The party celebrated the 30th anniversary with great fanfare in 2008, but official plans to commemorate the 40th anniversary this year have been scaled back considerably, according to a veteran journalist with a state news outlet. “Once you dredge up these matters, it’s very easy to lose control and set off new debate,” the journalist said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

During Mr. Xi’s visit to southern China last month, he noted the coming anniversary, attended an exhibition devoted to it and vowed to continue the economic transition that Deng began, but did not mention Deng — at least in the remarks chronicled by the state news media.

Inevitably, many compared the trip to the famous “southern tour” in 1992 that Deng used to steer the nation back toward market-oriented policies and out of the diplomatic isolation and economic retrenchment that followed the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.

“Xi Jinping has been pickpocketing policies from the Deng era,” Geremie R. Barmé, an Australian scholar of China, wrote this summer. “He does so while diminishing the man hailed for decades as the ‘Architect of Reform and the Opening Door Policies.’ At the same, he crucially overrides aspects of Deng’s legacy that might limit his afflatus and sense of mission.”

Mr. Barmé, in an interview, said Mr. Xi was eager to position himself as “the greater unifier after Mao,” relegating Deng and the leaders who followed him to an era of economic transition leading to a new era of strength that only he can achieve. Tellingly, Mr. Xi’s trip included a visit to China’s southern military command, where he urged commanders “to strengthen the mission” and focus on “preparations for fighting a war.”