Although not religious, I believe some invisible and mysterious hand predestined my connection with the Daoxian Cultural Revolution killings. The first sign of this mysterious hand came at the end of 1967, just months after the slaughter and nearly 20 years before I undertook my reporting assignment in Daoxian. At that time, I was a high-school student in Changsha, and in what proved to be a vain attempt to avoid being sent to the countryside, I accompanied my elder cousin (a former “educated youth” who had been sent down in 1964 to Jiangyong County, next to Daoxian) and a few others who were returning to their second home to “seize revolution and push production.” As we passed through Daoxian, my cousin and I got off the bus to meet up with those other friends.
In my recollection, the county town of Daojiang was only about one-tenth of its current size. It had a desolate atmosphere, its granite city wall rimmed with irregular growths of trees and vines and an arc of clear, blue water marked where the Xiaoshui and Lianxi Rivers met at the town’s southwest border and flowed southeast toward the city’s east gate. Standing on the city wall, one could see, beyond Daoxian’s No. 2 High School, the 135-meter Shuinan pontoon bridge that connected Daoxian with Ningyuan and Lanshan. The town of Daojiang itself had probably fewer than 20 streets lined with green-tiled, two-story wooden structures. Most of the buildings had balconies, making the already narrow streets even more claustrophobic, and many had their windows, and even some doors, partially bricked up, giving them a lopsided appearance. Most of the roads, 3 to 4 meters wide, were cobbled with river pebbles, which gave them the local nickname of “corn roads.”
The town had few pedestrians and even fewer shops. In front of the single long-distance bus stop was a pond, next to which a shack constructed from tree branches served as a restaurant—I think it was called the Red Star Cafe—and that’s where we ate lunch. Inside the crude structure were several eight-person tables with benches for seating, and the smoke-blackened walls carried gaudy images of the “Great Leader” Chairman Mao, along with the latest “highest directives” and slogans along the lines of “Swear to pursue the Proletarian Cultural Revolution to the end.” One I remember with particular clarity: “If the enemy refuses to surrender, he must be destroyed!”
We ordered a few dishes, warmed a bottle of rice wine, and sat down to eat. The stewed fresh fish, incredibly cheap and in an amazingly large serving, had a delicacy and freshness that kept our chopsticks in constant motion. Locals at the next table stared incredulously as we wolfed down the fish and its broth. (Fortunately we didn’t understand the implications of this gaze, or we might have vomited up our insides along with the food.) We examined ourselves and each other without finding anything amiss, and I thought disdainfully, You hicks, all we’re doing is eating!
After we’d eaten and drunk our fill, I suggested a stroll through Daojiang Town. This was the first time I’d gone to the countryside or to a distant town, and everything was novel to me. My cousin and the others weren’t interested, so I went off on my own while they waited at the bus station. The main sound and fury of the Cultural Revolution had passed by then, and its “smashing of the four olds”1 and big-character posters were no longer in fashion, although their traces were detectable in the ruined walls, memorial archways, stele inscriptions, and wall towers of the old city. The inscribed placard in the Kou Gong Tower had been destroyed by then, and a rusty lock secured the tower’s moldering door, but from the wall I could see the shimmering river and its distant tree-covered sandbars. Climbing down, I detoured around a smashed memorial arch and reached the riverbank through an archway in the city wall. At the north end of the Shuinan pontoon bridge, clear water beat against jagged rock, and although the granite pagodas at the end of the bridge had been knocked down, the scene was still heart-achingly beautiful. Walking back from the bridge, I was shocked to find posted next to the city wall archway a notice by the “Supreme People’s Court of the Poor and Lower-Middle Peasants.” The succinct notice, written in a fine hand, went something like this:
An investigation of reactionary landlords XXX, XXX, XXX … has found them guilty of heinous crimes including persistent reactionary standpoints, score settling, and resistance to remolding and poor work effort; public wrath demands their execution. Following a decision by the Supreme People’s Court of the Poor and Lower-Middle Peasants, they are sentenced to death, effective immediately.
