The Chinese Communist party celebrated its 90th birthday on July 1. In the days prior to this event, the airwaves were full of historical dramas depicting heroic People’s Liberation Army soldiers and party cadres battling various enemies. There is a new, neo-Maoist faction within the party, led by Bo Xilai, the party chief of the western city of Chongqing, promoting the singing of classic Communist songs such as “The East is Red” in work-places and schools across the country. Henry Kissinger, in China for a book tour, managed to attend a sing-along with some 70,000 other people.

This “red culture” revival has nothing to do with the Communist party’s original ideals of equality and social justice. Rather, it is being promoted by national party leaders as a means of strengthening stability in a country where inequality has shot up in recent years. One song not being promoted is the Marxist “Internationale”, with its call for revolution, lest this suggest the need for an Arab spring in China.

Older Chinese who lived through the Cultural Revolution understand its horrors and how much the new China relies on their generation’s determination never to let something like that happen again. The term-limits and collective decision-making imposed on party leaders are designed to stop another Mao Zedong arising. But because the party has never allowed an honest accounting of Mao’s legacy, younger Chinese can look back on that era today with nostalgia and imagine it as a time of stability and community.