ABSTRACT
Political ideology has played a crucially important role in the politics of all communist regimes. It serves to justify communist revolution, political actions, and the Leninist party–state institutions, mobilize political and ideological movements, provide official explanations to some basic questions of human society, criticize capitalist society, and offer an outlook on an ideal society. China is such a political regime that relies on a codified system of political ideology derived from Marxism–Leninism, which guides the actions of the communist political elite, justifies the party’s monopoly on truth, virtues, and power, establishes the party’s moral superiority in defining and creating the new socialist moral order, and legitimizes its proclaimed historical mission to “build socialism” and “realize communism.”
