THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION occupies a special place in China’s national consciousness. Too little time has passed since it rocked the nation, and too many people were directly affected by it for it to be completely forgotten. Mao’s exploitation of the nation’s youth to wage “unending revolution” against the party bureaucracy—and against his rivals in the leadership—touched the lives of almost everyone in China, from the cities to the countryside. If the Anti-Rightist Campaign was a tremor, the Cultural Revolution was an earthquake, with a far greater number of lives ruined and lost. But given the devastating scale of the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966 and continued until Mao’s death in 1976, the party has been remarkably effective at suppressing discussion of what happened—and at presenting what happened as a warning of the chaos that could follow democratic reform instead of a symptom of one-party rule. The party has succeeded in part because people in China have been willing accomplices in the act of forgetting. So many of them were taken in by the Cultural Revolution’s frenzied rhetoric, so many of them participated in the violence or stood by in silence, that it has never been very difficult for the party to persuade society to leave that past behind. Families were torn apart as wives divorced husbands who had been accused of political crimes, children condemned parents, and siblings turned against one another. When the Cultural Revolution finally ended, it was easier for many people just to move on than talk about it. Even many of those who suffered were eager to forget, for their hands were rarely entirely clean, either.
Meanwhile, a generation has come of age in China with only the vaguest understanding of the Cultural Revolution. More than half the population today was born after it ended. Many parents choose not to discuss the nightmare with their children, and the party keeps it out of the classrooms. As a result, perhaps the most awful chapter in the party’s rule has become the disaster that is dismissed with a nervous laugh, the catastrophe remembered only with the kitsch of a Mao watch or a Red Guard theme restaurant. For those who did not live through it, in China and overseas, it is the absurdity of the Cultural Revolution that lingers—the images of huge crowds massed in Tiananmen Square waving Chairman Mao’s little red book, of rampaging teenagers shouting idiotic slogans and smashing precious antiques, of teachers forced to wear ridiculous dunce caps and confess to preposterous crimes. And of course, the Cultural Revolution was absurd. But it was much more than that. What has been obscured and minimized is the horror and evil of what occurred. According to estimates based on the government’s own publications, upwards of 36 million people in the countryside were persecuted while about 750,000 to 1.5 million were killed and an equal number permanently injured. The number of casualties in the nation’s cities is less certain, but could total in the hundreds of thousands. In Beijing, more than 1,770 were murdered in only two months in 1966, according to official reports, and one million were persecuted in Shanghai, with at least 5,000 killed in 1968 alone.
The numbers are staggering enough, but then there are the stories of human brutality behind them—of men and women beaten in the streets or before screaming crowds in stadiums, of children forced to denounce and strike their own parents, of torture so cruel that countless victims chose to take their own lives, sometimes along with their loved ones. Killing occurred not only at the hands of overzealous Red Guards and in armed street battles between rival rebel factions, but also in organized pogroms carried out by party officials across the countryside. The targets of these mass murders were often former landlords and other class enemies who had already been persecuted for years, as well as their relatives. The executioners sometimes refused pleas to show mercy on children because they worried the young would grow up and exact revenge. In Daxin, a rural suburb south of Beijing, 325 people were killed in five bloody days in the summer of 1966, the youngest victim a one-month-old infant. In Daoxian county in Hunan Province, nearly five thousand people were killed in the space of two months after meetings in which names of potential victims were read aloud and votes were taken to decide their fate. People were beaten to death, hanged, shot, and sometimes buried alive or forced to jump off cliffs. In Guangxi Province, there is evidence of cannibalism in at least five counties.
Such violence has not been expunged from the country’s collective memory so much as repressed, and repressed memories have a way of surfacing unexpectedly. There have always been voices in China calling on the nation to confront the barbarity of the Cultural Revolution. Only with an honest accounting and thoughtful examination of the era, they argue, can the country come to terms with the legacy of mistrust and moral decay that haunts it today. As early as 1986, the novelist Ba Jin called for the construction of a Cultural Revolution museum and a memorial to its victims. As time passed and wounds healed, the number of people in China willing to face up to the past has grown. But the party has refused to allow a soul-searching national discussion, because it is fearful of the emotions it might unleash and the lessons that might be drawn about the wisdom of one-party rule. In 2006, four decades after the Cultural Revolution began, the party’s propaganda ministers issued an edict banning any mention of the anniversary in the media. In 2007, they issued another directive demanding that “vigilance must be increased” against those who would use the Cultural Revolution to discredit Mao, Mao Zedong Thought, and the Communist Party. All accounts of the period, the party reminded its censors, must comply with the official history laid out by the government in 1981.
