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Updated, 3:54 a.m. ET | Nearly half a century after Bian Zhongyun was beaten, kicked, tormented and left to die, bloody and alone, at the Beijing girls’ school where she was deputy principal, a daughter of the Communist Party elite has offered public penance — of a kind that instantly brought controversy — for her part in one of the most notorious killings of the Cultural Revolution.

Growing numbers of aging Red Guards have declared their contrition for violence perpetrated from 1966, when Mao Zedong urged students to turn against the school and party authorities he accused of stymieing his vision of a revolutionary society cleansed of ideological laxity.

But the apology from Song Binbin, reported by The Beijing News on Monday, quickly drew attention and was featured on many Chinese news websites. Here was a daughter of a veteran revolutionary apologizing for what has been widely described as the first killing of a teacher in the decade-long Cultural Revolution.

Ms. Song’s father was Song Renqiong, a general who served as a senior official under Mao and later Deng Xiaoping. Ms. Song herself won fame as a member of the first wave of Red Guards when she was photographed meeting Mao. But for years, many of them spent in the United States, she was muted about the death of Ms. Bian, a deputy principal at the elite Beijing Normal University Girls High School, where she was a student. The Cultural Revolution remains a sensitive, and heavily censored, chapter in China’s history. President Xi Jinping mentioned it only once and briefly in a speech last month celebrating the 120th anniversary of Mao’s birth.

On Sunday in Beijing, Ms. Song, who was born in 1949, told a gathering of former students and teachers from the school that she was sorry.

“Please allow me to express my everlasting solicitude and apologies to Principal Bian,” she said, according to The Beijing News. “I failed to properly protect the school leaders, and this has been a lifelong source of anguish and remorse.”

Tearfully, Ms. Song read out a statement about her “responsibility for Principal Bian’s terrible fate.” (Though Ms. Bian was actually a deputy principal, she served as the school’s leader.) The newspaper showed a photo of Ms. Song and other former students bowed before a bust of Ms. Bian.

“The Cultural Revolution was a massive calamity,” she said, according to a text of her statement published on “Consensus Net,” a Chinese website that specializes in intellectual and political discussions. She said:

How a country faces the future depends in large part on how it faces its past… I hope that all those who did wrong in the Cultural Revolution and hurt teachers and classmates will face up to themselves, reflect on the Cultural Revolution, seek forgiveness and achieve reconciliation.

Ms. Song’s apology immediately prompted rival views on the Internet in China. Some welcomed her words, others called them belated and inadequate. Some said the Communist Party itself should apologize.

Yin Hongbiao, a scholar at Peking University who studies the Cultural Revolution, said in a telephone interview that Ms. Song had taken a valuable step in confronting her past and that rumors had overstated her role in Ms. Bian’s death.

But Cui Weiping, a retired professor of literature in Beijing who has written about China’s struggle to recall – or forget – its traumatic past, said Ms. Song lacked candor. Ms. Cui said:

Given who she was, this wasn’t enough. She was an important figure among the Red Guards, and so the demands should be higher than for ordinary people. It’s meaningless to say you witnessed a murder and then say you don’t know who the killers were.

Ms. Song’s declaration of remorse also appeared unlikely to satisfy Ms. Bian’s widower, Wang Jingyao, who for years has accused Ms. Song and others of disguising their part in the death of Ms. Bian on Aug. 5, 1966.

Ever since then, Mr. Wang, 93, has preserved his wife’s memory and sought an honest reckoning from the perpetrators. He took photos of her battered body soon after she died and has kept a shrine to her in his home. In a telephone interview on Monday, he said he had heard about Ms. Song’s apology but had not heard directly from her.

“She is a bad person, because of what she did,” he said. “She and the others were supported by Mao Zedong. Mao was the source of all evil. He did so much that was bad. And it’s not just an individual problem” of someone like Ms. Song, he added. “The entire Communist Party and Mao Zedong are also responsible.”

Mao launched his Cultural Revolution to purge the authorities of perceived ideological foes, but initially its most ardent young supporters were the sons and daughters of powerful party officials, who saw the campaign as a chance to display and hone their revolutionary credentials. Ms. Song was among that early wave of Red Guards, who soon fell from Mao’s grace and were often then attacked by other, even more radical groups.

She was among the band of students who formed the school’s first group of Red Guards — youths pledged to enforce Mao’s revolutionary will — who organized rallies to criticize and humiliate the school authorities and teachers accused of sabotaging the Cultural Revolution.

In a memoir published in 2012, Ms. Song said she and other Red Guard leaders at the school twice tried to stop students from assaulting Ms. Bian and other school staff who had been dragged to a school sports ground. Only later was Ms. Song told that Ms. Bian was close to death, Ms. Song wrote in “Remembrance,” a Chinese magazine devoted to Cultural Revolution memoirs that circulates by email. A senior party official told Ms. Song soon after the killing to keep quiet about it, she wrote.

But other accounts, often citing Ms. Bian’s widower, Mr. Wang, have indicated that Ms. Song played a bigger role in the death, by abetting or implicitly endorsing the attacks and conspicuously failing to help Ms. Bian afterward.

In the ensuing mayhem of the Cultural Revolution, many other deaths followed. In August and September 1966, nearly 1,800 people died in attacks instigated by Red Guards and other radicals across Beijing, according to party estimates published in 1980.

Two weeks after Ms. Bian died, Ms. Song was among the Red Guards taken up to meet Mao as he stood on top of Tiananmen — the “Gate of Heavenly Peace” overlooking the square, where throngs of adoring students had gathered.

That encounter with Mao brought Ms. Song fame among her peers, and newspapers said that, at Mao’s suggestion, she took the name Yaowu, words indicating “Willing Fighter.” But in 1968, Ms. Song’s father fell from favor, and his family suffered.

After the Cultural Revolution, Ms. Song went to the United States to study and completed a doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She worked for the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, Bloomberg News reported in a 2012 profile of the family. In 2003, she moved back to China, she said in her statement on Sunday.

The Beijing News asked Ms. Song how she would respond if people called her apology insincere. “If I wasn’t prepared for that, I would not have stood up to do it,” she said.

Didi Kirsten Tatlow contributed reporting.