A few scattered red banners in the city of Xiangtan, under which Shaoshan is a village township, were the sole advertisement for the ongoing party congress.
For the man in the street in either Xiangtan or rustic Shaoshan, the most significant symbol of the party congress was the final retirement of their townsman Hua Guofeng, Mao's designated successor who reigned between 1976 and 1978.
As for village folk living around the former home of Mao in Shaoshan, their greatest fear was that Mao's importance would be minimized as Jiang resolutely diluted the revolutionary character of the party.
And Shaoshan, visited by millions over the years, is the Lourdes of his cult.
Humans have been worshipped as gods for thousands of years in China, and the point of Mao, in the eyes of the believers, is no longer whether he was good or bad; such categories do not apply to godmen.
Shaoshan, the birthplace of the greatest wrecker of Chinese tradition, has become, in many ways, a repository of it.
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