The Cultural Revolution (CR hereafter) is an important event in China’s modern history. Beginning in 1966, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, as it was originally known, was Mao Zedong’s attempt to extend and solidify the personality cult that had grown up around him, to purge allegedly “bourgeois,” capitalist, and traditional elements from Chinese society, and to seal his authority as the ideological leader of the Community Party of China (CPC hereafter). The “revisionists” who were allegedly infiltrating government, polity, the economy and society at large were to be removed through violent class struggle, an ideological trope that justified the wanton, brutal murders of millions of Chinese.1 This book tells the story of two such murders, the murder of Mr. Wang Jin on September 29, 1966 by 31 Red Guards in the Nanjing Foreign Language School (NFL School hereafter), where the senior author was a young student at the time; and the earlier murder of Mrs. Bian Zhongyun on August 5, 1966. These two murders mark the beginning and the end of old Red Guard violence in the CR. The book is thus a history of two small incidents in a massive social injustice and also an attempt to understand the CR within the framework of modern social movement theory. The book is composed of three parts: the history of the two incidents, the sources of violence in the CR, and the definition and periodization of the CR (that is, what was it, and when did it begin and end?).