In China’s south-central region lies the province of Hunan, and in the south of Hunan is a county ancient, fertile, and rich in culture—Daoxian.
Daoxian is nestled among several mountain regions in the middle reaches of the Xiaoshui tributary in Lingling Prefecture, abutting the Guangxi Autonomous Region to its west. An aerial view of the county shows a verdant basin encircled by green hills and networked with rivers. Jiucailing, the highest peak of the Dupang mountain range on the county’s western border, rises more than 2,000 meters above sea level and is the second-highest peak in Hunan Province. Sixty-three rivers of varying sizes crisscross the basin like veins in a leaf, but the main waterways are the Xiaoshui, Fushui (also known as Yishui), Yanshui (also called the Yongming River), Paoshui (Gongba River), Lingshui (Ningyuan River), and Lianxi. The Xiaoshui, Daoxian’s main waterway, nearly bisects the county from south to north, flowing into the Shuangpai Reservoir north of Daoxian. The Lianxi, Yongming, and Ningyuan Rivers and the Paoshui and Fushui tributaries intersect with the Xiaoshui from the east and the west. This geography explains why, during the Daoxian massacre, so many corpses followed the Xiaoshui through Daojiang Town, the county seat of Daoxian, and into the Shuangpai Reservoir. According to observers at the time, at the peak of the massacre, nearly 100 bodies flowed past in a single hour, an average of 1.6 per minute. Many fish died from gorging on the bodies, and so many stinking corpses clogged the reservoir’s dam that the hydroelectric plant was shut down for half a year.
The hundreds of bodies flowing into this medium-sized reservoir stained its water and filmed it with a rancid, reddish, oily scum. The seventh and eighth months of the lunar calendar are the hottest time of year in Hunan, and the blazing sun combined with foehn winds produced an overwhelming stench that afflicted everyone within miles. Clearing the corpses from the reservoir became a major headache. The decision at the time was to assign the odious task to the offspring of “black elements.”1 This had the advantage of “puncturing the arrogance of the class enemy” and “facilitating the ideological remolding” of black-element offspring, while cleansing the reservoir area and restoring the Shuangpai’s waters to their original limpid beauty.
A friend of mine, Yang XX, a well-known writer in Lingling Prefecture, told me of his personal experience of the Daoxian massacre. Yang was from a “rich peasant” family in Shuangpai County, and having recently graduated from middle school at the age of 17, he had returned home to farm. After Daoxian’s killing wind spread to Shuangpai, many people were also killed there. Yang’s family was fortunate enough to have been spared, but his production brigade sent Yang to the reservoir for voluntary service. The task seemed simple enough, consisting of rowing boats out to the corpses and towing them ashore for burial. Although the stench was appalling, it was infinitely better to bury another’s corpse than to be buried oneself. One day, while looking out on the water, Yang saw a dozen or so corpses floating together in a circle, looking from afar like a flower in bloom. He promptly rowed his little boat out to deal with them, and as he drew nearer he saw that the corpses had been strung together with wire through their collarbones. As Yang snagged them with the hook on his bamboo punt pole, a female corpse turned over, and he saw an infant clutched in her arms.
The Xiaoshui River had nurtured millions of lives without the devastation of flash floods, its placid waters shaded with trees and dotted with sandbars like strings of jade beads. Like the people who lived along its banks, the river was docile and not easily stirred. Its waters were dotted with fishing boats and timber rafts, the latter driven along at a leisurely pace by men, some burly and some rail thin, wearing only sackcloth trousers, if even that, their skin bronzed and glistening under the sun as they gripped their bamboo punt poles tipped with sharp iron hooks. When they saw housewives and girls washing clothes and vegetables along the shore, they puffed up their chests and bellowed uncouth highland ditties, the women responding with playful scolding. During the massacre, however, the raftsmen and washerwomen were replaced by corpses bloated to the size of water buffalo, male and female, young and old, floating singly or strung together like fish. The Xiaoshui wordlessly declined responsibility for this unaccustomed cargo by beaching the corpses among its phosphorous jags, sodden willow groves, and sandbars.
