Mao Zedong was said to have been moved to tears when he watched an early performance of "The White-Haired Girl," an opera created to meet his call for rousing revolutionary art. And under President Xi Jinping, a revival is on the road, reinvented once more to appeal to a Communist Party leader's stringently ideological tastes.

Karla Cabrera [...] was excited when she came across "Introduction to Mao Zedong Thought," an online course about the Chinese revolutionary leader. But when Cabrera began watching the lectures on a popular online education platform owned and administered by Harvard and MIT [...] each class opened with a patriotic video montage. Talk of Mao's errors was minimal, restricted to the Communist Party line.