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BEIJING — The spirits of two men called Mao are abroad in China, representing two dramatically different political views — nascent parties, perhaps — in a one-party state. Recently, there has been open hostility between the two camps, as I report in my Letter from China this week. The issue seems especially pertinent today, May 16, the 47th anniversary of the start of the Cultural Revolution that Mao Zedong initiated.

Page Two Posts written by the IHT’s Page Two columnists.

The first Mao is that Mao, who commands a group of loyalists from beyond the grave and whose legitimacy is enormously bolstered by the Communist Party’s refusal to repudiate his legacy, despite some acknowledgment that he did some wrong — a legacy that includes the violence of the Cultural Revolution, which lasted about a decade and finally ended with his death in 1976.

Despite the suffering brought by Mao’s policies, the party’s public support for him doesn’t seem likely to disappear anytime soon, judging by recent signs. In an article that drew much attention here, Guangming Daily, a party newspaper, reported that President Xi Jinping said in a high-level meeting in January that to repudiate the party’s history could lead to disaster: as a headline on the Web site 21CN put it, “There Could be Great Chaos Under Heaven in Repudiating Mao Zedong.” Mr. Xi’s thoughts are being presented, in the classic style of Chinese politics, as the “Two No Repudiates”: don’t use what happened after economic reform began in 1978 to repudiate what happened before it, and don’t use what happened before 1978 to repudiate what came after. In other words, don’t be too “right” and don’t be too “left.”

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The second Mao is Mao Yushi, a popular, 84-year-old engineer-turned-economist, a figurehead for greater economic and political freedoms who is an outspoken critic of the other Mao’s legacy, which he says poisons China and must be removed. (He is not related to Mao Zedong.)

The political groups the two Maos represent work broadly like this: on college campuses around the country, and elsewhere in society, there is a “ziyou pai,” or “freedom faction,” made up of adherents of Mao Yushi’s viewpoint (he is one of its best known representatives but by no means its only one). Mr. Mao was last year’s recipient of the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty.

There is also a loosely named “wumao pai,” or “50-cent faction” (named after citizens who, for a small fee or even voluntarily, “guide” public opinion on social media and in public debates in line with the government’s views). This group is very loyal to the party and mostly incorporates the Maoist rump, though there is tension, as the Maoists often accuse the party of not being Communist enough.

Mao Yushi has been subjected to verbal attacks and demonstrations from the far left in the past, as I write in the Letter from China, and things recently got ugly again when some of Mao Zedong’s followers staged small but aggressive demonstrations against him in several cities, including Changsha and Zhengzhou (there are also groups that oppose him in cities such as Beijing and Shenzhen), holding red banners denouncing him as a “traitor to China.” They harass him, Mr. Mao said at a recent, private talk in Beijing, making obscene phone calls to his home and spreading false rumors.

The question people are asking is: Why now? And that’s why the article in Guangming Daily attracted interest. If Mr. Xi is firmly behind continued support of Mao Zedong’s legacy, then Mao Yushi’s ideas, which rest on a repudiation of it, are an easy target. At the meeting in Beijing this week, Mr. Mao alluded to the problem of state support for the hard left faction.

“There are many good people in our government and those officials all support equality, freedom and human rights,” Mr. Mao said.

“But what does the government want? Who is the greatest threat to the government? Among the slogans they,” referring to the Maoist demonstrators, “used in Changsha was ‘Bring Back Xilai,’ ” referring to Bo Xilai, the former leader of Chongqing municipality, who espoused the imagery and style of Maoism and was widely perceived as a threat to Xi Jinping’s power. Mr. Bo is disgraced and in detention, following an intricate political affair in which his wife, Gu Kailai, was jailed for the murder of a British businessman in Chongqing in late 2011.

Mr. Mao continued: “They say Bo Xilai was wrongly arrested. That’s a direct challenge to the government. You cannot restrict people’s freedom of speech,” he said, but, crucially, “demonstrations need permission to take place, so what happened in Changsha worries me a lot.”