On Monday one of the most infamous anniversaries in the history of Chinese Communist party rule will pass without official acknowledgment, despite bearing a hallmark that affects everything from party disciplinary proceedings to concerts.

The 50th anniversary of Mao Zedong’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which unleashed a decade of chaos and violence across the country, comes at an awkward time for President Xi Jinping. It invites unflattering comparisons of his own “strongman” image and constrains — at least temporarily — his administration’s instinct to crush all dissent.

Mao, sidelined by his lieutenants after a disastrous industrialisation drive resulted in a famine that claimed tens of millions of lives in 1959-61, saw the Cultural Revolution as a path towards absolute power.