Xi Jinping's Classical Canon习近平的经典引用图谱

Substance: which is used more substantively?

The headline ranking (Deng 351 > Mao 319) hides a richer picture. At every substantive layer, the two are either tied or close — the gap is concentrated where you'd expect it given the corpus's genre.

What this means. Deng leads numerically because the GoC books are operationally focused — they're books of governance speeches, and governance speeches reach more often for the policy-architect (Deng, reform-era authority) than the revolutionary-patriarch (Mao, founding-era authority). When Xi is citing a specific Mao text vs a specific Deng text, the rates are essentially identical (114 vs 112). Mao and Deng are paired authorities, not rival ones — 84 close-pair events (within 100 chars of each other) occur across the corpus, including the canonical 「以毛泽东同志为核心的党的第一代中央领导集体、以邓小平同志为核心的党的第二代中央领导集体」 formula.

How Xi uses each today. Both figures decline sharply in CC20 speech-dates (Mao 17, Deng 15 in 2023+) — as 习近平新时代中国特色社会主义思想 consolidates as the active doctrine, the founding pair recedes. CC18 was the citation peak for both; Deng's CC18 spike (especially 2014, his 110th anniversary year) was particularly steep. The narrowing of the gap in CC20 reflects Xi's third-term framing: founders are invoked ceremonially as the succession backdrop, with his own thought as the operational front.