7

Destroying the Old World

The killings were mainly confined to Beijing, where members of the Cultural Revolution Group were in daily contact with the Red Guards. Still, there was plenty of violence in the rest of the country, as students took to heart Mao’s battle call ‘To Rebel is Justified’. Even before the mass rally on 18 August 1966, students from the Huadong Teachers University in Shanghai arrested more than 150 faculty members at their homes and paraded them on campus, forcing them to wear dunces’ caps and heavy boards around their necks reading ‘Reactionary Academic Authorities’. At the Fuxing Middle School, founded in 1886 by Elizabeth McKechnie, a missionary nurse whose motto was ‘Seek Truth’, students attacked some of their teachers with hammers. One of the victims suffered a fractured skull.¹

The mass rally on Tiananmen Square further prompted students around the country into action. In Changsha, Red Guards started beating students and teachers from ‘bad families’ the moment they returned from their first meeting with Mao Zedong on Tiananmen Square. Further south, in Guangzhou, a teacher was forced to drink a bottle of ink. After he had been repeatedly kicked in the stomach, the ink he regurgitated was mixed with blood. He later committed suicide. In Xi’an a ‘Red Terror Brigade’ doused a teacher in petrol and set him alight.²

But these were isolated acts. Many students outside the capital, at this early stage of the Cultural Revolution, were still unsure just what level of violence would be tolerated.

The real founding act of Red Guards was a campaign to destroy all remnants of old society. On 18 August, appearing on the rostrum next to Chairman Mao, Lin Biao had exhorted his youthful audience to go forth and destroy ‘all the old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits of the exploiting classes’. Feudal ideology had fettered people’s minds for thousands of years, and now these cultural remnants were to be destroyed to ensure that the country’s revolutionary colour would never fade. Tradition was the dead hand of the past trying to maintain its grip on the living, and it was to be smashed to smithereens. Sidney Rittenberg, an American who had thrown in his lot with the communist party before liberation and knew many of its leaders, was surprised by the fury of the message: ‘Everything was smash, smash, smash. I could hardly believe what I heard. These people at the very top were truly planning to destroy everything they had built up over the past two decades, to smash and build something new.’³

Lin Biao’s appeal was widely disseminated, and a day later Red Guards in Beijing put up posters boldly declaring war on the old world. ‘We want to take to task and smash all old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits. Barbers, tailors, photographers, book pedlars and others who are at the service of the bourgeois class, none of these are exceptions. We want to rebel against the old world!’ High heels, fancy haircuts, short skirts, jeans, bad books, all of these had to be eliminated at once, the Red Guards proclaimed. Printers at the officially sponsored China Youth Daily churned out thousands of copies of these inflammatory speeches on 19 August. On the evening of 20 August, bands of Red Guards began roving through the streets of Beijing, attacking anything that smacked of the old order. They changed street names, plastering new revolutionary terms over the old signs. Shops providing services, for instance tailors and barbers, came under attack, as their owners were humiliated, sometimes beaten and forced to close down. By the morning of 22 August, the atmosphere had turned ugly, as the Red Guards started attacking ordinary people, forcibly cutting their hair, slashing narrow trouser legs, chopping off high heels. That very same day, the New China News Agency hailed the Red Guards as ‘Mao’s little generals’, lauding their efforts to sweep away old culture. In a special broadcast, the Central People’s Radio spread the news to the rest of the country. The result was a nationwide explosion from 23 to 26 August of Red Guard violence towards anything that smacked of the past. The aftershocks would be felt for months.4

In Zhengding, where Gao Yuan and his schoolmates had already spent an exciting summer persecuting their teachers, the moment they read in the People’s Daily of the mass rally on Tiananmen Square each class set up its own Red Guards. Those who lacked a good class background were not eligible and walked off in shame. The successful ones put on torn strips of red cloth stencilled with yellow paint. The strips were not quite as elegant as the armband they had spotted on Chairman Mao in the newspapers, but they nonetheless gave them a new sense of importance. A day or two later they followed the news on how Red Guards had smashed old name boards in the capital. They decided to eradicate all traces of the old world in Zhengding, setting off towards the old quarter of the town with a red flag inscribed with ‘Red Guard’ fluttering at the head of their column. They copied what they had read and heard about the Red Guards in Beijing. They changed street names and attacked the lacquered signboards hanging over small shops. They deprecated pedlars selling their wares for being ‘capitalist’. An old woman with bound feet was harassed, forced to stand motionless in the sun for four hours wearing a sign denouncing her as a ‘prostitute’. But the biggest target was an ancient archway that symbolised feudal oppression. Thick ropes were attached around the top, the foundations were prized loose with crowbars and the structure was pulled down, reduced to a pile of broken stones. The onion dome of a local mosque posed an even greater challenge, and it took hundreds of Red Guards to bring it down. An old Muslim watchman with a wispy beard who tried to intervene was forced to wear a pig’s tail, obtained from the local butcher, around his neck.5

