Chinese Maoist tour group ridiculed for travelling to North Korea
When a group of Chinese Maoists travelled to North Korea last month - visiting a country that still holds dear the social norms of an era now long gone in China - they didn't seem to know that one of their fellow travellers was keeping a diary that would appear in a liberal Guangdong magazine.
The Maoist nostalgics visited China's reclusive northeastern neighbour from April 13 to 16, when tensions between North and South Korea brought the peninsula to the brink of war. The tour was organised by people behind neo-Maoist website Utopia.
After visiting the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea, the group of apparently mostly retired Chinese officials, "seeing aspirations to contribute their strength to war efforts blighted, showed their fighting power when shopping", the traveller wrote.
The group spent several dozen thousand yuan at a souvenir store before heading back to Pyongyang.
"Whether leftists or rightists, when it comes to emptying [store] shelves, they are all the same, they are all Chinese," a traveller said, according to the writer.
"The fellow comrades have made an extraordinary contribution to the North Korean economy. I thank you on behalf of the North Korean people," the tour guide is quoted as saying.
The tour group then returned to the capital to participate in Day of the Sun festivities, which marked the anniversary of the birth of Kim Il-sung, the founder of North Korea and grandfather of current dictator Kim Jong-un.
Diao Weiming, the organiser of the "red tours", said he did not know about the Southern People Weekly report. He called it "childish".
"This young lad is just trying to make an ideological point," he said.
The website Utopia, which last congratulated North Korea for its third nuclear test on March 12, has retained some relevance in political debate online. It was taken down in April, and searches for its Chinese name have been blocked on Sina Weibo, the country's largest microblogging platform.
Affiliate websites are still online, such as an online bookseller billed as "China's largest patriotic online bookstore", and a weibo account regularly publishes its statements.
Just last weekend, Maoists took to the streets in Changsha, capital of Mao Zedong's home province Hunan, to protest against a speech given there by the liberal economist Mao Yushi, calling him a traitor and that he should die "10,000 times".
Last year, Utopia claimed to have collected thousands of signatures calling for the public persecution of the hate figure for ultra-leftists.
