It was the worst of times

IN FEBRUARY 1970 a 16-year-old boy, Zhang Hongbing, denounced his mother to an army officer in his village in Anhui province, in eastern China. He slipped a note under the officer’s door accusing her of criticising the Cultural Revolution and its leader, Mao Zedong. She was bound, publicly beaten and executed. Decades later Mr Zhang began writing a blog about the tragedy, seeking to clear his mother’s name and to explain how her death happened. “I want to make people in China think,” he wrote in April. “How could there be such a horrifying tragedy of…a son sending his mother to execution? And how can we prevent it from happening again?” Mr Zhang suffers recurrent nightmares about his mother. So does China about the Cultural Revolution.

What documents at the time called “the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolutionary bugle to advance” first sounded 50 years ago, on May 16th 1966, when Mao approved a secret circular declaring war on “representatives of the bourgeoisie” who had “sneaked into the Communist Party, the government, the army and various spheres of culture”. Just over a year later Mao wrote to his wife, Jiang Qing, that he wanted to create “great disorder under heaven” so as to achieve “greater order under heaven”.