Where Mao’s Peasants Tilled the Soil, Tourists Now Pay for the View

Decades ago, a Chinese village became an official symbol of revolutionary “self-reliance.” The slogan hasn’t changed, but nearly everything else has.Jia Tianlian tending his tiny plot of land in Dazhai, a village in northern China that Mao Zedong once hailed as a model for the nation. In the background are residential buildings from the “people’s commune” of that era.