Map 2 Communes of Shouyan District
The narrative thread of the Daoxian massacre is complex. In terms of strict chronology, it should progress from the initial killing of Zhu Mian to the prelude and then to the wider massacre, then to the August 17 “killing mobilization meeting in Qingtang District,” the “August 20 reporting meeting in Yingjiang,” and so on. This narrative organization works well initially, but further on it develops into a chaotic tangle of people and incidents. Relations of time and space make it impossible to shape a concise narrative thread for the entire incident.
The collected material shows that the origin and development of the killings proceeded in distinct and unambiguous veins within each district, with a progression from the district level to the communes, then to the production brigades of each commune, and to the individual production teams under each production brigade. It was rare for a commune to have any relation to the killings occurring in a production brigade of a different commune, for example. The killings were generally mobilized, engineered, and carried out within the various levels of the individual administrative districts. At the county level, however, the problem looks much more complex. After long consideration, I’ve decided to describe the killings as they spread through each district, in the way Uyghur maidens comb their hair into many small braids. This provides an obvious advantage, but also a drawback in that it leads to a fragmentation of the origin and development of the Daoxian killings. For this reason, I would remind the reader to pay attention to how the killings began in each district, after which the overall cause and effect of the killings become clear.
Accordingly, I will now return to Shouyan District (see Map 2), where the first victim, Zhu Mian, met his death, and describe how the killings developed there.
Shouyan District, also called District 1, included Shouyan, Tangjia, and Niulukou communes as well as Shouyan Town. It was where the Daoxian killings began, but it did not experience the greatest number of killings. According to the Task Force’s investigations, a total of 535 residents of Shouyan District were killed (including 97 suicides), and 12 households were entirely wiped out.1
Map 2 Communes of Shouyan District
Tangjia Commune experienced the greatest number of killings. The main people responsible for inciting, planning, and arranging for the killings were the commune’s deputy Chinese Communist Party (CCP) secretary, deputy commune head, public-security deputy, and the commune accountant and Red Alliance head. The first official in the entire county to explicitly order a killing was Tangjia Commune’s deputy CCP secretary, Zou Yunlong. According to a cadre from the commune’s Zhuzifu production brigade, on August 11, 1967, Zou issued the following instructions to the production brigade’s CCP secretary: “Zhuzifu’s black elements have gotten completely out of hand. Go back and arrange for cadres and commune members to attack them. Just make sure not to kill anyone on the spot—let them die slowly.”
This happened to be the same day that the district seize-and-push chief, Chen Zhixi, directed the CCP secretary of the Xiaba production brigade to “do away with Zhu Mian.” Could this have been pure coincidence? As it turned out, however, Zou Yunlong’s more sweeping directive was more difficult to implement than Chen Zhixi’s; Zou didn’t specify which individuals should be targeted, and it was difficult to calibrate beatings in such a way that targets would not be killed at the scene but would still eventually die. That’s why the first blood of the Daoxian massacre was ultimately drawn at Xiaba rather than Zhuzifu.
Although Tangjia Commune ultimately racked up the largest number of killings, during the first wave of the massacre (August 17–26, 1967), only 19 people were killed there in a cool and deliberate fashion as other localities engaged in riotous slaughter. Starting on August 28, however, more than 100 people were killed in just five days. The Task Force investigation found this was entirely related to the commune’s leaders and to a “political and legal work conference” that the Red Alliance convened in Yingjiang from August 26 to 28. I will later describe in detail the cause and effect of this meeting in relation to the second wave of killings.
