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  It was often ambiguous, however, whether individual cases were suicide or murder, such as Zheng Meipian, the daughter of the memoirist Zheng Nian (Nien Cheng), who died in typically dubious circumstances during a struggle session by Red Guards in Shanghai. The ones who most commonly killed themselves were the very young, like the teenager who threw herself in front of a train after weeks of mockery for her ‘bad family’, and those who had once enjoyed positions of dignity and status.

  Drinking pesticide was a common method; truckloads of it had been produced as part of the ‘Campaign Against the Four Pests’ of 1958 – 62, when the state had declared war on sparrows, rats, flies and mosquitoes. (Millions of sparrows had been killed in an attempt to stop them eating grain seeds, which then resulted in huge locust swarms, since the sparrows were no longer around to control them. It was perhaps the emblematic campaign of the era: encourage people to kill to solve a problem, unleashing forces much worse than the original problem.)

  The Red Guards targeted far more than just people, however. With the thoroughness of the present-day Taliban, they looked to purge the country of any sign of ‘old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits’. The most harmless side of this was imposing revolutionary nomenclature on parts of the cities, so that you could stroll down Revolution Avenue, turn into Anti-Imperialist Boulevard, and end up in Mao Zedong Square.

  They attacked any sign of bourgeois culture, foreign influence or traditional thinking – women were dragged off the street by young patrols of purity police, their high heels broken and their long hair forcibly cut. Pleasant pastimes like kite-flying, chess, tai chi and poetry became politically suspect, and art that wasn’t tuned to political ends was deemed a sign of dangerous indulgence.

  Despite wars, revolution, pillaging imperialists and opportunistic archaeologists, China’s cultural heritage had remained among the richest in the world. That didn’t last. There were 6,843 historic or cultural sites in Beijing in 1966; by 1976 fewer than 2,000 were left, and most of those were either so small as to be overlooked or so large and important that Zhou Enlai and others had to send the army to protect them from the vandalism of the Guards.

  It was a pattern repeated across the country, from attacks on the Bund in Shanghai to the destruction of medieval temples in Tibet. Art and literature hardly fared any better, as the Red Guards made bonfires of books, sculptures and paintings. Numerous suicides wiped out a generation of artists and writers.

  In a rare moment of political honesty, the information board at the Yonghegong, a magnificent Tibetan Buddhist temple in Beijing, today records the battle between a mob of students intent on burning the temple complex to the ground and the soldiers sent to defend it. Religious institutions were singled out, since they represented a doubly hated legacy of tradition and superstition. The Communists had sought to stamp out religion even when they only controlled limited areas of China, by smashing village shrines and forcibly laicising monks, but the Cultural Revolution took these practices to new heights.

  Even ordinary household rituals, like smearing honey on the Kitchen God’s lips during the Spring Festival, or burning incense before exams, could invite violent denunciation. There was no space for ceremony any more, only for rituals dedicated to the new gods of Maoism. Being caught reciting the Buddhist sutras or the Christian gospels could be cause for a beating. Temples, churches, shrines and mosques were all destroyed as signs of outdated superstition, while passages from Mao’s works were recited each morning and his Little Red Book was proclaimed to have the power to heal the sick.

  The madness wasn’t limited to the young. Across the country ‘mass organisations’ and ‘rebel groups’ rallied. In Shanghai, in January 1967, the ‘Workers’ Command Post’ group, made up of a loose alliance of factory workers, students and opportunistic Party intellectuals, seized control of the city in the ‘January Storm’. Other groups seized power in cities and counties nationwide, as China shuddered under a thousand small coups, accompanied by the denunciation and persecution of the previous leaders.

  In the countryside, the movement became a pogrom against ‘rich peasants’ and ‘landlords’. There had already been one wave of violence against these groups, just after the founding of the PRC, back at a time when the terms actually meant something, although a huge number of the killings then had been arbitrary. According to Maoist theory, however, class status carried through the generations, and so now the children and grandchildren of those who had once been better off were targeted too. So were the descendants of ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and ‘rightists’, lumped together with the other two as the ‘Four Black Groups’ – a number which swelled to five, and then to seven, as ‘bad elements’, ‘capitalists’ and ‘black gangs’ were included among the persecuted.

  In some places, this meant social ostracism, heavy workloads and reduced rations. In others, it led to mass murder. Quanzhou County, Guangxi, was one example. There, according to the records, on 3 October 1967,

  . . . the militia commander Huang Tianhui led [the brigade militia] to engage in a massacre. They pushed off a cliff and killed seventy-six individuals of the brigade – former landlords, rich peasants, and their children – in snake-shaped Huanggua’an canyon . . . From July to October [another] 850 individuals [in the county] – the four-type elements and their children – were executed with firearms.9

  It didn’t take long before the various groups started to turn against each other. The Red Guard movement soon became as ideologically divided as any group of activists, while Party leaders, knowing that they could be next on the chopping block, allied with some mass groups against others. Meanwhile, the army involved itself, looking to restrain the violence in some places and solidify military power in others.

