In HG Wells’s novel “The Sleeper Awakes”, the hero emerges from a 200-year coma to find a world of brainwashed slaves ruled by a council of despots. “We were making the future,” he says, recalling his socialist youth, “and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making.” 

If Mao Zedong rose from his mausoleum today, what would he and his revolutionaries make of the colourful chaos around them? Would they condemn their successors for embracing a market economy, or be amazed by the wealth and productivity it has unleashed? Would they decry the lack of struggle sessions and thought reform, or applaud today’s subtler methods of manipulation—from censorship and surveillance to Twitter campaigns and “citizenship scores” for good behaviour?

And what would the old guard make of the artists in The Sleeper Awakes, with their irreverently sceptical view of the regime and its narratives? Visiting an invented nation ruled by tricksters that retains its integrity only by disappearing, would the Maoists suspect that their utopian ambitions were being mocked? How would they react to a video game based on the revered Long March in which a socialist hero armed with Coke cans does battle with robots and aliens? Would they have any sympathy for the artists who, discarding official histories as false, seek their private truths in memory and shadows?

Seventy years after the Maoists vowed to wake China’s “sleeping lion” and build a socialist utopia, the future has arrived—but is it the one they dreamed of?