The Supreme People’s Court of the Poor and Lower-Middle Peasants of the XX Production Brigade
Head Judge: XXX
Deputy Head Judge: XXX
[Date]
I remember with particular clarity that each of the names of those sentenced to death had been crossed out with a brush dipped in red ink.2
My heart began thundering in spite of myself, my scrotum shriveling into a tight little ball as my scalp tingled. I read the notice once more to make sure I hadn’t misread or misconstrued it. Although I’d long become inured to the many fantastical oddities emerging from the Cultural Revolution, this notice and this “court” took me completely by surprise. I wondered if it might simply be some malicious prank, or at most a threat.
Upon returning to the bus stop, I immediately told my cousin and the others of my discovery and was surprised by their nonchalance. My cousin said, “What’s so strange about that? It wasn’t only here that people were killed. They were killed where we were, too [i.e., in Jiangyong], but it wasn’t quite as bad as it was here.” His friends who had been sent to Daoxian’s villages had even more knowing expressions on their faces: “That’s nothing. Lots worse things went on. In our village, they tied people together and blew them up with dynamite. Flesh and bone flew all over the place. The villagers called it ‘the Celestial Maiden scattering flowers.’ ”3 But when I asked why these people were killed, they couldn’t come up with a reason. By the time of the killings, they had returned to their homes in Changsha to carry out revolution, and all they knew was what others had told them, which was that black elements had been killed and entire families had been massacred, even suckling infants. Heads had rolled and blood had flowed in rivers.
After leaving Daoxian and arriving in Jiangyong, I looked up an educated youth nicknamed Karl Liu, who was notable for rooting himself in the villages to “grasp revolution and promote production.” As someone well versed in Marxist-Leninist ideology, he could be expected to have a good knowledge and understanding of the Daoxian killings. Karl Liu said, “This was the inevitable result of the intensification of class struggle,” and as he went on I became only more bewildered.
According to Karl Liu, “The ‘killing wind’ in Daoxian arose because a small minority of black elements took advantage of the Great Cultural Revolution to establish reactionary organizations such as ‘black killing squads’ to kill poor and lower-middle peasants, but they were discovered, and the poor peasants turned around and killed them. But then things got out of control, and that’s what led to the indiscriminate killing.”
Liu’s explanation didn’t stand up under even the simplest follow-up questioning. I asked, “How do you know all this?” He replied, “I heard it from the poor and lower-middle peasants in our production team.”4
I later learned that this was the favorite explanation Daoxian officials gave for the killings. A slightly later version, still widely believed today, had it that the Daoxian killings were spurred by an ultra-Leftist ideological trend and by killings in Guangxi.5 This was also a complete fabrication; the truth was exactly the opposite, as I will later discuss in detail. What I found most chilling was that someone such as Karl Liu, who could not be regarded as ignorant or gullible, would express not the slightest suspicion toward such obvious fabrications. Even so, it took nearly 20 years for me to come any closer to the truth.
A few months after my first visit to Daoxian, in early 1968, I left Jiangyong and returned to Changsha to “resume my studies and make revolution.” Soon after that, I was sent to Leiyang, Hunan Province, as part of the mass campaign to send educated youth “up the mountains and down to the villages.” The events in Daoxian receded from my mind as I spent eight years being “reeducated” by the peasants. Finally, as the great tide of rusticated youth returned to the cities, I used the pretext of “health problems” to return to Changsha. I passed the college entrance exam to attend university, and after graduation I was assigned work in a school-run factory. Preferring my creative pastime, I eventually resigned and became a writer, and by 1986 I had gained a following. My life course seemed to have chosen me, and part of it was the opportunity to go to Daoxian to report on the Cultural Revolution killings.
