ILLUSTRATION: MARC BURCKHARDT

Fifty years ago, on May 16, Mao Zedongunleashed an attack aimed at smashing his own Communist Party apparatus from top to bottom, having concluded that it was going capitalist. “Bombard the headquarters!” he urged the masses in a famous People’s Daily article. Millions of young zealots responded, becoming Mao’s Red Guards, his fanatical foot-soldiers. Thus began China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a period of murderous insanity that ended only with Mao’s death a decade later, in 1976.

Nothing could be further from the tactics of President Xi Jinping today as he seeks to rid the party of the ills that he fears could lead to its extinction—corruption, moral decay, the loss of will to fight for a cause. His response has been to impose rigid order from on high, to stifle criticism—party members are forbidden from engaging in “improper discussion”—and to crush organized dissent, no matter how mild. Draconian media censorship has silenced debate on the Internet.

Yet, despite these obvious differences, Mr. Xi has spent his first three years in office resurrecting Mao, borrowing his rhetoric and aping his practices. He has concentrated power in his own hands and flirted with a personality cult—the most haunting symbol of the Cultural Revolution, in which blind worship of a supreme leader kindled years of convulsive violence. As many as 1.5 million Chinese were beaten to death, driven to suicide or killed in fighting among Red Guard factions.