Similar scenes played out across the country. In Xiamen, where Ken Ling had managed to join the Red Guards despite his bad family background, teams fanned out through the streets destroying everything old in their path, from ornamental brass knockers and antique shop signs to the dragon-shaped cornices on temples. Each team had its own red flag and marched in formation. Some of them beat drums and gongs, while others went about their business quietly and methodically, following a carefully prepared itinerary with all the addresses marked out by street committees. They gave haircuts to returned overseas students and cut long braids. A simple test was applied to stove-pipe trousers, a fashion also introduced by overseas students: if they were not wide enough to accommodate two bottles, the seams were slit open with a knife. Pointed shoes were confiscated, and high heels sliced off. There was nothing ordinary people could do: when the guidelines of the Cultural Revolution had been broadcast to the nation on 8 August in the so-called ‘Sixteen Articles’, the party had specified that no measures should be taken against students at primary schools, middle schools, colleges and universities. ‘To Rebel is Justified,’ the Red Guards cried.⁶

Zhengding and Xiamen were small cities, but an even greater outpouring of destruction took place in Shanghai, a city that had been administered by foreign powers before liberation and never quite managed to shed its image as a decadent, bourgeois stronghold. Every sign of the imperialist past came under attack, as Red Guards chipped, drilled and burned off ornaments from the solid granite buildings along the Bund – renamed Revolutionary Boulevard. Shops selling curios or flowers were smashed. Mattresses, silk, velvet, cosmetics and fashionable clothes, all condemned as bourgeois luxuries, were tossed out and carted away.7

More encouragement came from above. On 23 August, the Liberation Army Daily, under the thumb of Lin Biao, applauded the Red Guards: ‘What you did was right, and you did it well!’ The following day, another editorial enthused about the campaign, followed by a solemn pledge that the army would stand resolutely behind the Red Guards. ‘Learn from the Red Guards! Respect the Red Guards!’⁸

Now that the army had given them full licence to turn the old world upside down, the Red Guards went on the rampage. Libraries were easy targets, as they worked their way through the stacks, in schools and on campuses, confiscating every volume that looked even vaguely feudal or bourgeois. Book burnings were common. Some were symbolic, with only a few books thrown into the bonfire. Others were conflagrations that lit up the sky for days on end. In Xiamen, the flames leaped three storeys high, as Ken Ling and his comrades fed the fire with sixty litres of kerosene. People came with chairs to watch the spectacle. Under a red sky, some onlookers crowded the roofs of surrounding buildings.⁹

In Shanghai, Red Guards destroyed thousands of books from the Zikawei Library, a scholarly repository of over 200,000 volumes started by Jesuits in 1847. Wen Guanzhong, a local student who had not been allowed to join the Red Guards, observed with interest that foreign books were much harder to burn, as they were protected by sturdy leather covers. In the Huangpu district, where the shopping street of Nanjing Road had been laid waste by the Red Guards, several lorries were working around the clock to take books to the local paper mill for pulping.10

Public monuments were assailed. In Shanghai, it took the Red Guards only a few days to demolish eighteen listed historical monuments, including the tomb of Xu Guangqi (1562–1633), the city’s first Christian convert, who had collaborated with the Italian Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci. Longhua Pagoda, the oldest temple in Shanghai and a towering 44 metres in height, fell victim to the hammers and ropes of the Red Guards. Three thousand ancient scriptures belonging to the temple were reduced to ash. The Confucius Temple, an ancient architectural complex located in a quiet public park, was razed to the ground. Red Guards also tackled St Ignatius Cathedral, next to the Zikawei Library, tearing down the spires and the ceiling before shattering its stained-glass windows. There were many churches in Shanghai, and a report later established that ‘All the articles of worship inside Catholic churches have been destroyed.’¹¹

