In China’s Last Maoist Village, Nostalgia for the Chairman Endures

In Nanjie, Mao Zedong still watches over the village from a towering white statue, while crimson flags hang limp above the “East is Red” Square in the summer heat. Tourists continue to stop for photographs in a place often called China’s last Maoist village.

Almost 50 years after Mao’s death, Nanjie continues to organize parts of daily life around shared ownership. Electric carts carry visitors past uniform apartment blocks covered in socialist slogans, while guides explain how cooperative enterprises help fund free housing for residents.

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I still revere him very much.

For some visitors and residents, the village represents an era of equality and collective purpose. “I still revere him very much,” said Xie Kaiyue, a 22-year-old local university student, although she was born nearly three decades after Mao died. She said young people today lacked the same spirit and that “People were purer.”

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People were purer.

The nostalgia extends to Dazhai, a mountain village in Shanxi province that Mao once promoted as a national model after residents transformed its dry hills into irrigated fields. Li, a 64-year-old visitor from Xi’an, remembered a childhood when people lacked enough food and clothing, but said the country had been filled with energy. “Of course I miss it,” he said.

Dazhai now sells posters, playing cards, crockery and copies of the “Little Red Book,” all bearing Mao’s image. Yet the darker record of his rule remains heavily censored in public discussion. Historians blame his policies for mass starvation and millions of deaths, while the Communist Party has called the Cultural Revolution, launched in 1966, a “grave mistake.”

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Of course I miss it.