Chinese President Xi Jinping sowed consternation in liberal social and artistic circles last fall when he delivered a speech on arts and literature that offered a vision of culture torn from the pages of Mao Zedong's political playbook. The speech, delivered on the anniversary of a famous 1942 lecture delivered by Mao Zedong, echoed the revolutionary patriarch’s demand that art serve politics—a potentially chilling dictate for a cultural world that is now driven more by popular tastes but is in constant battle with Communist Party censors.

Just short of a year later, the full text of Mr. Xi's speech was published for the first time this week. And what’s been edited out and what remains is telling.

At the time, Mr. Xi's speech at a two-day arts symposium in Beijing last October raised eyebrows for its rejection of "strange-looking" architecture of the kind that has come to define Beijing's skyline, and for its hat-tip in the direction of a previously obscure anti-American blogger named Zhou Xiaoping. The references to adventurous building design and Mr. Zhou's patriotic blogging have been omitted from the final version.

Still, there are parallels with Mao’s lecture, given at the Communist Party’s guerilla base headquarters in Yan’an. That lecture is widely regarded by historians as laying the foundations of the party's early approach to propaganda, with its call for art and literature to be "subordinate to politics" and to serve the interests of the masses. As a result, many artists spent decades churning out often leaden works glorifying socialism – or being exiled to labor camps or the countryside for their inability to do so.

In the decades after Mao's death in 1976, many Chinese writers and artists deliberately tried to scrub their work free of politics -- a form of rebellion encapsulated in the title of one popular translated anthology of short stories from the 1990s, "Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused."