Memories of the Mao era are usually sought in state commemoration or personal recollection. This essay turns instead to Chinese web fiction, examining a genre of time-travel novels in which a protagonist from the 2020s returns to 1950 and reports China’s future to Mao Zedong. These stories are strikingly selective: they denounce the reform era’s ‘capitalist restoration’ yet fall silent on the disasters of the Mao years, and they answer restoration not with class struggle but with technology and productive forces. The essay argues that what they revive is a depleted Maoism—futurity and personal success cut loose from their political foundations.