observers, focusing on recent public statements by Xi and Li, highlight a dearth of comments in favor of economic or political reforms. But the same could have been said of the early utterances of Deng, modern China’s greatest reformer. As Ezra Vogel notes in Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, Deng’s first public statement after his political rehabilitation in 1976 was, “Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought constitute the guiding ideology of the party.”
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