Wang Hongbin, a 60-year-old man with deep creases lining his face, took a break from his duties as village chief this month to show me around Nanjiecun, in the wheat-heavy center of the country. It was unlike any place I’d seen in my years in China. No commercial advertisements cluttered the streets, just billboards screaming proletariat platitudes and memorializing Communist icons. “Long Live the Invincible Mao Zedong Thought,” read the inscription on an archway near the main government building. In the town’s three convenience stores, female clerks wore olive uniforms meant to evoke the People’s Liberation Army. And in the village square, surrounding the gigantic statue of Mao, stood four 30-foot portraits — one of Marx, one of Lenin, one of Engels and one of Stalin.

I asked Wang what he thought of Stalin. “Nobody is perfect,” he replied. “Even saints make mistakes.”

For 34 years, Wang has been secretary of the local branch of the Communist Party, and under his leadership, Nanjiecun has held fast to a retro red vision of China at the same time that much of the rest of the country has flirted with, or outright embraced, a free-market economy. Villagers wake up every morning to loudspeakers blaring the classic anthem “The East Is Red,” take a lunch break when they hear “Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman,” a paean to Mao, and leave work to “Socialism Is Good.” It is one of the few remaining self-styled Maoist collectives in the country.