Song Binbin, Poster Woman for Mao’s Bloody Revolution, Dies at 77

Song Binbin, a student leader of China’s Red Guards who in 1966 was embroiled in the beating death of her high school principal, one of the most notorious killings of the Cultural Revolution — and who publicly apologized for her actions almost a half-century later — died on Sept. 16. She was 77.

Her death was reported by a brother, Song Kehuang, on the Chinese app WeChat, saying she had died in the United States. He provided no other details.

News of her death set off renewed debate on Chinese social media about the adequacy of Ms. Song’s tearful apology in 2014, as well as the Communist Party’s failure to acknowledge the true toll of the Cultural Revolution, the decade-long rampage that Mao Zedong unleashed in the 1960s, claiming more than one million lives, and that remains a heavily censored topic in China.

A daughter of a prominent general in the People’s Liberation Army, Ms. Song was enrolled at Beijing Normal University Girls High School when she and classmates responded to Mao’s call for young people to turn against intellectuals, educators and others who supposedly held bourgeois values.

On Aug. 5, 1966, students attacked Bian Zhongyun, a 50-year-old mother of four who headed the school. She was kicked and beaten with sticks spiked with nails. After passing out, she was thrown onto a garbage cart and left to die.

Her death has been widely described as the first killing of a teacher during the Cultural Revolution, a violent spasm establishing Mao’s cult of personality, with masses waving his Little Red Book of his writings.