This life-changing opportunity was the result of efforts by a few senior officials to get to the bottom of the Daoxian atrocities. According to a source in the Lingling prefectural Chinese Communist Party (CCP) committee, on December 22, 1980, just before Hu Yaobang became general party secretary, he went on an inspection tour of the five south-central provinces and made a point of stopping in Hunan’s Lingling Prefecture to hear a report from the prefectural CCP committee on the killings in Daoxian. While listening, Hu Yaobang fidgeted and grimaced, popped up and down in his seat, and finally demanded, “What hasn’t yet been dealt with must be taken care of, especially the arrangements for the victims.” But discretion was required. As Hu Yaobang put it, “We can’t let this matter become public. Once it’s been taken care of, leave it alone and let it gradually fade away.”
In spring 1982, Jiang Hua, then president of the Supreme People’s Court, went back to his home village in Jianghua County, Lingling Prefecture, for a family visit. When the prefectural CCP secretary reported to him on the random killing of innocent people in Daoxian during the Cultural Revolution, Jiang Hua abruptly asked, “How many monks do you have in Daoxian?” The prefectural CCP secretary expected only a serious question from a senior cadre, so he answered truthfully, “I haven’t heard of any monks in Daoxian.” “No monks?” Jiang Hua demanded, his voice rising an octave, “Yet killing so many so lawlessly!” He was making a pun on the word “lawless,” wufa, which sounded the same as the term for “no hair,” a defining characteristic of monks. Jiang Hua’s own cousins had been among the innocents killed in this massacre.
Eventually the indignation of such officials, and a brief period of openness and reform in the government, let to the establishment in May 1984 of the special Task Force to investigate the Daoxian massacre. The Task Force carried out all its work behind closed doors, and its findings were never made public.
That was not the original intention, however. In 1986, just as I was making my name as a writer, there was still an official desire to understand and learn from the tragic events in Daoxian.
At that time, a certain Hunan literary magazine was influential throughout China, and its editors had the ambition of raising it to a higher level and making it more relevant to the life of China’s people. With historical reportage popular at that time, the editors decided to publish a series of groundbreaking reports on actual events, one of which was the Cultural Revolution killings in Daoxian. The honor of that assignment was entrusted to me. Through internal information and the grapevine, we’d learned that Lingling Prefecture had organized a huge task force under the central and provincial leadership to investigate and deal with the Daoxian killings, and that the task force had investigated the cause and effect of the killings, settled matters with the survivors of the victims, and dealt appropriately with those whose crimes and errors were responsible for the killings. In official parlance, the Task Force had “sorted out issues of right and wrong, absorbed important historical lessons, and enhanced the concepts of law and discipline”; 85 percent of the victims’ families had reportedly expressed satisfaction with the results, and most of the investigated individuals had admitted their wrongdoing. The diffusion of rancor between cadres and the public had united hearts and minds and set the groundwork for the Four Modernizations,6 and the Central Committee had expressed its satisfaction in a four-phrase assessment: “Attention to leadership, clear-cut policies, steady pace, and competent measures.”
One of the magazine’s editors said: “We hope this article will comprehensively and realistically reflect the killing incident, while also emphasizing the great effort and enormous achievements of the Lingling prefectural party committee and its Task Force in thoroughly negating the Cultural Revolution, liberating thought, and bringing order out of chaos under the spiritual guidance of the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee. We hope you can come up with something as powerful as the article on the Tangshan earthquake.”7
Taking the hint, I replied, “I understand. I’ll be forward looking and will thoroughly cover the healing process.”
That editor was normally a very stern individual, but at this point he allowed a little humor to creep in with a well-known quote by former president Liu Shaoqi: “Yes, problems must be discussed thoroughly, and accomplishments must be discussed adequately.”8
That’s how I arrived in Lingling Prefecture (also known as Yongzhou) to embark on the most important assignment of my journalistic career, the Cultural Revolution killings in Daoxian. It never occurred to me that this trip would completely change the course of my life.