There were scenes of Red Guards toppling the steeples of foreign churches or burning ancient pagodas in most cities. In Qingdao, where the churches had been packed in the years following Mao’s Great Famine, the organ of St Michael’s Cathedral was smashed with hammers, the windows shattered one after the other.¹² In Mount Hengshan, one of the five sacred mountains revered by followers of both Taoism and Buddhism, local cadres and Red Guards collaborated to take down every temple and statue, feeding a hungry fire for three nights.¹³

In a few places the assault on tradition was rebuffed. Qufu, the hometown and resting place of Confucius, had some of the largest compounds and family tombs in the country. Tens of thousands of descendants of the ancient sage had their final resting place in the Confucius Cemetery, a sacred compound with dozens of buildings surrounded by an ancient wall, overgrown with gnarled trees. Local Red Guards repeatedly tried to attack the premises, but the Qufu authorities managed to repel their assaults. Only after more than 200 Red Guards from Beijing had descended on the city were the tombs finally desecrated. Five female corpses, still well preserved, were tied together and hung from a tree. Chen Boda had personally wired his instructions, allowing the graves to be dug up but demanding that the main edifice be preserved as a ‘museum of class education’.¹⁴

Other cemeteries were easier targets, in particular those belonging to foreigners. Shanghai, before liberation, was a metropolis half as big again as Moscow, with a larger foreign population than any other city except New York. It had some sixty-nine cemeteries with 400,000 graves, and 20,000 of these belonged to foreigners. Headstones were systematically smashed, crosses broken and memorial plaques and inscriptions obliterated with cement or smeared over with paint. Soon the local authorities reported proudly that ‘except for the graves of a few revolutionary martyrs, all the tombstones have basically been completely overturned or smashed to pieces’. One exception was the Ji’an Cemetery, where many foreigners had been reburied in 1951. Guards on duty were able to protect some of the graves. The party intervened instead, deciding to level all tombstones dating from the pre-liberation era, since they were ‘symbols of imperialism’.15

In Shanghai, as elsewhere, burials were almost immediately abolished by revolutionary decree in favour of cremation. Within weeks, a brand-new facility appeared in the suburbs, as burn teams worked around the clock to fill the crematoria. In Nanjing, where the authorities also banned burials, Red Guards smashed all the coffins confiscated from funeral parlours.¹⁶

Nationwide, in 1966 there were roughly 50,000 graves belonging to foreigners. More than half of these were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Many others were defiled, and only one in ten managed to escape undamaged.¹⁷

Local tombs also suffered. Among the victims was Hai Rui, the official who had been dismissed from office by the Ming emperor. Red Guards destroyed his resting place on Hainan Island.¹⁸

On 23 August, Red Guards attacked some thirty-six flower shops in Shanghai. Ornamental plants and flowers were considered wasteful and bourgeois, and in the following days Red Guards rampaged through flowerbeds and hothouses in parks across the city. Elaborate rockeries and goldfish ponds were smashed. Flowers at funerals were prohibited. Complex economic calculations were made to highlight the inherently exploitative nature of growing flowers, as one party hack concluded that the 3 million bunches of fresh flowers sold in Shanghai in 1965 had been cultivated on a surface large enough to produce a year’s supply of grain for 3,000 members of the proletariat.¹⁹

Dogs had long since disappeared, denounced as a threat to public hygiene before they were hunted down in cities across the country in the early 1950s.20 Now came a great cat massacre, as Red Guards did the rounds to eliminate the feline symbol of bourgeois decadence. Rae Yang, the fifteen-year-old student who had turned against her teacher in Beijing, tried to smuggle her pet out of the house, but Red Guards noticed something moving in the bag she was carrying and guessed what was hidden inside. They grabbed the bag, swung it round and hit it against a brick wall. The cat mewed wildly. ‘The boys laughed. It was fun. They continued to hit him against the wall.’ Her brother started to cry and begged them to stop but nobody listened. Walking through the streets of the capital at the end of August, people saw dead cats lying by the roadside with their front paws tied together.²¹

