AKIPRESS.COM - Beijing has marked the 50th anniversary of one of the most devastating and defining events of 20th century China with silence, according to The Guardian.

Chairman Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution – a decade-long period of political and social turmoil – began exactly 50 years ago on Monday.

On 16 May 1966 a Communist party document fired the opening salvo of the catastrophic mobilization warning that counter-revolutionary schemers were conspiring to replace the party with a “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.”

What followed was an unprecedented period of upheaval, bloodshed and economic stagnation that only ended with Mao’s death, in September 1976. However, on Monday newspapers in mainland China were bereft of any coverage of the Cultural Revolution’s anniversary.

No official memorial events were reported by China’s controlled media and Chinese academics were forbidden from talking about the sensitive period.

Particularly unwelcome was any reflection on Mao’s central role in orchestrating the mayhem that consumed China from 1966 onwards and is estimated to have claimed up to two million lives.

Half a century after the Cultural Revolution kicked off with an explosion of Red Guard violence in Beijing, academics are still debating the period’s impact on contemporary China.

Daniel Leese, a Cultural Revolution expert from Freiburg University who is researching the legacies of the Mao era, said one consequence was the fixation of Chinese leaders with political stability.

“From the view of the party it is very clear that one of the main legacies is that you should never let go of control, you should always maintain the commanding heights, there shouldn’t be factionalism at all within the party,” he said.

For today’s leaders it was still paramount that “the 10 years shouldn’t appear as a period of complete anarchy because, after all, the party was still at the helm,” Leese added.

MacFarquhar, the author of Mao’s Last Revolution, said half-a-century on the role of ordinary Chinese citizens in the violence had still not been been sufficiently interrogated.

“I think that the most terrible aspect of the Cultural Revolution was not just that the chairman threw the whole country into chaos. It was that having fired the starting gun, Chinese became immensely cruel to each other,” he said.

Zhang Hongliang, a prominent Maoist scholar, claimed critics of the Communist party were manipulating Monday’s anniversary to destabilize China’s current regime.

“[Their purpose] is not only to reject the Cultural Revolution… they are taking advantage of these 10 years to entirely negate the leadership of the Communist party of China,” he said. “Even if it was a wrongful campaign, 40 years is enough time for people to move on.”