Fancy getting shot at by a mock-Red Army guerrilla, sleeping on a brick bed and eating canned rations of millet porridge? Or having a happy snap with a Mao Zedong lookalike outside the mountain cave from which he fought the Communist revolution?

China’s newly affluent tourists do. They are increasingly choosing to visit sites that extol Mao or glorify the Chinese Communist party, a trend heartily welcomed by government officials struggling to clean up the party’s corrupt image and reignite revolutionary values that have fallen by the wayside on the path to prosperity.

In the past decade China has invested Rmb9bn ($1.5bn) to develop sites of famous battles in both the war between Communists and Nationalists, and the wartime struggle with Japan in what has come to be known as “red tourism”. The latter is coming in handy to ratchet up public opinion against its eastern neighbour in the current territorial dispute over a group of islands in the East China Sea.