Red tourism in Xi’s China

IN ITS HEYDAY in the 1960s and 1970s, the village of Dazhai was called a place of miracles. Millions of revolutionary pilgrims came to hear how local peasants had carved terraced grain-fields and reservoirs from its rocky hillsides, armed with little more than hand tools and love of Chairman Mao Zedong. Dazhai’s barely literate Communist Party secretary, Chen Yonggui, was summoned to Beijing and elevated to the Politburo with the rank of vice prime minister. Back then Liang Jiwen was a schoolboy, the son of a Dazhai official. He recalls dignitaries arriving each day in his corner of Shanxi province, in the dust-dry Taihang mountains. He and classmates would wave flowers and sing red hymns at the roadside. “We did not get much studying done,” he recalls.

Then came the fall. In 1980, as part of a broader purge of ultra-leftists that followed Mao’s death in 1976, official Communist Party newspapers called Dazhai a fraud. Investigators charged that its miraculous grain harvests were invented. They described massive cash subsidies channelled to the supposedly self-reliant village, and thousands of soldiers sent to build its engineering marvels.

Now Dazhai is trying for a third act. Local officials have drawn up plans to include their village in a China-wide official campaign to promote “red tourism” and teach party history...