  The country was plunged into a civil war with no two clear sides, only a multitude of local factions. Broadly speaking, any given area would have a ‘rebel’ group whose members saw themselves as ideological purifiers and overturners of the corrupt old order, and a ‘loyalist’ group made up of an old guard equally convinced that they were the true Communists, and determined to protect their positions. But ‘rebel’ groups as frequently fought each other as the loyalists, and local politics, ethnic rivalries and old squabbles created a tangled mess of political violence.

  In most places the battles were fought with spears, knives and improvised explosives. Home-made hand grenades were still being unearthed forty years later. In the industrial city of Chongqing, the centre of China’s armaments industry, the battles escalated to tanks and artillery. A single clash there left a thousand dead.

  In Wuhan, where the Party leadership rallied its own ‘Million Heroes’ against the Red Guards, young teenagers were hired as mercenaries. One recalled, after attacking a group of young Red Guards:

  I killed five kids with my star-knife . . . one got it in the waist, the second, third, and fifth ones in the back, and number four in the neck. They were all maybe eight, nine years old. Killing a young boy would get you 20 yuan.10

  Near Beijing, hungry farmers were paid in grain to attack soldiers. The vast city factories, built in the fifties in a frenzy of heavy industrialisation, were major battlefields in fights as bloodily intimate as Stalingrad. The economy collapsed as work came to a standstill, while precious machinery was smashed beyond repair. Defeat in battle produced further slaughter, as in the Dao County massacre of 1967, where the losing side in a factional battle decided to prove their superior political consciousness by massacring upwards of 4,000 people in a month.

  By October 1968 the chaos had grown too much even for Mao, and he ordered the PLA to disperse the Red Guards. They were sent ‘up to the mountains and down to the villages’, rusticated to stop them causing further trouble. The army fought pitched battles against the more tenacious groups.

  The end of the student movements, however, did not mean an end to the violence. The killings in the countryside worsened in 1968 – 70. The ‘Cleansing of the Class Ranks’ campaign, launched in 1968,
prompted whole new waves of brutality, including bizarre cases of politically inspired cannibalism. In Inner Mongolia, for instance, 790,000 people were persecuted, 22,900 killed, and 120,000 crippled, out of a population of around 14 million people. In total, perhaps somewhere between one and two million people were killed in those years, and tens of millions persecuted.

  It was only by 1971 that the violence abated, as the new revolutionary organisations found themselves in charge, and the number of targets had decreased. Mass killings had mostly ended, but political persecution, often to the point of suicide, continued.

  Even in 1975 there were still horrific incidents. An extreme case was the Muslim village of Shadian, in the borderlands of southern Yunnan. Ethnic and religious conflicts, sparked by Red Guards burning mosques and shredding Korans, created civil war between Shadian’s ‘Muslim Militia Regiment’ and the local Han Chinese. A peace treaty had been brokered by Beijing, only to fall apart in an argument over the handing-in of weapons, and eventually the PLA itself was called in. On 29 July, the army was unleashed against Shadian and six other Muslim villages; a month later, when the fighting had finished, the town was razed, and 1,600 people were dead.

  In present-day China, the Red Guards tend to be treated as an aberration, a perverse generation of murderers. But the violence they used didn’t come from nowhere. They’d grown up in an atmosphere where brutality was normal, especially if they were from the countryside. During the Great Leap Forward, in 1959 – 61, violence was normalised. Those who couldn’t work, usually because of physical exhaustion, or who were found to be hoarding or stealing food, were subject to the same public criticism sessions the Red Guards later used, already a standard Maoist technique.

  One villager recalled:

  The victim was forced to stand on a table, [kneel down] and confess to everyone in the crowd . . . If the explanation was acceptable, then the person being criticised would be spared, but if the explanation was unacceptable, then the village leaders would beat the person. On some occasions, the village leaders would suddenly knock down the table on which the victim was standing, and the victim would fall to the ground and suffer injury.11

  Many of the Guards had therefore seen their parents or older siblings beating or being beaten, as well as witnessing other tortures. In one commune of 40,000 people, among 4,605 deaths in 1959 – 60, most of them by starvation, ‘398 were beaten to death, 148 driven to suicide, and 105 were frozen to death after being stripped of their clothing’.12 Out of the over 30 million deaths of those years, perhaps as many as 2 million were due to political violence linked to the famine – around the same as the high estimates of deaths during the Cultural Revolution itself.

  At the top, thousands of leaders were targeted in Beijing alone at the end of 1959. ‘The struggle should be profound, and should be carried out according to our principles, whether it is against old comrades-in-arms, colleagues or even husbands and wives!’ one of Mao’s allies proclaimed in language ‘auguring the Cultural Revolution’. 13

  Before that, of course, there had been the long violence of the civil wars and the Japanese invasion. Even in the Anti-Japanese War, most of the violence was Chinese fighting Chinese. The Chinese ‘puppet army’ fighting for the Japanese always outnumbered the Japanese in the country, and they were much easier targets than Japanese soldiers.

