BEIJING — ON the surface, at least, there is not much about Chen Xiaolu to suggest a lifetime of regret.
The son of one of Communist China’s founding generals, he enjoyed privilege at an early age and then a career as a business consultant that took him around the world. Now 67, he relaxes on golf courses in Scotland and southern France and eschews the dark suits and high-maintenance black hair of most affluent Chinese men for casual shirts and a gray buzz cut.
But beneath the genial exterior is a memory that has haunted him for nearly 50 years. There he was, back in high school, a fresh-faced member of the volleyball team and a student leader in Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, ordering teachers to line up in the auditorium, dunce caps on their bowed heads. He stood there, excited and proud, as thousands of students howled abuse at the teachers.
Then, suddenly, a posse stormed the stage and beat them until they crumpled to the floor, blood oozing from their heads. He did not object. He simply fled. “I was too scared,” he recalled recently in one of several interviews at a restaurant near Tiananmen Square, not far from his alma mater, No. 8 Middle School, which catered to the children of the Mao elite. “I couldn’t stop it. I was afraid of being called a counterrevolutionary, of having to wear a dunce’s hat.”


Mr. Chen, center, with Zhou Enlai, right, in the early 1970s at a funeral.
Courtesy of Chen Xiaolu
A ripple of confessions about the Cultural Revolution from former Red Guards, most of them retired men of modest backgrounds, has surfaced in the last few months. But it was Mr. Chen’s decision to step forward in August with a public apology that has drawn the most attention, raising hopes that a nation so determined to define its future might finally be moving to confront the horrors of its past.
He did so, he said, not only for personal redemption but also for profound reasons to do with China’s political development that must include the rule of law.
“Many people are thinking back fondly to the good old days of the Cultural Revolution, and are saying it was just against corrupt officials,” he said in an interview. “But many things happened in the Cultural Revolution that violated people’s rights. The majority in China did not really experience the Cultural Revolution, and those of us who did have to tell people about it.”
Mr. Chen’s remorse stands out because of his stature, then and now. He is quite candid that as the son of Chen Yi, a founder of Communist China and its longtime foreign minister, he was handed the mantle of immense authority during the decisive, early days of the Cultural Revolution.
“I bear direct responsibility for the denouncing and criticism, and forced-labor re-education of school leaders, and some teachers and students,” Mr. Chen wrote in a blog post on his school alumni website in August that quickly circulated on the Internet. “I actively rebelled and organized the denouncements of school leaders. Later on when I served as the director of the school’s Revolution Committee, I wasn’t brave enough to stop the inhumane prosecutions.”
“My official apology comes too late, but for the purification of the soul, the progress of society and the future of the nation, one must make this kind of apology,” he concluded.
The apology has drawn a mixed response. Slightly more than half of the comments on the alumni website commended him. On Chinese websites, many questioned why it was necessary to pick over old wounds.
THE Cultural Revolution remains largely hidden from view in China as successive governments have discouraged discussion of the turmoil and terror that Mao orchestrated to perpetuate his rule but that almost brought the country to its knees.
Deng Xiaoping repudiated the Cultural Revolution in 1978, and the party has acknowledged it was a mistake, but a full accounting has never occurred.
A particularly delicate subject for the party has been the number of people killed.
In Beijing alone, about 1,800 people died during August and September 1966, the height of the frenzy, when Mao first deployed students as Red Guards to turn against the party, according to the historians Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals. Estimates range from 1.5 million to three million dead across China from 1966 to 1976.
A Chinese historian of the Cultural Revolution, Xu Youyu, described Mr. Chen’s apology as “very unusual” because former Red Guards — an entire generation of Chinese now in their 60s — generally justify their actions during the Cultural Revolution and prefer to emphasize their role as victims rather than perpetrators; they rarely apologize in private, much less in public.
The fateful criticism ceremony of teachers at the Zhongshan Concert Hall, near the Forbidden City, that Mr. Chen organized was brutal even before it began, said Huang Jian, the chairman of the alumni group.
On the way to the auditorium, students “wielded whips,” lashing at the school principal, Wen Hanjiang, as they frog-marched him, Mr. Huang said. Mr. Wen, now 89 and living in Beijing, where Mr. Chen recently visited him, was beaten on the stage, too.
Back at the school, the atmosphere darkened. The school’s senior party official, Hua Jia, committed suicide. She took her life after two weeks of beatings and being fed only bits of food in a storeroom where she was imprisoned, Mr. Chen said.
Someone told him of the suicide, and he rushed to the room to find the body on the floor.
“She used a string tied to the windowsill, put her head through the noose and then knelt down to hang herself,” he said. Mr. Chen offered the details quickly and quietly, a tinge of embarrassment in his words. It turned out, he said, she had been a loyal member of the Communist Party for 30 years.
During the early turmoil, Mr. Chen lived at home with his parents at Zhongnanhai, the sprawling compound in the center of Beijing where senior party officials were assigned traditional courtyard-style houses and luxuries existed unknown beyond the high walls.
His father insisted that the family could not discuss the Cultural Revolution at home, he said. “To put it simply, my father said you must participate in the Cultural Revolution but be careful and prudent.”
They maintained a “Chinese screen” of silence about the violence, he said. “I never told my father anything about the suicide” of Ms. Hua, he said. “My father knew someone could use me to target him.”
LIFE was easy at Zhongnanhai. The children were often summoned to watch Mao swim in one of two 50-meter pools — outdoors in summer, indoors in winter. There were basketball games, rowing on a lake and weekend movies.
But soon, trouble struck at the heart of the Chen family. In a speech in early 1967, Chen Yi dared to criticize the Cultural Revolution. Mao sidelined him, and the man who had greeted every foreign leader to the new China was subjected to a humiliating self-criticism session and ordered to stay at home.
After his father was disgraced, Mr. Chen stopped living at home “to keep more distance.” In the summer of 1968, Mao dispersed the students to the countryside. Prime Minister Zhou Enlai spared Mr. Chen that fate by sending him to the army.
In 1972, Chen Yi died of colon cancer, a broken man. Chen Xiaolu came home from the army for the funeral. Out of the blue, he said, Mao turned up dressed in pajamas and a winter topcoat to pay respects to his father. In front of the Chen family, Mao reinstated Chen Yi in the pantheon of revolutionary greats by calling him a “good comrade.”
That afternoon, Mr. Chen drank beer with a school friend, Ji Sanmeng, and shared a poem, Mr. Ji recalled, about how his father, a hero, had endured ill treatment for the past five years at the hands of Mao and his men.
By then, Mr. Chen’s faith in Mao had evaporated, although he never said so publicly.
Bree Feng contributed research.