Tourists taking selfies in front of Mao's birthplace: "red tourism" is a hit in China.

Shaoshan (China)When you arrive at your hotel in the Chinese city of Shaoshan, you'll likely be offered a welcome drink. The hotels here are modern and comfortable. Mine opened a few months ago and blends Scandinavian design with architecture. feng shui, the Chinese technique of Taoist origin that seeks balance. The hotel is made of wood, clean and bright, and very reasonably priced. A hotel like this in Barcelona would cost an arm and a leg. However, here, upon arrival, in addition to the drink, they give you a second gift: a pin with Mao Zedong's face. "You can wear it tomorrow when you visit the city," the receptionist says in English.

Every year, millions of people visit the town of Shaoshan, in the heart of China, in Hunan province. The reason? Mao was born here on December 26, 1893. The city has grown from a population of about 10,000 to 125,000 in just a few years, with the arrival of thousands of people to work in the ever-growing tourist scene, as Shaoshan is the epicenter of the so-called red tourismWhat travelers experience when visiting key sites in the history of Chinese communism. For decades, many Chinese people visited this city on organized tours for work or the military. Diplomats and Marxists from all continents also visited the city. But in the last decade, everything has changed in surprising ways, as is often the case in China.

Every day, from 8 am to 5 pm, thousands of people queue to enter the compound surrounding the house where The Great Helmsman saw the light. Admission is free and the entrances are full of shops selling all kinds of souvenirs: caps, t-shirts, keychains, stuffed animals... Few places symbolize the new China better than Shaoshan. People visit the village of a socialist who pursued capitalism using a network of hotels, transportation, and restaurants that look more like Disney World than the Great Leap Forward. People usually arrive on an express train from Changsha, a city of seven million inhabitants that is also very visited because there are museums in the places where Mao studied and taught. But everyone prioritizes Shaoshan. When you get off at the station, you are greeted by a large mural of Mao, but also by giant plastic dolls that symbolize members of the communist red guard, but with an aesthetic taken from Japanese cartoons. Communists who seem to have emerged from the Doctor Slump either Dragon BallThe aesthetics of Japanese manga triumph in China, despite being enemy states.

It's hard to imagine what the most fanatical communists who carried out the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s would think if they saw Mao T-shirts now bearing Andy Warhol's image. More and more people want to come to one of the prominent sites of this red tourism, as the government officially defines it in its press releases. A project that began in 2004, partly to offer job opportunities in poor areas, since the iconic sites of Chinese communism are often found in rural regions. General plan for the development of red tourism 2004-2010 He created a list of 100 key positions in the birth, consolidation, and triumph of Chinese communism. Publicity works and campaigns were carried out, and the population was encouraged to visit battlegrounds or convention venues.

From Shaoshan to Tiananmen

A second key date is 2021, which marked the centenary of the birth of the Chinese Communist Party. Even more sites were then added to the list, which grew to more than 170. The five most visited are Yan'an, the city in Shaanxi province where the communist army completed the Long March in 1935; the city of Nanchang, on the occasion of its 1927 uprising led by communists Zhou Enlai and He Long; the Jinggang Mountains, where Mao lived and where he began his revolutionary experiences; the city of Zunyi, where a party congress was held in 1935; Shaoshan; and finally, Beijing's Tiananmen Square, designed by Mao in 1949, where he gave the speech proclaiming the People's Republic of China, where his famous portrait hangs at the gate of the Forbidden City, and where the mausoleum with his mummified body is located. To visit the square and the mausoleum, you must reserve tickets, which are free, using modern Chinese apps like WeChat. The tight checkpoints to enter a square that witnessed the main anti-regime protests in 1989 are cumbersome. Not so much in Shaoshan. Beyond an initial checkpoint, peace reigns in this village.

According to government data, the red tourism It moved 73 million people in 2019, before the pandemic. Now the numbers have recovered and are now over 100 million. A business has been created that, according to internal data, now accounts for 11% of Chinese domestic tourism. In other words, one in ten Chinese tourists goes to places like Mao's birthplace. A modest, single-story house with stone and mud walls. Photos are not allowed inside, but many people ignore them, especially in the room where his mother gave birth. The house has a stable behind it, the room of his brother who died in battle in 1943, and an interior courtyard. When you go outside again, you see a rice field and a small lake that wasn't there in 1893. They came back later. The rice paddies were there. It's a beautiful place, very well maintained, with paths that lead to his parents' grave, five minutes from the house, on top of a hill. In line to enter the building, a group of young people wait patiently. One of them checks his phone for shares in companies he has bought.Online. Another is playing an online game. When they enter, they encounter a group of veteran workers wearing T-shirts with Mao's face and a folded Chinese Communist Party flag, identical to that of the USSR. They unfurl it in front of the house and take a group photo. The young people also take photos with their cell phones. Different generations united in the same place, all dedicated to the cult of Mao.

A prayer before the statue

About a five-minute walk from the house is a park presided over by a 10-meter-high bronze statue of the great leader. It's the meeting point where groups of students, workers, and families parade. People leave flowers, light incense, and, to the surprise of many Westerners, pray. They pray before the statue of the man who championed an ideology that said religion was the opium of the people. Many circle the statue three times, and all bow their heads. In fact, guards ensure that people follow protocol. Most of those present take the opportunity to pray to Mao, as if he were a deity, for luck in business. Many of the visitors are workers or officials on visits organized by the Party. In front of a monument with a speech by Mao carved into the stone, some men raise their fists. If it weren't for these details, one might forget that this is an officially communist site. Few Western tourists are seen.

The residents of Shaoshan claim that, thanks to Mao, this village has not suffered earthquakes or floods. Some visitors admit that, to them, Mao would be like Jesus to Christians. Without him, China wouldn't be what it is. The new China has moved far away from Marxism, but because he said things like we should follow "the Chinese path to progress," Xi Jinping's government uses them to justify the policies of recent years. All this to ensure that China doesn't end up like the USSR, one of Xi Jinping's great obsessions. This is the "socialism with Chinese characteristics" explained in Shaoshan's museums, where they emphasize how, thanks to Mao, a thousand-year-old empire like China, once humiliated by the West, is now great again. There's no contradiction in raising your fist at a picture of Mao and then buying publicly traded stocks. It's the Chinese way.

Luxury stores and the founding of the Party

These contradictions are especially evident in Shanghai. Here you can visit the building where the Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1921. The rooms of these former warehouses have remained as they were, but everything around them has changed: the building is surrounded by luxury stores of Western brands and skyscrapers. It's in the trendy Huangpu district. A group of girls in high heels carry bags of French brands as they walk past the entrance to the museum that tells the history of the Party. A museum where, at the end, you can leave your messages and wishes on small wooden tables, just as has historically been done in religious temples. Two workers read the messages left by people. If they aren't convinced by the content, they remove them. The messages left usually ask for prosperity, money, and work. Here, flags with the hammer and sickle coexist with a BMW and Dior.

He red tourism continues to gain followers. Many young people want to understand how their grandparents did in difficult times or are attracted to the war against the Japanese in the 1940s, first, and the civil war later, as if it were a film. Many of the sites in this red tourism They follow the route of the Long March, the journey through the interior of China followed by Mao's troops between 1934 and 1935, fleeing from the army of the Republic of China. Everything is covered with signs with phrases like "The founding of the Communist Party of China is the inevitable result of the development of China's modern history," to create a meaningful story that unites past and present. As Xi Jinping says, it is necessary to visit these places to "renew historical confidence in socialism." But a socialism in China, with increasingly young visitors. According to government data, the age group that visits these sites the most is between 13 and 27 years old, Generation Z. They are young people who, dressed in fashion, want to buy souvenirs.of Mao and when they visit Shaoshan they try the grilled pork with local sauce, the great leader's favorite dish, and then dress up as revolutionary guards to take selfies.