Most of the bodies were naked, or at most covered with only shreds of clothing, usually skeletal or dismembered, and often headless. They’d been rendered unrecognizable by the gnawing of hungry fish, which left deep pits for eyes and a horrible, yawning cavity in place of the lips that had recited Chairman Mao’s quotes and begged for the revolutionary masses to punish them for their crimes, their joyous laughter and cries of grief having been eternally silenced.
When the corpses first began floating through Daojiang Town, crowds lined the riverbanks in wide-eyed astonishment, discussing among themselves. After the sight became common, however, people took no more notice than of trees felled by a storm. Although rumors were rampant and explanations varied, who these corpses were and what had happened to them soon became an open secret. People quickly turned away at the sight of the corpses, because the weather was hot and the stench sickening, and because they had a faint inkling that the day might come when they themselves must kill or be killed. Some itched for the opportunity, while others lived in dread of that day.
Here in Daojiang Town, people encountered the same problem as at the Shuangpai Reservoir, as some of the bodies became stranded among the town’s piers, wharfs, and culverts, an offense to the senses and public health. The Jiefang Neighborhood Committee, located along the river, bore the brunt of a practical issue that had to be addressed. But it was more difficult in the county town to recruit black-element offspring as had been done at the reservoir, so the neighborhood committee was obliged to hire a mentally ill man to handle the cleaning work. His task was even simpler than that at the reservoir; he need only push stranded corpses back into the water with a bamboo pole and allow the current to carry them out of town. Many of Daojiang’s elderly still remember this man, though his name is long forgotten; he was called the Black Lunatic. His age, impossible to ascertain, appeared to be somewhere between 30 and 50. Dark and thin, with a stubbly beard, he wore only a pair of ragged pants of a murky blue-black color and a shabby coir hat hanging down his back. All day he carried his bamboo pole along the river bank, pushing corpses into the current. It was said that the Black Lunatic was a “peach blossom manic” who favored female corpses. Some young scamps enjoyed teasing him by spotting a male corpse but telling him it was female. The Black Lunatic would run off to deal with it, and upon learning the truth, he’d raise his pole and scold the naughty boys, who by then would be doubled-up with laughter.
With classes suspended and adults all caught up in the Cultural Revolution, packs of untended children ran wild in the streets day and night. They liked to run up to the watchtower on the city wall and gaze out on the Xiaoshui and Lianxi Rivers to see who could spy the most floating corpses.
“One, two, three, four … I see seven,” said one child.
“No, there’s eight,” another argued.
Two of the Xiaoshui’s most notable sandbars could be seen from Daojiang’s Kou Gong Watchtower. One of Daoxian’s great historic sites, the watchtower had been built during the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127) by Kou Zhun, a respected prime minster, after he was demoted to the position of a deputy commissioner of Daozhou, a larger administrative region of that time. Back then, the watchtower had been adorned with a placard personally inscribed by Kou Zhun with the words “Peaceful Prospect,” but the placard had been destroyed by Red Guards when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966. As the corpses floated past a sandbar, it was possible to determine that the boy who’d guessed eight was correct, because one female corpse carried a child’s body on her back.
Those boys are now grown, and remembering those times is like living in a dream.
These little vignettes hardly seem worth mentioning against the backdrop of Daoxian’s Cultural Revolution massacre. I’ve given them space in this narrative as examples of the recollections passed along to me by local people who greatly assisted me when I first began looking into the Daoxian massacre in 1986. In particular, it would have been all but impossible for me to make contact with surviving family members of the massacre’s victims without others acting as intermediaries. They felt that the Daoxian massacre was a disgrace not only to the people of their county, but also to the Chinese people as a whole, and that it must be written about so that all could reflect on its lessons.
It was, in fact, such local outrage that eventually brought the Daoxian atrocities to the attention of officials in the central government. This information was relayed in petitions that the families of victims submitted to the central government in hopes of redress. China’s petitioning system has existed for centuries as an alternative means for ordinary citizens to obtain the justice deprived them in more-institutional settings. It is a last-ditch and often-unsuccessful appeal to officials who may be far enough removed from the matter to give it an objective hearing. In the case of the Daoxian massacre, petitions of this sort spurred China’s top officials into appointing the Task Force that eventually investigated the incident.
