BEIJING — The schoolgirls slapped and punched their vice principal, then grabbed table legs with protruding nails and beat her unconscious. Bian Zhongyun was left slumped, bloodied and dead in a garbage cart in the Beijing high school’s courtyard.

On that afternoon in August 1966, Bian became an early murder victim of the Cultural Revolution, a movement that would leave millions of Chinese dead, injured or mentally broken in the decade that followed.

Although 44 years have passed since the “Red August” that unleashed the floodgates of violence in the capital and across the nation, there’s never been a complete public accounting in China about what happened. Bian’s killers have yet to be named.

“Even after all these decades, their crimes are still being covered up,” said Wang Jingyao, 89, Bian’s widower. Wang has kept the bloody, soiled clothes that Bian wore the day she was killed. He wants to know who killed his wife.

“But it’s very difficult to find out in China,” he said.

Unlike South Africa or Chile, which set up truth commissions to exhume painful pasts, China remains tight-lipped. The authoritarian government in Beijing has discouraged domestic attempts at critical examination of the legacy of the Cultural Revolution.

So even as analysts across the world speak of China’s bright economic future, at home this August there remains a page missing from the country’s past.

Observers say the reason is obvious: Mao Zedong, who fanned the flames of the Cultural Revolution out of fears that the government was growing too moderate, is the historical bedrock of the Communist Party. To delve into the destruction Mao wrought could lead to a questioning of the political system itself.

Chinese official histories acknowledge that the period was bloody and chaotic, but they give little detail about what happened, especially when it comes to individual murders. State museums often don’t mention the event at all.

“The Cultural Revolution changed the life of our generation completely, and it wreaked havoc on China. It was a catastrophe,” said Wang Duanyang, who as a teenager led a Red Guard group in Tianjin, a city southeast of Beijing. “I feel regret. … I have done a lot of things that you may think ridiculous and insane, but those things were done in a particular context.”

Wang wrote a book that described the humiliation and beating of his school’s leaders and local officials that he witnessed, and in 2007 he paid to have 1,000 copies published. In the forward he apologizes “to the people who I’ve hurt.” He handed out the volume to friends and acquaintances, but commercial distribution wasn’t an option.

Unauthorized books

“According to the Chinese government, any (unauthorized) book related to the Cultural Revolution is not allowed to be published,” said Wang, whose own father, an author, was denounced as a “rightist” during the movement.

Why?

“You should ask the Chinese government,” he said.

Beyond Mao’s legacy, the history is sensitive because those involved in assaults on their fellow Chinese almost certainly included future leaders of business and politics.

Looking over pictures of himself with fellow Red Guards in 1966 and beyond, Wang pointed to young men who grew up to be a vice minister, an influential party official in Shanghai and the director of an important state history museum.

Wang Youqin, a former student at Bian’s school who’s written a book about the Cultural Revolution, named a prominent Chinese bank executive and a senior administrator at a Shanghai university as having knowledge about Bian’s death.

“They have become people with power and with money,” said Wang Jingyao, Bian’s husband. “The central government wants to cover up for them and protect them.”

The high school where Bian died was one of the best known in the country. The daughters of the general secretary of the Communist Party, Deng Xiaoping, and the head of state, Liu Shaoqi, attended the school.

Despite the school’s visibility, there’s been no official investigation of Bian’s murder on Aug. 5, 1966.