BEIJING — Fifty years to the day since Communist Party leaders formally set in motion Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, miring China in a decade of bloody political upheaval, the party’s main newspaper broke the general silence about the anniversary and urged people to accept the past condemnation of the event and focus on the future.

“History always advances, and we sum up and absorb the lessons of history in order to use it as a mirror to better advance,” said the commentary, which appeared late Monday on the website of the newspaper, People’s Daily, after a day when official news outlets were mostly mute about the anniversary. “We must certainly fix in our memories the historic lessons of the Cultural Revolution.”

The article was the party’s most high-level public comment so far on the 50th anniversary of the revolution, Mao’s effort to cleanse and reinvigorate Communism by attacking his own colleagues and unleashing the Red Guards, fervent student militants recruited to enforce his cause. It also appeared in the print edition of People’s Daily on tuesday, on an inside page.

But the commentary broke no new ground. It asserted that the Communist Party’s verdict condemning the Cultural Revolution, delivered in a resolution in 1981, was “unshakably scientific and authoritative,” and urged Chinese people to rally around President Xi Jinping and his policies.