Less successful was the attack on racing pigeons, a hobby introduced in the nineteenth century by foreigners. In Shanghai the first Homing Pigeon Club was opened in 1929, and soon local enthusiasts started developing pigeon breeds distinguished by their sense of direction, endurance and speed. By the time the city had been liberated, there were nine different pigeon clubs, all merged into one association under strict government control in 1964. As in Britain, the vast majority of its members were working people, and they kept an estimated 30,000 birds, although a further 20,000 were bred by independent fans without a licence. Their owners were accused of wasting precious grain that could sustain thousands of workers. Red Guards first issued an ultimatum calling for their destruction within two days. Then they did the rounds, smashing some of the racks and lofts that dotted the roofs of Shanghai. The local authorities lent a hand by arresting hundreds of pigeon breeders in the ensuing months. Despite the pressure, pigeon breeding persisted, as people moved their birds away from public view.²²

But the most frightful development by far was house searches, which started on 23 August and peaked in the following days. Pieces of paper with details of the targets – their name, age, status and address – were passed on to the Red Guards, sometimes by the local police, sometimes by street committees. The Red Guards searched the homes of people from bad class backgrounds for an ever growing list of suspect items: articles of worship, luxury items, reactionary literature, foreign books, concealed weapons, hidden gold, foreign currency, signs of a decadent lifestyle, portraits of Chiang Kai-shek, old land deeds, documents from the nationalist era, signs of underground activities or incriminating evidence of links with enemies of the regime.

Many of these victims had already been subject to systematic persecution since liberation. They were regularly denounced by the regime, paraded through the streets during every major political campaign, hounded from their jobs and forced to sell their possessions in order to eke out a living for themselves and their dependants. When the Red Guards who had ransacked the Zikawei Library turned up at the home of Wen Guanzhong, the boy who had watched as a bonfire consumed a pile of foreign books, they were astonished by what they saw. His father, who had been a general under Chiang Kai-shek, was in prison in Beijing. His mother had been driven to her death in 1955. Her wet nurse, treated like family, looked after Wen and his two brothers. The Red Guards found nothing but bare walls. There was nothing the Red Guards could take that had not already been pawned or bartered for food.23

Nien Cheng, on the other hand, lived in great comfort as the widow of the former manager of a foreign firm in Shanghai, the oil company Shell. The Red Guards turned up on the evening of 30 August, as she was reading William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in her study. There were thirty or forty of them, led by two elderly men and a woman. ‘We are the Red Guards. We have come to take revolutionary action against you!’ a gangling youth shouted at her, as others dispersed in groups to loot her two-storey house. There was the sound of people walking up and down the stairs, followed by the tinkle of broken glass and heavy knocking on the wall. Crates in a storeroom were opened with pliers, curtains were torn down, mirrors smashed, rare antiques shattered. ‘On the floor there were fragments of porcelain in colours of oxblood, imperial yellow, celadon green and blue-and-white.’ In the bedroom, Red Guards hammered on the furniture. Bits of silk and fur were flying around under the ceiling fan, as garments were torn to pieces. Trembling with anxiety, Nien Cheng tried to intervene but was kicked in the chest. On the lawn outside, a bonfire was lit, as Red Guards tossed books into the flames. All along her street, smoke rose over the garden walls, permeating the air as the Red Guards burned piles of confiscated goods.

This was merely the beginning. A couple of weeks later, Red Guards arrived from Beijing, armed with leather whips. They were looking for hidden treasure in Nien Cheng’s house, and they were far worse: ‘They ripped open mattresses, cut the upholstery of the chairs and sofas, removed tiles from the walls of the bathrooms, climbed into the fireplace and poked into the chimney, lifted floorboards, got onto the roof, fished in the water tank under the ceiling, and crawled under the floor to examine the pipes.’ The garden was turned into a sea of mud, as the flowerbeds were dug up and plants were pulled from their pots.24

Similar scenes were seen in many towns and cities across the country, as people scurried to dispose of compromising items before the Red Guards knocked on their door. In Beijing, Rae Yang’s parents burned family letters and old photographs, flushing the ashes down the toilet. In Xi’an, Kang Zhengguo, a young man who was passionate about literature, hid some of his favourite books inside a large earthenware jar. The Red Guards tore up the other books and carted off pieces of furniture.²⁵

Some targets of the campaign, knowing that they would be next, went to bed fully clothed, waiting for their turn. Every night there were terrifying sounds of loud knocks on the door, objects breaking, students shouting and children crying. But most ordinary people had no idea when the Red Guards would appear, and what harmless possessions might be seen as suspicious. They lived in fear.²⁶

