The cultural revolution.

• Author: Majerol, Veronica
• Position: TIMES PAST 1966

Fifty years ago, Communist China's leader Mao Zedong began inciting young people to turn on "class enemies"--even their own parents. Are there echoes of Mao's rule in China today?

When Chen Shuxiang arrived at his home in Beijing that night, everything was in shambles. His siblings were crying, the dumplings his mother had been making for dinner were squashed on the walls and floor, and his parents were missing.

A gang of high school students in green uniforms and red armbands had stormed in and taken them away, beating them with military-style leather belts and iron rods. His mother survived, but his father wasn't so lucky.

In the five decades since that night in 1966, Chen, who was 22 at the time, has hoped for answers and maybe an apology from those involved. But no one has ever come forward.

"Just before he died, my father wasn't even allowed a mouthful of water," says Chen, a 72-year-old retired teacher who still lives in Beijing. "It's something I don't like to think about even now, but also I want to hear from those who did this."

Chen's parents were among the tens of millions of victims of China's Cultural Revolution, which began 50 years ago. Heeding the call of Communist China's leader Mao Zedong to purge the country of "class enemies," radical youths known as Red Guards brutally attacked elite politicians, teachers, and even their own parents--in short, anyone who seemed to betray Mao's vision of Communism. Chen's father, a barely educated boiler operator, was targeted simply because his family had once owned 3 acres of land, enough to label him a landlord, which ran contrary to Communist teachings that land should be collectively owned.

The decade-long Cultural Revolution--in which more than a million people died and tens of millions more were beaten, humiliated, and jailed--ended with Mao's death in 1976, but it has had lasting effects that are still evident today.

"It was one of the most savage revolutions in world history," says Orville Schell, director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York. "Once you have such a deep revolution, it stays in your bloodstream," he adds, "and in China's President Xi Jinping today, we see many aspects of a Maoist form of leadership."

The 'Great Leap Forward'

Why did the Cultural Revolution happen?

Mao and the Communists had taken control of China in 1949. For the previous century, China had been dominated by foreign powers and badly weakened. Before and during...