Power tip for Chinese women's volleyball? Read Mao.

Female volleyball players of the world, unite!

You might need a little Marxist inspiration to help you combat the Chinese team’s secret weapon at next year’s London Olympics – Mao Zedong’s poetry.

In a further sign of the Mao-stalgia that is creeping into official circles here, the Chinese women's volleyball squad spent a week recently studying “The Long March,” a stirring poem by the former Chinese leader, according to the Chinese Volleyball Association’s website.

This “traditional revolutionary education” taught the women “not to be afraid of difficulties and to dedicate themselves to their daily training with the Red Army’s Long March spirit under Mao’s leadership,” the association explained.

The Long March was an epic, year-long, 6,000-mile trek that Mao’s armies undertook in 1934 to avoid annihilation in the civil war. Generations of Chinese schoolchildren have been made to memorize Mao’s poem about the ordeal.

It is sinew-stiffening stuff. “The Red Army fears not the trials of the March,” it begins, “Making light of ten thousand crags and torrents.”

That female volleyball players should be seeking inspiration from "the great helmsman" – reading his poem out loud after each training session and studying background material during their spare time – is perhaps not surprising.

Mao-era culture is making a comeback in some parts of China. In Chongqing, a giant city in the southwest of the country, the ambitious head of the local Communist party, Bo Xilai, is making a name for himself by reviving the sort of revolutionary songs, films, and art that had their heyday 40 years ago.