Driven by fear, spite or ambition, some people started informing on their neighbours. Rae Yang, herself a Red Guard, was approached by an old woman who insisted that she and her friends raid the home of a prominent overseas Chinese. In Chengdu, two members of a street committee turned up in Jung Chang’s school, denouncing some of their neighbours in grave and mysterious tones, as if they were on a grand mission. The Red Guards found a partly naked woman kneeling in the middle of a room that had already been turned upside down. The stench of faeces and urine permeated the air. The victim’s eyes were bulging with fear and desperation as she shrieked for forgiveness. The Red Guards found nothing. Outside the door, one of the informers beamed with satisfaction. ‘She had denounced the poor woman out of vindictiveness.’²⁷

Lorries heaped with works of art, musical instruments, linen cupboards and other bourgeois belongings drove to and fro through every city, sometimes blocking the traffic.28 The plunder was collected and inventoried at a central location in each city, much as the works of art confiscated by the Nazis in Paris went to the Jeu de Paume. In Guangzhou, the Sacred Heart Cathedral, in the very centre of the old town, was selected for this key operation. Modelled on the Basilica of St Clotilde in Paris with imposing twin spires, it was vandalised by the Red Guards before the municipal party committee decided to commandeer it as a sorting house. Mountains of furniture, books and clothes were hoarded in one huge, cavernous space, while more valuable objects were stored in two gatekeeper’s rooms. There was a mound of silver rings, bracelets, necklaces, earrings, charms and pendants in one corner, while gold bars were stacked separately against a wall. But what most struck one of the Red Guards, in charge of a pushcart used to deliver the gold to the cathedral, was a sprawling collection of musical boxes. ‘It was the first time in my life that I saw musical boxes, and there were a lot of them, over a hundred.’²⁹

Meticulous inventories were kept, and many are still extant in the archives. In Wuhan, the capital of Hubei where 20,000 homes were raided, the loot included 319,933 silver dollars, over 3 million yuan in bank deposits, 560,130 yuan in cash, 679 antiques, 3,400 pieces of furniture, 8,439 sealed boxes, 9,428 silver objects, over 91,000 pieces of porcelain, 798 watches, 340 radio sets, 8 nationalist flags, 22 rifles, 971.1 kilos of gold and 1,717 kilos of silver. Across the province as a whole, where 1 per cent of all households were raided, the value of the seized assets was estimated at 200 million yuan. The Red Guards collected more than 4 tonnes in gold alone.³⁰

The biggest booty was probably in Shanghai, where Red Guards searched more than a quarter of a million households. Three million collectible antiques and art objects ended up in warehouses, not including jewellery and currency estimated at 600 million yuan.31

These lists, of course, reflected a mere fraction of the total. Nien Cheng had to beg the Red Guards not to destroy her collection of rare porcelain but donate it to the state instead. Red Guards had been enjoined to smash the old world, and they thoroughly enjoyed themselves with hammers, axes, crowbars, pliers and bats. Much besides books was consumed by fire. In Xiamen, the list of objects thrown into the flames included ‘wooden ancestor tablets, old paper currency, brightly coloured Chinese-style dresses, men’s suits, old signboards, movie tickets printed with the original names (now changed) of movie theatres, bamboo mah-jongg tiles, playing cards, foreign cigarettes, curios, antiques, scrolls with calligraphy, Chinese opera stringed instruments, Western violins’.³²

And the loot was exposed to a plethora of thieving hands. It started with the Red Guards, who lined their pockets with money, jewellery and wristwatches, openly appropriating radios and bicycles in the name of the cause. ‘The school dormitories suddenly became plush. Many students were enjoying themselves there with their loot.’ There were also common thieves who impersonated Red Guards, doing the rounds to seize their share of the booty. Once the objects had arrived at the central storage, many vanished even before they were inventoried. In Xi’an a mere scribble on a piece of paper was handed to Red Guards who deposited their plunder in the City God Temple.³³

