SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong declared the start of the People's Republic of China on this day in 1949.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MAO ZEDONG: (Non-English language spoken).
PFEIFFER: It's been 50 years since his death, and as the Chinese economy slows, fascination with the chairman is on the rise. NPR's Jennifer Pak reports.
JENNIFER PAK, BYLINE: College student James Xu is a collector of Mao memorabilia.
JAMES XU: (Speaking Mandarin).
PAK: Online, he shows off stacks of Mao's little red books, Mao pins and Mao's writings.
XU: (Speaking Mandarin).
PAK: "For young people like us," he says, "Mao is a hero."
XU: (Speaking Mandarin).
PAK: That wasn't always how the leader was remembered, says Kerry Brown, author of the book, "Mao: Power And Contradiction."
KERRY BROWN: Mao was under a shadow. I mean, many people had suffered badly in his period.
PAK: Like, he says, the famine and a decade-long campaign to purge capitalists known as the Cultural Revolution. Later, the Communist Party issued an official verdict on the leader.
BROWN: What it said was he was a great revolutionary, a great Marxist, Leninist, great leader who made mistakes. And the Cultural Revolution is regarded as the biggest mistake.
PAK: Today, as corporate profits shrink and workers feel squeezed, some are idealizing Mao, even his mistakes. American Fred Engst was born in China in the 1950s. He joined the students in the Cultural Revolution. Back then, he says they could freely exchange ideas written on big posters.
FRED ENGST: If, really, people like your idea and copy your posters, then they travel home or go to other city and spread. So within a week or two, it would be all over China.
PAK: Later, he was assigned to a factory job where he says...
ENGST: The workers are really free to speak up against managers.
PAK: While some participants may have felt empowered, history professor Sun Peidong at Cornell University says historians widely regard the Cultural Revolution as a political disaster.
SUN PEIDONG: In which millions were subject to political persecution, imprisonment, torture. And very large number of people lost their lives.
PAK: It doesn't help that there has not been a full account of Mao's mistakes, she says.
SUN: Because the party has the absolute power to write or rewrite the history, and they create the memory for the young generation.
PAK: China's sanitized version of Mao leaves space for some disillusioned young people to romanticize the Mao era. We saw this in November...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "YOUTH")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character, speaking Mandarin).
PAK: ...A series of videos on China's YouTube-like platform, Bilibili, argued that a 2017 movie titled "Youth"...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "YOUTH")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character, speaking Mandarin).
PAK: ...Was suddenly praising Mao and the Cultural Revolution for fighting against capitalism.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "YOUTH")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character, speaking Mandarin).
PAK: The video commentaries got more than 35 million views before they were deleted by the platform.
YAN GELING: (Laughter) I give it a big laughs.
PAK: This interpretation is absurd, says Yan Geling, the author of the book the movie, "Youth," was based on. Especially since her family of intellectuals were considered the worst-class enemies during the Cultural Revolution.
YAN: Period of my father being condemned.
PAK: I've reached her in Berlin, where the connection is shaky. She says during the Cultural Revolution, her father, a writer, would wake up, and the first thing he did was stand in front of Mao's portrait and say, sorry. I'm guilty. And repeated that to passerbys (ph), too, she says. But she is empathetic to young people hearkening back to Mao's planned economy.
YAN: I think now the...
PAK: The disparity between the rich and poor is so huge in China, she says. People desire a society where everybody is poor but at least equal. But student Xu has a different take.
XU: (Speaking Mandarin).
PAK: "Young people don't necessarily wish to return to Mao's era," he says. "They may simply be hoping for a fairer future. Praising Mao is one way to express that desire."
Jennifer Pak, NPR News, Beijing. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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