Second of two parts.


BEIJING -- The hideous violence that wracked China during the 1966-76 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution has yet to be fully explained and understood -- even now, nearly two decades after the nightmare ended. Seemingly simple questions about the period -- in which Mao sought to reshape Chinese society and thought, and wound up plunging much of China into social, political and economic chaos -- have defied easy answers. These include how many people died, how much the Communist system and Chinese culture were responsible and how much Mao was to blame when his allies called for the young to smash the "four olds" -- thinking, habits, culture and customs.


Why, in the blink of an eye, did people betray, torture and kill those they knew and those they did not? How could they demolish precious paintings, vases, books and anything else they found from China's distinguished past?


The period has left profound effects on the Chinese leadership and society as well, fostering a fear of chaos that does not justify but may help to explain Beijing's continued insistence on tight political control. Young Chinese lost years of valuable education and grew up in a world void of reason or morality; their parents and grandparents watched the society they had helped build be torn asunder.


Many millions of Chinese still actively worry that turmoil could return, yet the full truth of what happened during the Cultural Revolution remains a mystery. To better understand the movement's dynamics, a relatively small number of Western and Chinese scholars have been studying the tumultuous period, and it is only now that a few scholars have examined documents on the violence in greater depth.


The debate over Mao's role, while historical, has important implications for China today. The country's aged leadership still claims its legitimacy from Mao and his revolutionary legacy, and thus the destruction of Mao's image would be risky for the Communist Party. But Chinese who want the truth exposed argue that a clear understanding of the past is vital to avoid repeating its mistakes.


The new material on the Cultural Revolution reveals that violence penetrated areas previously thought unscathed, and that the savagery lasted longer than is commonly known. Furthermore, the evidence is now overwhelming that Mao created the atmosphere that made the nightmare possible -- despite attempts by many to lay the blame on other officials -- and that many more than a million people may have been killed. Until now, most scholars have estimated the number of deaths in the range of a half-million to 1 million.


The Cultural Revolution flowed from Mao's failure with the 1958-60 Great Leap Forward, an industrialization drive that led to widespread famine. The Chinese leader was on the defensive. His prestige and authority had been diminished, and he believed that the all-important revolutionary spirit of the Communist Party had been lost.


So after a period of pragmatic economic recovery in the early 1960s, Mao decided to train a new generation of revolutionaries, strengthen his political position and transform society, by using the tactics he knew best -- revolution and guerrilla warfare.


When, in 1966, Mao's leading allies such as Defense Minister Lin Biao called for the destruction of traditional beliefs, customs and thinking, chaos ensued. Schools were closed, workplaces became battlegrounds, Tibetan monasteries were destroyed, and countless Chinese who were classified as "bad elements" were tortured and killed, many in the streets, some in their own homes. Many were driven to suicide. Houses were invaded at the whim of Red Guards; belongings were smashed. Conflict flared into what amounted to a series of small civil wars throughout the country.


The Cultural Revolution began in the universities and secondary schools of Beijing, where students calling themselves Red Guards targeted certain teachers and university and school administrators.


The students, long regimented and restrained by the Communist system, were in a mood to rebel and show they could be as revolutionary as their parents, who had survived the Long March across China in the 1930s and fought to victory against the Nationalists.


In Chengdu Province the first armed Red Guard clashes of the Cultural Revolution began, first around a cotton mill and then at a fighter-plane factory.


In May 1967, conservative and radical factions in Chengdu, a center for defense industries, battled with automatic rifles, mortars, recoilless rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.


The violence spread from urban schools and factories to provinces and villages, where factional power struggles erupted. Many of the participants, in the absence of an impartial police force or an independent legal system, simply took the opportunity to settle personal scores.


In some cases, the Red Guards massacred whole families from "bad class" backgrounds to prove their revolutionary fervor; throughout those years, Mao's ideology of class warfare had as much influence as any orders he gave.