Through friends, I first arranged interviews with some members of Lingling Prefecture’s “Task Force to Deal with the Aftermath of the Cultural Revolution Killings” (referred to hereafter as the Task Force). The Task Force, established in May 1984, carried out all its work behind closed doors and never made its findings public. Our interviews were subsequently referred to as “secret,” but in fact we received help and support from leaders in Hunan Province and Lingling Prefecture; our inquiries were not secret, but it could be said that they were not open. Without the help and support of those officials, we could never have gained access to so much confidential data or carried out so many sensitive interviews. We read those records, data, and investigative reports trembling and with tear-drenched faces. It was as if we stood disoriented in the middle of a desert with the wailing of thousands of people assaulting our ears while gales of wind sent human body parts dancing through the air around us. The horrifying details will come later, but here I will extract some figures from the reports to summarize this killing campaign.
The Daoxian killings occurred over the course of 66 days, from August 13 to October 17, 1967, affecting all of the county’s 10 districts and 37 communes, 468 (93.4 percent) of its rural production brigades, 1,590 of its production teams, and 2,778 of its households (2.7 percent of the total), with 117 households completely wiped out. A total of 4,519 people died, composing 1.17 percent of the county’s population at the time. Of these, 4,193 were killed and 326 were driven to suicide. In terms of class breakdown, 1,830 (41.4 percent) of the victims were classified as black elements, 2,207 (49.9 percent) were classified as the offspring of black elements, 352 (8 percent) were poor or lower-middle peasants, and 31 (0.7 percent) belonged to other categories. In terms of occupation, 4,208 (95.2 percent) of the victims were peasants, 17 (0.38 percent) were state cadres, 141 (3.19 percent) were educators, 20 (0.45 percent) were health workers, and 34 (0.77 percent) were workers. Those killed included eight CCP members and 13 Communist Youth League members. Following the killings, family members of the victims were also targeted through the confiscation of assets of 2,423 households, the occupation or destruction of 3,781 homes, and the seizing of 53,000 household implements, while 629 people were forced to flee the county and 635 elderly or children were left without family support.
Under the influence of Daoxian, the other 10 counties and cities of Lingling Prefecture also experienced killings to a greater or lesser degree. The entire prefecture (including Daoxian) recorded 9,093 unnatural deaths during the Cultural Revolution, of which 7,696 were killings and 1,397 were suicides, and another 2,146 people were gravely wounded or crippled. In terms of class breakdown, 3,576 of the dead were black elements (including Rightists), 4,057 were the offspring of black elements, 1,049 were poor or lower-middle peasants (some of whom had varying degrees of “historical problems,” and some of whom were killed in revenge for their killing of others), and 411 belonged to other categories. The victims included 826 minors, and ranged in age from 78 years to 10 days old.
Some 15,050 people were directly implicated as organizers, supervisors, or those who actually did the killing. In Daoxian, for example, it was initially ascertained that 426 state cadres were directly involved, composing 22.6 percent of all the county’s cadres (and the majority of the county-level leadership), along with 4,665 (66.5 percent) of the county’s rural grassroots cadres, and 3,880 (36.9 percent) of its CCP members.
There were ten basic killing methods:
(1)shooting (with rifles, shotguns, fowling pieces, blunderbusses, etc.);
(2)stabbing (with sabers, broadswords, hatchets, spears, etc.);
(3)drowning (in ponds or in rivers, known as “releasing a raft”);
(4)explosion (known as “flying the homemade airplane” or the more evocative “Celestial Maiden scattering flowers”);
(5)pushing over a cliff (or into an abandoned mining pit);
(6)live burial (usually in abandoned kilns previously used for roasting sweet potatoes);
(7)beating (with cudgels, hoes, rakes, and shoulder poles);
(8)hanging or strangling;
(9)burning (including smoke inhalation);
(10)other methods.