I read some of these petitions before I went to Daoxian to report on the Task Force’s investigations, and they gave me a sense of the terror that shrouded Daoxian’s towns and villages at the time. Here are some scenarios depicted in those petitions:
Rumors abounded of “class enemies” organizing “black killing squads” that would “organize in August, rebel in September, and carry out a massacre in September,” “killing first Party members, then cadres, then half of the poor and lower-middle peasants, so the landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, and bad elements can eat their fill.” These lies were not mere back-alley rumormongering but were transmitted through official or semiofficial channels or through Chinese Communist Party (CCP) meetings, cadre meetings, militia rallies, and mass rallies.
The streets were flooded with “highest-level directives” exhorting people to “sharpen our knives as the enemies are sharpening theirs,” and ubiquitous posters called for “exterminating the seven black categories and keeping China eternally red” while reporting killings by the Supreme People’s Court of the Poor and Lower-Middle Peasants.
Militia checkpoints and sentry posts were set up along blockaded highways, in shady mountain villages, along wave-lapped ferry piers, in fields crisscrossed with footpaths, and at bus stations, wherever people came and went. Militiamen wearing red armbands and carrying rifles, hunting guns, or homemade weapons interrogated passersby day and night. At the slightest movement, they would grip their sabers or cock their rifles and call out, “What’s going on?” or “What element?,” then check travel permits, carry out body searches, and interrogate. At the slightest suspicion or hesitation, they would tie up and grill the suspect, and failure to give a good accounting could be fatal.
In one instance, a secondary-school student named Yang Yuekun, whose home village was part of Dapingling Commune, was coming home for the summer school break when he was interrogated by militiamen as he passed by Xingqiao Commune. As elsewhere during the Cultural Revolution, Daoxian hosted two opposing “rebel factions” known as the Revolutionary Alliance and the Red Alliance. When a phone call to his commune raised suspicions that Yang Yuekun was a “spy” for the opposing Revolutionary Alliance, he was escorted to his production brigade to be executed with other black elements. Before his execution, Yang cried out, “Long live Chairman Mao! Long live the Communist Party!,” at which his eyes were gouged out and his tongue sliced off, and the executioner stabbed Yang Yuekun 16 times with horrendous brutality. The Task Force subsequently categorized Yang Yuekun’s case as revenge for an incident back in 1963, when Yang’s father had criticized the local CCP secretary and led to his dismissal. This turned out to be a common pattern during the Daoxian killings.
In another case I read about, Jiang Xiaochu, a 22-year-old student of mechanics at Hunan University, made the fatal error of deciding to avoid the Cultural Revolution turmoil in Changsha by returning to his home in the Huangtuba production brigade of Daoxian’s Shenzhangtang Commune.
Jiang Xiaochu’s father, Jiang Xun, had graduated from Hunan University in 1942 with a degree in history and had been teaching ever since then. Many years later, a leader of the county’s education bureau described Jiang Xun as “an upright and diligent man who made an indelible contribution to Daoxian’s education efforts.” But back in 1964, during the Socialist Education movement (also known as the Four Cleanups campaign),2 Jiang Xun’s family background caused him to be labeled an “alien-class element who had infiltrated the party.” He was stripped of his CCP membership and dismissed from his job, and he and his wife were sent back to his home village, Huangtuba.
Aware of his “class enemy” status, Jiang Xun was prepared to remold himself by working diligently and without complaint, and he instructed his wife and children to do likewise, hoping that good behavior would win them a promising future. And indeed, the family made a positive impression on the other villagers in the two years following their return.
The next day, the village held a meeting, and Jiang Xun and his second son, Jiang Xiaozhung, along with a dozen or so other “landlords and rich peasants” and their offspring, were rounded up and locked in the brigade headquarters until they could be executed. When Jiang Xiaochu learned what had happened, he dashed off to the headquarters, hoping to persuade the irrational grassroots cadres with Mao Zedong Thought, only to be locked up as well.
At midnight that night, Jiang Xiaochu and his younger brother were bound hand and foot and taken to the Jiujing River, where they were shot and stabbed and then kicked into the river, sending scarlet ripples downstream. The next day, Jiang Xun and the other black elements were divided into batches for execution; in a little mountain village of just over 100 households, 15 people were killed. Jiang Xiaochu’s mother and younger sister were gang-raped by the executioners. The devastated women later fled to Xinjiang, where they somehow managed to survive.
