AFTER a long drive up a narrow dirt track through hills east of Pyongyang, a North Korean tour bus dropped the Chinese tourists near a wooded graveyard. In front of it, on a concrete pedestal, stood a bronze bust of Mao Anying, the eldest son of Mao Zedong. This was their holy grail. One by one they laid wreaths and bowed in reverence (see picture). One man kowtowed. Several wept as they delivered speeches in honour of the younger Mao, who died during the Korean war. “We must clean China up and turn it a brilliant red,” said one. Another led the group in chants of “Socialism will be victorious!”

For most members of the group of 15 tourists (except one who was there to report for The Economist) the visit to North Korea was a welcome relief after a grim year. As die-hard Maoists, they believe that China’s leaders are betraying the ideals of the communist country’s founder and leading it to enslavement by the West and perdition. The past few months have seen the purging of their idol, a Mao-quoting member of the Politburo, Bo Xilai, and the closure by the Chinese government of some of their most outspoken websites.

Many of China’s new middle class regard the Maoists as members of a nutty fringe. But to the poor and marginalised, as well as a few idealistic intellectuals, their views are appealing. During their four days in North Korea in October, the Maoists found a country that appeared to be following the right path: one that, in their view, Mao had started down but which his diminutive successor, Deng Xiaoping, had abandoned. “Dwarf Deng destroyed the lives of peasants,” says one member of the group, staring from the bus at new two-storey houses in the countryside on the way to Mao Anying’s memorial in Hoechang county. The suspicions of Potemkinism that constantly prey on the minds of foreign tourists in North Korea appeared not to trouble them.

The group had assembled in the north-eastern Chinese city of Shenyang, a former centre of state-owned industry that in recent years has closed many of its old factories and turned itself into a regional hub. There they gathered in a hotel with 100 other Maoists and several plainclothes policemen who insisted on keeping watch. Though the Maoists are Communist Party loyalists at heart, their thinly veiled disdain for many of the country’s current leaders makes the authorities uneasy. They listened to a fiery speech by Zhang Hongliang, an academic from Beijing. “This has been a year of decisive battle between left and right,” said Mr Zhang, denouncing the authorities’ measures to curb Maoist websites as “fascist”. Were a “colour revolution” to occur in China, he said (referring to recent uprisings around the world) “it could turn into a red revolution”.

Great leap backwards

Few analysts believe a leap backwards to Maoist totalitarianism in China is possible. But Mao-veneered populism such as Mr Bo displayed enjoys real support. Over breakfast in a run-down Pyongyang hotel, the tourists engaged in a lively defence of Mao’s decision to launch the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Maoist websites often argue that Mao’s critics exaggerate the horrors of that decade, when hundreds of thousands were killed or persecuted by fanatical Red Guards.

“I love [North] Korea!” exclaimed one of the tourists, who teaches physical education at a school in the central province of Hubei. “It is like a pure maiden, while China is like a heavily made-up young wife,” he went on, to murmurs of approval from others as they drove through Pyongyang’s grim streets. The teacher jokingly asked an accompanying guide how he could emigrate to North Korea.

A retired official from a state-owned oil firm praised the “purity” of North Koreans compared with the Chinese, whose hearts were “filled with black-and-white cats”; a reference to Deng Xiaoping’s famously pragmatic dismissal of ideology, that it doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.

In Panmunjom, a “truce village” on the border between the two Koreas, the Maoists saw a tiny sign of what some believe has been a shift in recent months towards the kind of Deng-style economic pragmatism that they abhor. At a tourist shop, the visitors were invited by guides to haggle over prices, a practice formerly forbidden. One leader of the group said he was worried that this might mean the government was loosening its grip over the country’s (barely functioning) economy. North Korean sales staff were clearly new to the game. One sold two pairs of chopsticks for the equivalent of just over $3, but a few minutes later approached the Maoist who had bought them to demand another $3 because the salesman had made a muddle. The tourist agreed to pay the extra, but complained bitterly to her fellow Maoists.

To avoid contact with one of North Korea’s rare concessions to the decadent needs of foreign visitors, the group stayed away from the Yanggakdo Hotel in central Pyongyang. The 47-story edifice is normally popular among Chinese tourists because of a foreigners-only casino in the basement. (China may be following the capitalist road, but gambling is still banned.) Organisers of the trip felt that the Chinese prostitutes who are said to work in the hotel might have a “negative impact” on the group.