Long Marching; 'Red tourism' is on the upswing, as Chinese look for the good in Chairman Mao.

Byline: Melinda Liu and Benjamin Robertson

Tourists crowd into Jinggangshan, a mountainous retreat in Jiangxi province that was Mao Zedong's base before the legendary Long March of 1934-36. Some lay white funerary wreaths at a memorial hall; others toss cigarettes onto his stark wooden bed as an offering to the chain-smoking Great Helmsman. Thirty years have passed since Mao died on Sept. 9, and Jinggangshan now attracts free-spending Chinese yuppies instead of stern cadres. These so-called red tourists, in fact, are flocking to revolutionary sites all around the country--from the party's wartime base in Yanan to Zunyi, where Mao solidified his leadership over the Communist Party in 1935. They wave red flags and dine on such communist delicacies as yam soup and wild grass. At Jinggangshan, the party secretary of a Guangdong-based trading company leads a couple dozen employees in shouting "Victory" as photographers snap their picture.

The process of marketing Mao has been ongoing for years, ever since the first alarm clock featuring an avuncular Helmsman waving his arm hit street markets in Hong Kong. But China has yet to come to terms with his legacy. Back in 1981 the Communist Party fell back on ambiguous statistics to pass judgment on his three decades in power: 70 percent good, 30 percent bad. They've since muzzled serious debate about the cruelties imposed during the period.

But more and more ordinary Chinese now say that Mao's policies began going bad right after the Red Army defeated rival Kuomintang forces in 1949. In other words, the good-Mao period lasted for less than half of his adult life. "If Mao had died in 1949, the whole world would be remembering him now as a hero," says China expert Sidney Rittenberg, 85, who was Mao's translator and lived on the mainland for 35 years. "Instead, Mao became terribly corrupted by power. He lived too long."

That helps explain why the Long March, which ended 70 years ago next month, is resonating so deeply again. The 1930s, after all, was the era of the good Mao. And the drama of the Long March--a 12,500-kilometer retreat during which less than 4,000 of the original force of 100,000 soldiers survived, after slogging through mountains, swamps, ambushes and hostile weather--remains "one of the stories left in the Communist bag of myths that still speaks to people," says Briton Andrew McEwen, ...