Yet another petition describing the murder of Xiong Yunyou, a medic at the county’s Shouyan District Public Health Clinic, showed how arbitrary killing became in Daoxian.
Xiong Yunyou, born in 1930, was from an upper-middle peasant family. A native of Lianghekou Village in Daoxian’s Cenjiangdu Township, he was a secondary-school graduate who joined the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in 1950, serving as an educator and political instructor. Xiong wanted to marry a young woman from his home village named Wu Xiuqin, but at that time, the prospective spouses of military personnel had to be vetted, and since Wu Xiuqin had an “overseas connection” (her father was in Hong Kong), permission to marry was withheld. Xiong Yunyou was insistent, however, and finally CCP officials told him, “If you must have her, you’ll have to be demobilized.” That’s how Xiong ended up back in his native village in Daoxian.
After returning to Daoxian and marrying Wu Xiuqin in 1962, Xiong Yunyou began working at the Veterans’ Convalescent Hospital and then became a medic in the Shouyan District Public Health Clinic in 1964. The couple had just had their third son in July 1967, and Xiong Yunyou was killed on the way back from visiting his wife and baby on August 31, 1967. Although killings had become rampant in Daoxian by then, Xiong wasn’t a member of any “black category,” nor had he taken part in any rebel faction organizations, so he never expected to be killed. But when he was stopped at a militia blockade and was found not to be carrying identification, the militiamen suspected him of being a black element and took him to their headquarters in Yingjiang for further interrogation.
As luck would have it, just that morning the commander of Shouyan Commune People’s Armed Forces Department (PAFD), Zhou Yuanbing, and several cadres had come to Yingjiang out of concern over the direction the Cultural Revolution was taking in Daoxian. Shaoyan District public-security deputy Chen Zhixi3 was also there, and Chen told Zhou and the others, “Xiong Yunyou has been captured, and comrades from the clinic tell me this fellow has been AWOL for three days. He must have run off to the high school. He’s no good and should be shot.” Daoxian’s No. 2 High School had become the headquarters of the local Revolutionary Alliance, and Chen Zhixi suspected Xiong of being on a secret mission. The leaders of the Red Alliance at Yingjiang decided that the militia should execute Xiong Yunyou while escorting him back to Shouyan.
That afternoon, Chen Zhixi called in the Shouyan militia platoon leader, Tang Zu, and told him to have militia escort Xiong Yunyou to Donglingjiao. “We’ll go ahead and wait for them there. Once they arrive, we’ll decide how to deal with him.” But when the militia escort headed by deputy platoon leader He Wanxi arrived with Xiong Yunyou at Donglingjiao, Chen was nowhere to be found, so they proceeded to Shouyan.
As they passed by the Tangfu production brigade, they spied commune PAFD head Zhou Yuanbing resting and eating watermelon with production brigade leader He Shenghong and other cadres under a large tree by the well. He Shenghong asked why the men hadn’t killed Xiong Yunyou at Donglingjiao: “I order you to find a place up ahead to kill him.” He Wangxi found a quiet place about 250 meters off, and since he wasn’t carrying a gun, he motioned for one of the militiamen, Yi Zhichang, to shoot Xiong Yunyou in the back.
Although Yi Zhichang claimed to be a demobilized veteran, he had never killed anyone, and trembling with fear, he managed to miss, even at such close range. Alerted by the gunfire, Xiong Yunyou ran for his life, quick as a rabbit even with his hands tied, and the militiamen gave chase, gasping with their effort. He Wangxi impatiently grabbed the gun from Yi Zhichang and fired at Xiong Yunyou. His aim was true; Xiong fell to the ground, twisted a few times and was still.
After reading about these killings, some readers may ask: weren’t the main targets of the Daoxian killings supposed to be black elements and their offspring? It appears that these examples don’t qualify. Why is that?
Trying to understand this bloody historical episode nearly 20 years later required courage and conscience, but also timing and opportunity. History had been waiting for our government and historians to provide clear answers to our people, our society, and future generations; even now, decades later, our society maintains a profound silence, as if nothing ever happened, or as if it were all part of some remote and mythic past.