The party spent more than a year writing that official history, a stilted account laced with ideological jargon and bureaucratic doublespeak, which barely hinted at the violence that ravaged the nation. To be sure, it disavowed the Cultural Revolution, describing it as “responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, state, and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic.” The party blamed Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, and three other radical leaders, vilifying them and labeling them the Gang of Four. But from beginning to end, the Cultural Revolution was really Mao’s project. In 1966, at the age of seventy-two, he had grown suspicious of the men around him and the party he had built, and events in Moscow weighed on him. As Khrushchev denounced Stalin and then was ousted himself, Mao worried he, too, might be toppled from power or repudiated by his successors. He believed the Soviets had gone soft on U.S. “imperialism” and abandoned socialism for faster economic growth, and he suspected his colleagues were taking China down the same road. The Cultural Revolution was his response, a mad attempt to revitalize the party by tearing it down while rearing a new generation of revolutionaries in bloody struggle. The party’s official history acknowledged that “chief responsibility” for the disaster “does indeed lie with Comrade Mao Zedong.” But Deng Xiaoping, the man who succeeded him and was himself a victim of the Cultural Revolution, decided the party could not afford to renounce the Chairman and directed the historians to cast him instead as a tragic hero, “a leader laboring under a misapprehension” who nevertheless remained “a great proletarian revolutionary.”
As the official history was being written, Deng also declared that it should “encourage people to close ranks and look to the future.” He expressed his hope that after it was released, “common views will be reached and, by and large, debate on the major historical questions will come to an end.” In other words, it was a version of history designed to make people forget history. But a single account of the Cultural Revolution, especially one as sanitized as the party’s, could never be enough to satisfy a nation that suffered so much and in so many different ways. Inevitably, people have sought to remember what happened on their own.
ZENG ZHONG WAS fourteen and in the seventh grade when the Cultural Revolution began with the mobilization of high school and college students into units of what became known as the Red Guards. He longed to join them, but his father had been a manager in Chongqing’s largest bank before the Communist takeover and was labeled a member of the bourgeoisie. Under the party’s theory of class struggle, childre
n were destined to behave as their parents did, so only the offspring of workers, peasants, and other members of the proletariat could be true revolutionaries. It made no sense to Zeng, who believed that the best rebels, including Mao himself, had not come from “good class backgrounds.” But if he questioned the principle of inherited class consciousness, he never doubted the righteousness of the party. Even after the Red Guards took his father away and put him to work at a local grain depot, even after they ransacked his home and seized everything of value, Zeng wanted to be one of them. One Red Guard unit at his school agreed to accept him, but only as a member of an auxiliary group. “I felt humiliated being identified with a bad family background, but I put up with the disgrace to participate in the revolution,” Zeng recalled. A month later, his unit had a change of heart and expelled him. Not long after that, his father returned home on a stretcher. He had suffered a back injury after being forced to carry a two-hundred-pound bag of grain.
Zeng’s expulsion from the Red Guards and his father’s injury kept him at home as the violence in Chongqing escalated. Workers and other adults began forming Red Guard units, too, and competing factions turned against one another and obtained weapons from the city’s munitions factories. Soon the nights were marked by gunfire and artillery blasts, Zeng said. As the fighting raged across the city, the Red Guards pretty much ignored Zeng and his family. The family stayed in their house, kept their heads down, and made it through the worst of the Cultural Revolution unharmed. Zeng knew others were not as fortunate. But it was not until he stepped foot in the cemetery decades later that he began to fathom the extent of the killing and set out to understand what had happened and why.
Zeng took out a notebook and sketched a map of the graveyard for me, dividing it into six sections. He said he had counted fifteen to twenty-five tombs in each section, for a total of 118, and assigned a code to each. Then he began counting the dead. About 350 names or parts of names were visible on about ninety of the pillars and tombstones, but there were more than two dozen tombs with markers that had disappeared or were so eroded the names were no longer legible. Zeng estimated that more than five hundred people were buried in the cemetery altogether. His goal was to identify them all and determine how each had died. He spent as much time as he could in the cemetery, waiting for friends or relatives of the dead to show up and then gently approaching them with questions. In the winter he lurked amid the tombstones for two to three hours at a time, stamping his feet to keep warm, and he stayed longer in the milder seasons. Often, no one would come by. When people did show up, they sometimes refused to talk to him, saying they wanted to forget the Cultural Revolution. But most were willing to help, and gradually Zeng collected information on the deaths of two hundred people buried in the cemetery. “It’s like putting together a jigsaw puzzle,” he said. “Sometimes, I hear four different versions of the same incident. I write them all down, and save them on my computer at home. If I find someone who witnessed the incident in person, then I give that account primary consideration. That’s how history is written.”
