1/端傳媒 with a fascinating piece on Worshipping Mao to Suppress Deng 崇毛抑鄧？習時代對兩個領導人的重塑和打通四個「三十年」的野心 Is Xi recovering Mao as the "great man" or "hero" of CCP history, and relegating Deng to a mere "inheritor" of socialism? theinitium.com/article/202106…
2/ The author argues that by focusing on Mao's skill in Party-building, cultivating the "revolutionary tradition" & "red gene" of the CCP, Deng's decidedly secondary contribution is relegated to "reform & opening" & developing "socialism with Chinese characteristics".
3/ The author then adopts the keyword counting method used by @cnmediaproject to come up with levels of "warmth" in political discourse. From 2013 to 2019, the author finds Mao is pretty consistently hotter than Deng, w/a brief deflation due to #COVID19 in 2020 
4/ The author then traces out occurrences of "red" ( 红色) as a proxy for CCP fundamentalism in The People's Daily, and finds that Xi out-reds them all-- even redder than the reddest sun of Mao's heart! (Deng and Jiang are clearly the whiter shade of pale)
5/ "Communism" (共产主义) as a term has not much troubled anyone since Mao's day, but it also appears far less often than "socialism with Chinese characteristics."
6/ According to Wu Si, bet. Dec. 2018 & March 2021, Xi mentioned "communism" only five times in his public addresses, whereas "socialism with Chinese characteristics" (part of "XJP Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era") is far more common.
7/ More evidence of "heating up Mao, cooling down Deng" according to the 端傳媒 piece, is the near-total disappearance of the Dengist "political system reform" (政治体制改革). It did not appear at all at the 19th CC's 4th Plenum, appeared only a few times in 2013, 2017 & 2018;
8/ Usage of "democratic politics" (民主政治),"intra-party democracy" (党内民主)、and "excessive concentration of power" (权力过于集中) has dropped off in the past 8 years. "'Worshipping Mao to suppress Deng' evidently means concentrating power, but opposes restricting it."
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