I should note that when I was unable to publish the initial draft of this book, I compiled the above data for inclusion in someone else’s book,9 which brought the Daoxian killings to the public eye for the first time. At that time, I gave the 10th killing method as “dropping,” believing that other killing methods would fall under one of the listed categories. During later supplementary interviews, a source told me of a production team that tied up a “rich peasant,” dropped him into an abandoned limekiln, and covered him with quicklime, then poured on water, which ignited the quicklime and incinerated him. This method was known as “lime-roasted egg.” I had difficulty believing this method actually existed, since lime is hard to come by, yet it is essential for neutralizing Daoxian’s acidic red earth and for construction, and using it for killing would be wasteful. But my source contacted me after I returned to Changsha and said he’d found witnesses who could confirm the report: “Next time you come to Daoxian, I’ll take you to see them.” That’s how I learned that Wanjiazhuang Commune’s Ganzhepu production brigade (Shangdong Village) used this method to dispatch 14 victims. The victims were lowered into two abandoned pits in a stone quarry near the village, after which 500 kilos or so of quicklime was poured in. Witnesses say the people in the pits screamed pleas for a quick death as their skin blackened and rotted from their bones. I was simply flabbergasted.
That’s why I changed the 10th method to “other,” to ensure that even the most inconceivable killing method would not be left out.
All the evil of which humans are capable was displayed to shocking effect in this mass frenzy. What was it that stripped these killers of all conscience and made them so determined to eliminate their victims? With few exceptions, no prior ill will existed between killers and victims, and some were even distant relations. To this day, the killers have been unable to claim any threat presented to them by the victims, or any improvement to their own lives resulting from these deaths. The vast majority of the dead had been honest, law-abiding citizens who minded their own business and worked hard to maintain the most basic standard of living.
The investigation by the Task Force found:
(1)Among the more than 9,000 people killed, scarcely anyone had engaged in any form of counterrevolutionary activity, and very few even resisted or dared protest their innocence.
(2)The seven major “counterrevolutionary organizations” that Daoxian claimed to have uncovered during that time all were found to be bogus.
(3)Being a black element was reason enough to be killed; if you weren’t a black element, you could be labeled as one or as a collaborator and then be killed.
After gaining this basic understanding of what had occurred, I devised a work plan with my reporting partner, Zhang Minghong, who at that time was the Lingling station chief for Hunan Provincial Radio and Television. A native of Ningyuan County, Zhang was a journalist with a genuine grassroots background. At his home we discussed and formulated a rough plan for our reporting and set three rules of conduct for ourselves: (1) to maintain complete objectivity and fairness during our reporting, not to make any false representations or act against our convictions, and not to be swayed by personal feelings; (2) to listen carefully and not ask leading questions or express our own viewpoints, and not to involve ourselves in any specific case; (3) if during our reporting any conflict or disagreement arose between us, we should not argue or become divided but should resolve the matter after our reporting was completed.
Looking back, I can see that our ability to carry out our reporting without a hitch was dependent on these three rules, and it was my careless violation of them that caused the serious obstruction we later encountered.
We set off for Daoxian by bus early the next morning, without any specific local interview targets or any work unit or individual to receive us. Minghong said jokingly, “We’re going fishing in choppy waters.”
The weather was gray and drizzly, and my attempts to recall the details of my visit 19 years earlier were just as clouded. I must have traveled the same road twice before, but it seemed to become only increasingly unfamiliar and mysterious. The precipitous, twisting slopes of Shuangpei Mountain made my head spin, while a misty rain made me feel that the bus was carrying us deep into a treacherous lair of no return. Yet, as the bus descended through the folds of Zijin Mountain and passed the Huyan Dam, the vista opened onto a gradually leveling and expansive landscape. A road sign appeared in bold, black script: Daoxian. At that moment, the clouds parted to reveal a brilliant sun. Minghong told me this was the southern Hunan microclimate: rain amid sunlight and sun amid the rain. The bus barreled on toward the county town, through alternating bands of golden ripening paddy and newly planted green sprouts enclosed by screen-like mountain ranges.
Upon disembarking from the long-distance bus, I found Daojiang completely transformed from the place that had been lingering in my dreams, as if the past 19 years had wiped clean the stains and scars of that time. The pond and snack shop had been replaced by a market where multicolored garments rippled in the wind. Across the road stood the Daoxian No. 2 High School, which during the Cultural Revolution had served as headquarters for the Revolutionary Alliance and had been the locus of Daoxian’s three main incidents of mass armed conflict.