But the biggest thieves were members of the Cultural Revolution Group. Much as Hermann Göring travelled to Paris twenty times, selecting the very best objects for his own personal collection from the Jeu de Paume, Kang Sheng built up an impressive collection of fine art by visiting the main storage centres around the country. There were prehistoric oracle bones, antique bronzes, ivory seals, precious paintings and more than 12,000 books. A cultured scholar and skilled calligrapher, deeply versed in the classics, Kang was particularly keen on rare rubbings from stone inscriptions, calligraphy scrolls and antique inkstones. Some of the artefacts amassed by Deng Tuo ended up in his possession, as well as the collections of around one hundred other scholars – all persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. Kang was not alone. On a single visit in May 1970, Kang Sheng, Chen Boda, Lin Biao’s wife Ye Qun and four of her acolytes more or less emptied an entire warehouse. Kang Sheng and Jiang Qing also divided rare seals and inkstones among themselves.³⁴

What the Nazis did not burn, they cherished, but the same could not be said of the Red Guards. The vast majority of the loot was left to rot. In Shanghai, some 600 confiscated pianos were distributed to kindergartens, but many other objects fared badly. This was particularly true of the 5 million books that somehow managed to escape the flames. Many were bundled together and dumped in an attic above a wet market on Fuzhou Road, a street where bookshops used to thrive. On Huqiu Road, once called Museum Road in honour of the Shanghai Museum, set up by the British in 1874, a million rare volumes were stacked up to the ceiling, attacked by vermin and the elements. The situation was worse in the suburbs. In Fengxian, where a new crematorium was opened in September 1966, antique calligraphy scrolls and paintings littered the floor of an improvised storage room, most of them wet, torn and mouldy.35

A belated attempt to rescue some of the loot was made by the end of 1966, as restrictions were imposed on the recycling or breaking up of antique bronze bells, ritual containers and statues.³⁶ A team of specialists from Beijing was put in charge of salvaging what remained, but they faced an uphill battle. Many priceless antique bronzes had already been melted down in foundries or sold off on the black market. Much of the porcelain was smashed to pieces. Still, the team managed to save 281,000 objects and 368,000 books.³⁷

If the situation was bad in Shanghai, inland it was far worse. In Wuhan, there were no guards in the storage centres, and by 1968 most of the plunder had been stolen or was damaged beyond repair by vermin and humidity.³⁸

A day after Red Guards had ransacked her home, a party official paid Nien Cheng a visit. He made a sweeping gesture encompassing the entire house, and asked rhetorically: ‘Is it right for you and your daughter to live in a house of nine rooms with four bathrooms when there is such a severe housing shortage in Shanghai? Is it right for you to use wool carpets and have each room filled with rosewood and blackwood furniture when there is a shortage of wood and basic furniture for others? Is it right for you to wear silk and fur and sleep under quilts filled with down?’ Nien was allowed to pack a suitcase before being confined to her room, stripped of all furniture but for a mattress and two chairs. Soon enough she was put under formal arrest and deported to a local gaol. Several working families moved into her house.³⁹

The homes of people from bad backgrounds were divided up. Rae Yang, despite being a Red Guard herself, was unable to protect her own family. Her aunt, bedridden with diabetes, was moved into a pantry without windows. Six families from ‘revolutionary backgrounds’ moved into the compound, sharing the house among themselves. They dug up the garden, levelled the roses, turned several corridors into storage rooms and built makeshift kitchens in the courtyard, using salvaged material like broken bricks, plywood planks and pieces of asphalt felt.40

The bulk of the victims were ordinary people, but party members tainted by their links to disgraced leaders also suffered. On the campus of Peking University, a party stalwart who had boasted of his ties to Deng Tuo and Peng Zhen found a poster glued to the outside wall of his house. The announcement declared that he had to give up his living quarters to the proletariat. His family had to work feverishly through the night to move their possessions and clear enough space for two other families.⁴¹

The situation varied from place to place, but archival evidence from Shanghai gives an idea of the scale of the expropriations. A total of 30,000 families were forced to hand over their property deeds to the state. Many were allowed to retain a total living surface of 3 to 5 square metres per family, although rent was due. The vast majority of the victims were classified as ‘bad elements exploiting the proletariat’, being neither intellectuals nor administrators working for the party.⁴²

Many more were hounded out of town, but not without first being beaten, spat upon and otherwise humiliated. Red Guards emulated their counterparts in Beijing, cleansing the cities of class enemies. In Shanghai there were harrowing sights of elderly people being frogmarched barefoot through the streets to the railway station, their clothes in tatters, with placards proclaiming their crimes hanging around their necks. A conservative estimate places the number of exiled victims in the country overall at 400,000.⁴³