In Daoxian, however, people still remember. People told us how in the town of Daojiang, while not so badly affected as the rural areas, rumors spread like wildfire that the Red Alliance wanted to wash the streets with blood. People going out to the street stalls to buy their daily necessities were confronted with big-character posters, and a gust of wind stirring up a clump of litter or the clank of an upset pail was enough to send people yelling and scurrying in all directions like scared rats. People referred to the phenomenon as “mental dust storms,” and these occurred almost daily in Daojiang, where people’s nerves were stretched to the breaking point. Those with bad family backgrounds, and especially those who belonged to one of the 21 categories,4 never knew which day would see their heads tumbling to the ground. Every day at dusk, Daojiang became a ghost town. Some neurotics found it impossible to sleep at night, any sound outside their homes leaving them wide-eyed until dawn.
The owner of a small restaurant told us: “At that time, even though I’d never broken a single law and had never taken part in activities organized by any faction, I was scared out of my wits, never knowing if I’d live to see another day. Back then, there was no way to defend yourself against what was going on.”
The people of Daoxian, accustomed to drinking cool, clear river water, no longer dared use the water polluted by corpses. The county town’s five wells suddenly became tremendously precious. Every day at dawn, long lines formed at the Anjia well next to the county militia headquarters and the Qijia well on Wuxing Street, and quarrels were frequent.
This was the case in neighboring Shuangpai County as well. My friend Yang who worked at the Shuangpai Reservoir told me: “That year, the reservoir’s fish were especially fat and numerous. Every morning we’d find fish weighing more than 5 kilos floating belly-up in the water, having died from gorging on human flesh. No one scooped them out or dared to eat them, but you couldn’t avoid seeing them.”
Daoxian was famous for its tofu, and most of the county town’s tofu shops were located along the river for easy access to water. But who would eat tofu made with water that had carried corpses? And there wasn’t enough well water for basic consumption, much less for making tofu. The tofu makers switched to a recipe for rice tofu that used less water, but even so, when the tofu makers took their trade to the streets with cries of “Well-water rice tofu!,” there were few takers.
Big-character posters went up exhorting “Drink river water for the revolution!,” and some brave revolutionaries publicly demonstrated their own willingness to drink the river water.
Meanwhile, the Xiaoshui River, which had nurtured generations of Hunan’s sons and daughters, sorrowfully licked her wounds and flowed silently through the Daozhou basin like an enormous question mark.
These are the images described by eyewitnesses. At that time, they couldn’t understand the enormous historical implications contained in these scattered images, much less realize the full truth. Even now, aware of the implications, they still have no way of knowing the whole truth.
The tragedy of China is that experience has accustomed our people to disaster and bloodshed, and even to apathy and forgetfulness.
Similar massacres and other types of large-scale death have occurred throughout Chinese history, and as recently as the Three Years of Hardship in 1959–1961,5 more than 34,000 people died of starvation or illness in Daoxian—7.5 times the number that were killed during the Cultural Revolution. It is unprecedented, however, to carry out such large-scale, brutal slaughter of innocent people in a time of peace, as in the case of the Daoxian killings. It’s not death that’s the issue, but how it occurred and for what reason.
One comrade assigned to the Task Force told us of an incident in spring 1985, when he was questioning a killer about his motives. The killer replied in a righteous tone of voice, “They were class enemies. If we didn’t kill them, we would have suffered from the revival of capitalism.” Another Task Force investigator was dumbstruck when a malefactor replied even more simply, “The higher-ups told me to kill, and I killed; if someone told me to kill you now, I would do it, too!”
I wonder what China’s leaders today would think at hearing these words.
Any incident can be said to have its reasons and historical background at the time it occurs, and I’m in no position to analyze and explore each and every factor. I only hope to pull back the thick veil of history and let the world see the basic truth. We know that the government never welcomes the exposure of national wounds long enveloped in the fog of history, and that some “patriotic” citizens consider it “harmful” to the national image of an ancient country with a long history. For example, a leader in the Daoxian CCP committee who had no involvement whatsoever in the killings still felt that “the best way to deal with this matter is to let it gradually fade with time.” But in truth, the greatest sorrow for any people is not disaster and hardship, but rather spiritual castration and psychic fracture. Just as wounds left covered will fester and breed further misfortune, attempts to whitewash the historical calamities of millions of people will foment even-greater historical calamity. As George Santayana said, those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.