Li Qingyou vividly recalls the hot summer day 40 years ago in Tiananmen Square. He was among the one million members of the new cadre of radical students called Red Guards who stood at rapt attention and waved their Little Red Books as Mao Zedong exhorted them to destroy China's "Four Olds" - old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits.

The historic mass rally was the first under the Cultural Revolution, Mao's effort to rid the country of its feudal past and create an agrarian utopia. Over 10 years, it led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and scarred China's national psyche.

It is an anniversary that the government would prefer that Li, a 55-year-old retired factory manager, and other Chinese forgot.

The government, which still reveres Mao, has taken few steps to redress the wrongs committed during the Cultural Revolution, leaving many Chinese of that generation, including former members of the Red Guards, struggling to make sense of the madness that enveloped their nation and the trauma it inflicted.

Despite China's official reluctance to address the fallout of the Cultural Revolution, Li and other former Red Guards in his old unit are attempting to come to grips with the period in a personal way: They recently "adopted" the village where they were once sent to spread the Cultural Revolution. Now they are helping it modernize using a mix of international assistance and homegrown entrepreneurship.

Looking back on the Cultural Revolution, Li said that he and the other schoolchildren had been brainwashed by an irrational mixture of Marxist idealism and Maoist extremism.

"We were a generation that was born and grew up under the red flag," Li said in a recent interview. "Our mentality was that when Chairman Mao waved his hand, we would move, and whatever he said, we would do. We never realized where it would all lead."

The Tiananmen Square rally on Aug. 18, 1966, was a call to action for the Red Guards. The frenzied students took to the streets.

"We did what you see on TV or in films," Li said. "We put up big-character posters and went around to the houses of the rich and landowners to get their stuff. We took their money, gold, silver and things and gave it to the government.

"And of course, we also destroyed the stuff that belonged to the Four Olds category."

As Mao goaded on the Red Guards over the next few months, they began attacking anyone deemed counterrevolutionary.

Modern learning and development were shelved in favor of "learning from the farmers," and cities were emptied of students and professionals who were sent to work in remote villages.

In December 1966, Li found himself with 18 classmates on a rickety truck bound for Jiasang, in central Shanxi Province.

Liang Yuting, 60, a farmer who was Jiasang's Communist Party secretary at the time, said he had had o... [ Read More (0.5k in body) ]