The study of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) ideological architecture has long been dominated by a focus on Marxist-Leninist foundations, the history of revolutionary struggle, and the mechanics of Party organisation. This framing, though analytically useful, risks obscuring a more persistent and arguably more consequential dimension of Chinese political thought, the deliberate instrumentalisation of classical philosophy as a mechanism of state governance. In contemporary China, Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism are not merely artefacts of a civilisational past that the Party tolerates for cultural reasons. They are, with increasing explicitness under Xi Jinping, active resources of political legitimation, institutional design, and social management.