  Back then live burial (also a staple of Russian peasant killings) had been a common means of execution, used both by the puppet armies and by the resistance fighters. This was followed by the mass killings of landlords, rich peasants and supposed collaborators and Nationalist supporters in 1949 – 51, when any wild accusation could result in a lynching. ‘Superstitious and feudal’ practices, from Daoist exorcisms to the transport of corpses thousands of miles for burial in their home towns, were punished with anything from lectures to beating to hanging.

  Sporadic political violence continued throughout the fifties, whether used against ‘rightist’ intellectuals or in local village disputes. In 1956 Mao promised intellectual freedom and called for dissenting voices to be heard with his slogan ‘Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom’, and then crushed those who had spoken out in the vicious ‘Anti-Rightist’ movement that followed. Most of the dissenters were about as right-wing as Trotsky, but ‘rightist’ had long since become a generic term of abuse, like ‘bourgeois’ and ‘counter-revolutionary’.

  It was in 1957 that a professor wrote, in a public letter to Mao:

  We have applied to intellectuals methods of punishment which peasants would not apply to landlords and workers would not apply to capitalists. During the social reform campaigns, unable to endure the spiritual torture and humiliation imposed by the struggle . . . the intellectuals who chose to die by jumping from tall buildings, drowning in rivers, swallowing poison, cutting their throats, or by other methods, were immeasurable. The aged had no escape, and pregnant women were given no quarter. 14

  None of the cruelties of the Cultural Revolution were new to the People’s Republic; they were just enacted on a horrendously larger scale than ever before.

  Even regular countryside life was (and is) rough. Most villages had their local thugs or hooligans, and even normally peaceful farmers could get violent with relatively little provocation. Political and ideological violence never ceased altogether, and, at a local level, one round of it was often revenge for the last. Villages were close-knit places, often dominated by one or two local clans, and each slight, humiliation, theft, murder or other abuse of power stuck in people’s memories and could be used against the former leaders when the next cycle of political upheaval began.

  Yet many of the Red Guards came from urban middle-class backgrounds, where their experience of violence was relatively limited. The youth of the perpetrators, however, was something new. At one level, they weren’t that different from their student counterparts in the West, young, idealistic, and fed up with an old order that seemed to have become stagnant and complacent. They had grown up on stories of revolutionary martyrs and liberation from a feudal past, but around them they saw the same old corruption, superstition and backwardness.

  After 1949, Party officials had rapidly become as drunk and petty with power as the landlords, collaborators or Nationalists they had replaced. Periodic anti-corruption purges from the centre did little to change the lack of judicial or public oversight that gave Party cadres, in many cases, free rein to plunder, beat, rape and rob those beneath them. Life was still cripplingly poor for the vast majority of the population.

  From the point of view of the young, the system had promised so much and delivered so little – but, suffused with Maoist ideology, the conclusion they drew was that the system had failed because it had not been red enough, that the black stains of old ways of thinking were still smeared across the nation. Or it had been betrayed by saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries. What other explanation could there be?

  Student revolution had a long history in China, starting with the angry protestors of the ‘May 4th’ movement in 1919, who had denounced the post-WWI handover of Germany’s colonial territories in China to Japan by burning the homes of government officials. During the Anti-Japanese War, ‘the bravest of the terrorists were the young students in the middle-schools’, who would make the sudden decision to murder a collaborator because, ‘It is intolerable that we should breathe the same air as him.’15 Their terrible sincerity was not far removed from that of their juvenile descendants, if arguably directed to better ends.

  And their schoolbooks taught them to kill. The necessity of violence was drummed into Chinese children from a young age. So was an acute and resentful class consciousness: ‘Family origin was important: those of us from good backgrounds had to be certain not to stray from the path, and those from bad backgrounds had to struggle against their inferior inheritance,’ one writer remembered.16

  Second-grade17 textbooks in the sixties told a story of a wolf who disguised himself in sheep’s clothing and ate many sheep without the shepherd realisin
g it. When the shepherd found that out, no leniency was possible: ‘The shepherd raised the wooden stick in his hand and struck fiercely at the wolf, saying as he struck: “Death to you, you wolf in sheep’s clothing! Death to you, you wolf in sheep’s clothing!”’ By fourth grade, students had learnt about the Farmer and the Snake: ‘The snake was freezing on a very cold day. When the farmer saw it, he held it against his chest to give him warmth. When the snake awakened it bit the farmer, who died.’18 Teachers made sure the message came across clearly: the wolf and the snake were class enemies. They could never be trusted, and they deserved only death.

  Money was another motivation. Especially at the village level, being a Red Guard was often an opportunity to steal from others with impunity. And beneath all the ideological fervour, sometimes there was just the appeal of running free and wild, shouting and killing, and revelling in the joy of mayhem. One participant remembered:

  I was in my third year of junior high school when the Cultural Revolution got going. It was No. 27 High School, a real dump. I don’t care what other people say about why they got involved; I know I became a Red Guard just for the hell of it, to have a chance to lash out and rebel. Up till then alley-kids like me were always treated like dirt.