A concrete bridge replaced the steel cable bridge that had once spanned the Xiaoshui. Wide, straight concrete streets were lined with shops and crowded with pedestrians. The bus station restaurant’s walls were full of information on the latest merchandise, and the fruit store wall offered an advertisement for a “secret family recipe curing impotence and flaccidness.” A red banner proclaiming a 20 percent discount emblazoned a nearby store, while on a roadside billboard, a beautiful woman called for striking hard against the evil people and deeds that sabotaged family planning. The county radio station broadcasted tips on preventing sunstroke in the fields, and the cosmetic uses of loofah gourds.
The cobblestone streets, city wall, and pontoon bridge that had so deeply impressed themselves in my memory had subtly receded into the background, and without making an effort to seek them out, I would easily have missed them.
The coastal road ran along the Xiaoshui for about a kilometer before crossing a concrete bridge that took us to the county CCP committee hostel. Behind the hostel’s enclosing wall, a pre-revolutionary screen wall commemorated the Chinese Workers and Peasants Red Sixth Army stopping in Daoxian in August and September 1934 while heading westward for the Long March: “China for the underprivileged: Long live the Chinese worker and peasant revolution!”
Along the way, I looked for anything that might make the town or its people stand out, only to find Daoxian indistinguishable from any other county in the People’s Republic of China. The Cultural Revolution killings had led other people (including myself) to wrongly view Daoxian as a closed-off, backward, unruly place full of barbarians who attacked each other at the drop of a hat. Before my departure, my wife had been sleepless with worry and had repeatedly urged me to mind my safety and remember that our children were still young, while an old comrade who supported my reporting project wrote a letter for me to take to a former subordinate working in Lingling Prefecture, asking him to guarantee my safety. Even people in Lingling Prefecture who had never been to Daoxian shared this excessive apprehension. One comrade from the Task Force later told us that he’d been so anxious about his transfer to Daoxian that he’d brought a handgun with him. It was only after his arrival that he realized the gun was an unnecessary bother, and that what he should have brought was an extra stomach; the people of Daoxian put such an emphasis on civility, friendship, and respect that they would cut off their own heads for you to sit on if necessary. We repeatedly experienced this same feeling in the course of our reporting.
That evening, under our lamps, we browsed through the Daozhou Gazetteer and other related materials to prepare for our reporting work, hoping to gain a better understanding of Daoxian’s history. The Gazetteer recorded that tribal settlements had existed here as far back as the Neolithic period. The locality had undergone many transformations and jurisdictional changes from prehistoric times through the reign of China’s first emperor, Qin Shihuang, and on through the dynasties, merging with and then splitting from other counties and known successively as Yongyang County, Yingdao County, Hongdao County, and Daozhou, finally taking its current name in the second year of the Republican Era, 1913.
In its 2,000-year recorded history, Daoxian had been the birthplace of the Song-dynasty scholar Zhou Dunyi (1017–1073) and the Qing-dynasty calligraphy master He Shaoji (1799–1873), among other notables. Indeed, scholars have established that the great modern writer Lu Xun and the People’s Republic of China’s first premier, Zhou Enlai, had their family roots here. In short, the county could be said to have produced more than its share of talent.
Daoxian contributed to the development of the Chu culture in the first millennium bce and then gave rise to the Baiyue culture of southern China. The legendary Emperor Shun passed through here when he toured the south. Here Kou Zhun had erected his tower, dreaming of peace, and here the Taiping Rebellion leader Hong Xiuquan had paused to issue his proclamations against the Qing in 1852.
Outside the window of our room, the county town was a vision of tranquility as the Lianxi River shimmered under a starry sky and refreshing winds surged across the basin from Mount Jiuyi. Standing in the placid moonlight, I sensed an insistent murmur beside my ear, but when I listened for it, all returned to silence.