Mao Zedong still casts a giant shadow over the country he led from 1949 until 1976, but it’s worth remembering that for a great number of China’s citizens, he has always been dead. The Chinese born during the decade following Deng Xiaoping’s famous 1979 visit to the U.S. belong to what is called the balinghou (post-1980s) generation. Those born during the decade following the protests and massacres of 1989 belong to the jiulinghou (post-1990s) cohort. Some journalistic accounts caricature the quarter-billion Chinese in these two groups as “little emperors,” spoiled only children cut from the same conformist cloth. But...