The hometown of Mao Tse-tung is planning a £1.5bn "facelift" in the lead-up to the 120th anniversary of his birth next year. According to reports in the Changsha Evening News, the city of Xiangtan, which administers Shaoshan town where Mao was born, is planning to build motorways, tourist projects and a school to commemorate the anniversary of the revolutionary who founded the People's Republic of China and ruled it until his death in 1976.
A museum with 6,000 pieces of Mao memorabilia will be renovated. "During the 120th year, there will be more tourists on our Red-themed tour," explained a local propaganda official, who gave his name as Mr Zhang.
But recent months have seen two leading newspapers focus on a darker side of Mao's 28-year rule: the Great Famine that swept through the Chinese countryside in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Some claim as many as 45 million people were starved, worked or beaten to death for not complying with government policy.
While official accounts site a far lower death toll and attribute much of the misery to natural disasters, historians point the finger at Mao's Great Leap Forward, a calamitous 1958 push to transform China into a leading industrial power.
In China's rush to produce more steel than the UK harvests were neglected, grain production collapsed and famine set in. Historians describe the famine as one of the worst man-made tragedies in the history of mankind, but within China debate over its causes remains highly restricted.
On Friday, however, the state-run Global Times printed a double-page feature examining one man's decision to build a monument to victims of the famine.
Under the headline: "Starved of memories", it argued: "China is in dire need of recording the dark chapters of its modern history."
That followed a series of May reports about the famine in the Southern People Weekly, including a combative editorial that said its true causes had been ignored for "long enough."
"The Great Famine, a rare disaster in the history of mankind, does not have an 'official record' or a reasonable explanation, nor is it acknowledged by the textbooks. It has basically been blocked," the newspaper wrote. "For the new generation, the history of Great Famine is like a fairy tale."
University of Hong Kong historian Zhou Xun, the author of a new book called 'The Great Famine in China', said stories contradicting the official account were "quite rare".
She questioned whether the Global Times article was a deliberate move to revise interpretations of the famine or a "slip".
Dutch historian Frank Dikotter, the author of Mao's Great Famine, suggested an apparent willingness to revisit the darkest days of Mao's rule could be linked to attempts to discredit disgraced politician Bo Xilai, who promoted Maoist policies before being toppled by the Neil Heywood scandal.