BEIJING — On Jan. 12, Song Binbin, the daughter of a former prominent member of the Communist Party, created a stir on China’s blogosphere when she joined some fellow former Red Guards at a Beijing high school and offered a public apology for her part in one of the most notorious killings of the Cultural Revolution. In August 1966, the school’s vice principal, Bian Zhongyun, was tormented, beaten and left to die by students at the school. Ms. Song said she had tried to stop them but did not try hard enough. She said she did not participate in the beating.

The Cultural Revolution wreaked devastation on the lives of millions of Chinese people. Mao, who unleashed the movement by urging young people to rise up against their parents and teachers, was attempting to regain prominence after years of failed policies by purging the Communist Party of “capitalists.” For 10 years, the nation was reduced to a state of barbarism.

Because Mao has continued to be revered by China’s leaders since his death in 1976, genuine public reflection on the lessons of this disastrous time has been impossible. Attempts by intellectuals to publicly address the Cultural Revolution have been suppressed; only a smattering of research by state-funded scholars has seen the light of day. The result has been a gradual receding of memory. The economic surge of the past 30 years has even led some deluded souls to look back on the period with nostalgia. But given the authoritarian nature of today’s leadership, many people fear the prospect of a return of the terror that marked the Cultural Revolution.

Still, a sort of “apology compulsion” appears to have taken hold among people like Song Binbin who were lured into villainy during that tumultuous period. Wang Jiyu, haunted by a fatal beating he carried out in 1967 when he was 16 years old, published an article in a pro-reform journal, Yanhuang Chunqiu, in 2010, reflecting on his transgressions.