Promising a socialist utopia built with the toil of ordinary farmers, Mao Zedong singled out the remote mountain village of Dazhai as proof that faith in the Communist Party and hard work could conquer the harshest terrain.

The villagers, wielding pick axes, hoes and their bare hands more than half a century ago, were said to have carved terraces out of stony hillsides, hauling soil to turn barren slopes into miraculously bountiful fields of corn.

More than 10 million Chinese visited the tiny village in Shanxi Province in northern China, obeying Mao's order to "learn from Dazhai" and soak up its history of hardship and anticapitalist fervour. Most came during China's disastrous 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, during which Dazhai’s semiliterate party boss, Chen Yonggui, was elevated to the Politburo in Beijing.

Today, the farmers of Dazhai have mostly vanished. Many of their terraces have crumbled, while machines and corporate farming have replaced their labour on those that remain.

Villagers now mainly work to serve the one thing that has not changed: Dazhai's role as a place of pilgrimage and symbol of what the Communist Party would like China to be, though what exactly that is keeps changing.

Visitors today are mostly older people with fond memories of their youth in the ’60s and ’70s, but they also include younger Chinese bused in on party-organised tours. The place is a must-see stop on China's sprawling "red tourism" trail of party heritage sites, combining mass tourism frippery with what Xi Jinping, China's leader and a big fan of party history, calls "moral nourishment".

Primitive cave homes in the middle of what used to be Dazhai's "people’s commune", the village's only employer, have been turned into a boutique hotel, which opened last year backed by investment from a coal company.

On Tiger Head Mountain, the focus of what were once trumpeted as superhuman feats led by the party chief — hauling soil to make rocky ground fit for planting — terraced fields have mostly been abandoned because they were too small and unstable for heavy farm machinery.

The mountain has become a tourist attraction that charges for admission. It has a Buddhist temple, but its main draw is the grave of a dedicated atheist, Chen, the former party boss.

A group of young women, party members at a state-run energy company who were on a recent "study tour" of Dazhai, giggled nervously when asked what a discredited Mao-era model village had to do with today's China.

One woman eventually answered, "The spirit of self-reliance," using the Chinese phrase "zili gengsheng", a Maoist slogan plastered in red paint on walls around the village.

Self-reliance — the literal translation is "regeneration through one's own efforts" — is a slogan for all seasons. It was first declared the party's guiding principle by Mao in 1945, four years before he seized power in Beijing. He deemed it an invincible weapon to "defeat all Chinese and foreign reactionaries".

Xi does not talk about reactionaries. But he has made "self-reliance" a cornerstone of the party’s efforts to meld its revolutionary past with its current pursuit of "national rejuvenation" through economic growth.

This is a sharp shift in emphasis. For decades after Deng Xiaoping opened up the Chinese economy to the world in the late 1970s, the idea of self-reliance was played down, though it still popped up in formulaic declarations of loyalty to Mao.

It became "associated in China with North Korea, a byword for grim backwardness and deprivation", said Richard McGregor, the author of The Party, a book on China's political system, and a senior fellow for East Asia at the Lowy Institute, an Australian research centre. "It was a totally negative concept."

"Nowadays, under Xi, a policy of self-reliance is tied to visions of high-tech independence, security and advancement, a kind of digital nirvana with Chinese characteristics," McGregor said.

That policy, though far from the economic autarky promoted by Mao or North Korea, still sees the outside world as a threat. But it is now focused on investing, to make sure China is never dependent on — and therefore vulnerable to — the West, particularly for critical technologies like semiconductors and computer operating systems.

The new meaning of self-reliance has allowed Dazhai to reinvent itself, changing from a beacon of rural anticapitalist fervour into a hive of capitalist commerce. Former farmers run shops selling Mao trinkets, locally distilled grain liquor and enamel mugs celebrating the "Dazhai spirit". For visitors with serious cases of nostalgia, some restaurants offer noodles garnished with tree bark, a throwback to China's days of hunger.

New York Times News Service