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 only a vague idea at the time why 19 urban teenagers had been sent to his tiny hamlet of stone and mud houses.
"We didn't get much information," he said in a recent interview from a room in his house, which is wallpapered with newsprint. "All we were told is that these city kids needed to 'learn from the peasants,' because they had not really experienced any hardship and they needed to taste the bitterness of the countryside."
That they did, Li recalled stoically.
Arriving in the middle of winter in a village with no heat or electricity, Li and his colleagues had to build their own houses and put in place plans to raise food production in the village.
"It was a bit of a shock for us," he said. "The village smelled of dung and was so cold seven or eight of us used to sit around a small housestove for heat."
Although bereft of direction and short on funds, Li said he and the other Red Guards cobbled together a development plan.
They built a simple road connecting the village to the main road and, by 1972, had diverted a river and built a small dam to generate electricity.
But the benefits were overshadowed by conflicts erupting in the village.
"Sometimes, when the wheat was ready for harvest in the fields, it would rot because all the young people had gone to other parts of the country to spread the spirit of the Cultural Revolution," Liang said.
Years of such anarchy shrank China's gross domestic product by about 40 percent between 1966 and 1976, when the movement ended.
Concerns that such chaos could tear China apart forced Mao to rein in the Red Guards in 1972. But it took until his death in 1976 for new leaders, like Deng Xiaoping, to put a complete end to the tumult.
Li and the other Red Guards all returned to Beijing and benefited from China's economic transformation. Li worked with a Beijing jeep company, and others made careers as builders, engineers and businessmen in the rapidly developing coastal areas.
But when Li visited Jiasang by chance in 1995, he was shocked to see it still mired in poverty. The road and dam the students built had become useless with age, and since water was scarce the land had become so arid the villagers were unable to farm it effectively.
Strapped for cash, they had cut and sold the trees around their village and so the area was severely deforested.
Moved by the conditions, Li contacted his former Red Guard colleagues with whom he had kept in touch, and they unanimously decided to do something for Jiasang.
Over the next few months, the group pooled $120,000 and used it to reforest the mountains around Jiasang with about 20,000 pine, persimmon and walnut trees.
"We realized that just as in 1966, it was a road and mini-dam that the village really needed," said Tian Tianxiang, a retired businessman and one of the former Red Guards involved in the aid project.
So the group sought out local government and international donors.
The Australian Embassy in Beijing donated $40,000 for the dam, but when provincial authorities approved money for the road, much of it was swallowed up by corrupt local officials, the villagers said.
Still, the group persevered. Now Jiasang has a new dam and a decent road connecting it to the highway 16 kilometers, or 10 miles, away.
"Sometimes a voice is all that voiceless people need," Tian said recently as he stood proudly above the gushing dam, which helps the village to breed fish.
Since some of the ex-Red Guards now work almost half the year in Jiasang, they have made a deal with the village to get a share of the profits being made from the persimmon and walnut trees, and this is helping many of them through what might otherwise have been a tough retirement, Tian said.