As we were talking, a park employee rushed up to our table and told Zeng something in the local Chongqing dialect that I couldn’t make out. “Would you excuse me?” Zeng said, as he picked up his notebook and stood to leave. “There are people visiting the graveyard.” I asked if I could tag along, he agreed, and together we hurried up the path. Zeng explained that he had befriended a few of the workers at the park, and that they quietly supported his research, telephoning him when they noticed people in the graveyard or taking down information when he couldn’t get there in time. The park employee who had just tipped him off grinned, and said, “It’s all unofficial.”
Zeng walked quickly, clearly excited. He said he had been puzzled for a long time by one particular tomb. Most of the tombs were marked with obelisks built in the Soviet style of the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square, often with engravings of hammers, sickles, rifles, torches, and other socialist insignia. But the pillar that marked this one was wider, shorter, and topped with a traditional Chinese roof with round tiles and upswept eaves. It was the only one like it in the cemetery, and Zeng had little information about the five people buried under it. The inscription gave their names but no ages or other identifying details, except that they belonged to a Red Guard unit called the “Set the Prairie Ablaze” Corps. Below the names was the date October 1968, and carved above them were six large characters: “Long Live the Martyrs.” Zeng had never seen anyone visit the tomb—until now. As we entered the cemetery and stepped over fallen tree trunks and branches, the park employee pointed out two men and a woman standing next to the tomb.
“Do you know how these people died?” Zeng asked.
“How could I not know?” one of the men replied. He was a stocky fellow in his mid-fifties, and he spoke with a thick Sichuanese drawl. “When Zhu Qingyun was killed, I was in the same bed as him!” Zhu’s was one of the five names listed on the pillar.
Zeng checked his notebook. “I heard people from the school at the steel mill did it?”
“It was a guy we called Duo Jian from the steel school.”
“Duo Jian from the steel school killed him?”
“Duo Jian didn’t do it himself. He led a group of people that did it.”
The man said he and Zhu had been classmates and fellow Red Guards at the No. 71 Middle School in Chongqing. On the night of August 16, 1968, they were on the run and hiding in a school from another Red Guard unit that they had clashed with in a dispute over guns. There were more than a dozen of his fellow Red Guards in the school, and because there weren’t enough beds, he and Zhu were forced to share one. The next morning, he said, Duo Jian and his comrades burst in and opened fire. The man said he rolled out of the bed and took cover, but Zhu sat up and a bullet struck him in the head. Zeng took down the details, and asked about the unusual design of the tombstone. The man laughed, and said he and his classmates originally planned to build a tall monument like the others in the cemetery. They even forced local residents who were political outcasts—members of the landlord and bourgeoisie classes, as well as Rightists and other criminals—to help them. After two weeks, though, they ran out of material and the corpses were beginning to rot. The stench was overwhelming. Finally, the students decided to just finish the monument by putting a Chinese-style roof on top of what they had built.
Zeng asked about the other names on the tombstone. The man said they were members of the same Red Guard unit but had died in separate incidents. Two of them were ninth-graders and one of them was in the eighth grade, but he couldn’t remember how they had been killed. Zeng jotted the information down in his notebook, then thanked the man and gave him a slip of paper with his telephone number. He asked him to call if he wanted to talk more, or if he remembered anything else.
“I always leave my phone number and ask people to call me,” Zeng told me after the visitors had left. “But less than a third of them ever do.”
At first, Zeng regarded his job as simply the accumulation of raw data—names and places, dates and ages, facts and fates. “I just wanted to collect as much information as possible, and then leave it for future generations to figure out what it meant and draw conclusions,” he said. But as he unearthed one tragic story of violence after another, as the enormity of what had happened in Chongqing—and the rest of the country—began to sink in, he could not help but draw conclusions. Sometimes he tracked down the families of the dead and visited them at their homes. He learned of two brothers who were killed in the same battle fighting for rival Red Guard factions; of a group of twenty students who were taken prisoner and executed with a grenade blast when the Red Guards who captured them were forced to retreat; of a young man who was beaten and left to die locked in a hot basement without food or water. And he knew he was just scratching the surface. This was just one cemetery, with some of the casualties from one Red Guard faction in one part of one city. When he asked himself why such violence had occurred
, why his contemporaries had been so cruel to one another, he thought of the values the party had taught him as a child—and he worried about what it was teaching children now.
There were once dozens of other graveyards with victims of the Cultural Revolution scattered across Chongqing. The party demolished them all after Mao’s death. The cemetery in Shapingba Park has survived, Zeng said, but the government “wants it to erode and deteriorate naturally. It wants people to forget about what happened. But I think it would be a tremendous loss if this history were forgotten, because it was cast in the blood and tears of the Chinese people. Future generations must learn these lessons so tragedies like this don’t happen again.
“In the future, when people visit this cemetery, the words on the tombstones won’t be visible anymore,” he added. “I hope my written record can fill in the blanks.”
Out of Mao's Shadow Page 11
