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Devotion is a key concept, one that the author sees as a dominant feature of Maoist politics. He notes the similarity to religious fanaticism: in Shaoshan, the Hunan village where Mao was born, the museum of revolutionary history has been built in duplicate to accommodate the crush of pilgrims. Leys even goes so far as to see in China "the incarnation of a medieval dream, where institutionalized Truth has again a strong secular arm to impose dogma, stifle heresy, and uproot immorality."
Underlying all this is the author's belief that China is a dictatorship by bureaucracy—one made more than normally timid and inflexible by the long power struggle that has occupied the leadership in Peking. In a society where yesterday's hero has so often turned into today's target of vilification, Leys sees a regime that has had to rely on an ever more improbable system of organized lying to explain things to its people. Official language has itself been reduced to a few tiresome but unassailable clichés—the "prefabricated jargon that is a substitute for thought."
Leys' anti-Maoism sometimes leads him to see only evil. Yet his informed subjectivity still comes closer to a believable portrait of China than any Western writer has managed since journalists and scholars began flocking to Peking five years ago. His book should make it almost impossible to visit China without being aware of the Revolution's hidden shadows.
— Richard Bernstein