During the first stage of the killings in Tangjia Commune, although Zou Yunlong and the others repeatedly tried to stir up violence and even ordered specific killings, they weren’t very forceful, and their attitude was somewhat ambivalent and even coy. However, once Zou and the other leaders came back from the county political and legal work conference in Yingjiang on August 28, it was as if they’d been given an adrenaline injection; they immediately called a “five-chiefs meeting” of all the commune’s production brigades to mobilize manpower and arrange for more killings.2 Zou Yunlong explicitly ordered: “After you return to your production brigades, carry out a careful examination and then kill a couple of troublemakers.” Red Alliance leader He Xueneng praised the Tangjia and Wenjia brigades for the speed and number of their killings, and he criticized brigades that were lagging behind: “You brigade party secretaries need to get involved and step up for revolution! If you don’t come forward under these complicated circumstances, you betray the revolution.” Public-security deputy Xie Lintong was even more specific: “I want you to kill a couple of those bad guys, the real scoundrels. A lot of landlords and rich peasants have run off to mountain lairs to become bandits. Organize militia to search the hills and suppress them where you find them—don’t haul them back, and don’t kill people at Victory Bridge—too many people pass by there, and pools of blood would be unsightly. When you kill, do it in the hills, and post guards lower down so the cat doesn’t get out of the bag.”
Killings in the commune reached a climax after that meeting.
The largest number of killings in the district occurred at the Tangjia brigade, where 50 people died (including two suicides). In the county overall, four production brigades recorded 50 or more killings, and Tangjia didn’t break into the top three,3 but it had one killer named Lei Kanggu who broke the county record with a claim to having single-handedly beheaded 36 people with a saber. The Task Force eventually ascertained that Lei actually killed only half that many, the discrepancy apparently related to the taking of “commission.” Killings were rewarded in Daoxian at the time, and the typical commission for one killing was 2 to 5 yuan, supplemented with work points and material rewards such as 10 or 15 kilos of unhusked rice. The Tangjia brigade was relatively prosperous, so the commission was at the higher end, 5 yuan per person. Lei Kanggu reportedly earned 180 yuan in commission on that one day (likely partly in the form of grain), which is more than he would normally have earned in an entire year.4
Among the victims in the Tangjia brigade was Hu Xiangxian, a 23-year-old man from a class enemy family5 described as quiet, honest, and hard-working. During the killings, the production brigade cadres said, “We don’t need to kill this one.” That should have been enough to spare Hu Xiangxian, but he had the disadvantage of a pretty wife who was also a hard worker, the kind referred to as good in the field and in bed, and this made Hu a target of envy. An unmarried poor peasant named Xiong Tiangou who had his eye on Hu’s wife insisted that Hu be “suppressed.” It was common during the Daoxian massacre for men to be killed for the sake of a woman; I found at least 40 instances in the material I collected, and the actual number was certainly much higher, given that the authorities investigated only if the woman concerned filed a complaint. What distinguished the case in the Tangjia brigade was that while Xiong Tiangou joyfully anticipated becoming a bridegroom, he unexpectedly encountered two rivals, both likewise poor peasant bachelors who wanted Hu’s wife for themselves. Xiong Tiangou subsequently said, “Those two were worse than Chiang Kai-shek. When it was time to kill landlords, they hid out in the mountains rather than risk their lives in revolution, but once it came to sharing the spoils, they ran down to steal the peaches.”6 None of the parties would back down, and when it looked like a fight would break out, Xiong stabbed the woman to death rather than provoke a conflict that would “damage class sentiment.”
Someone in the Task Force summarized 15 notable cases during the Daoxian massacre, including the mass killer Lei Kanggu in the Tangjia production brigade. We reported on most of these cases, and they will be integrated into subsequent narratives relating the districts or communes where they occurred. The truth is that all individual cases in the Daoxian massacre are at once classic and distinctive, and understanding any case in depth always brings distinctive and inherent qualities to the surface. The difficulty of such in-depth reporting was immense, however; grassroots cadres were unwilling to cooperate, killers would say only as much as they wanted to, and the families of victims were wary of us and displayed clear signs of post-traumatic stress. Some of these family members were referred to as “squealers,” and if we weren’t careful in our handling of sensitive matters, we’d be accused of “creating new chaos with the intent of intensifying conflict.” This was a source of constant vexation to me, and I felt frustrated in my attempts to get to the truth. Minghong took a wider view and said, “Don’t worry; just being allowed to do this reporting is already a major accomplishment. Don’t beat your head against a wall. Just publishing the names of the 4,000 victims would require writing down more than 10,000 characters, so why obsess over details? As long as we get the basic facts, that’s enough.” What he said made a lot of sense, and even though I had misgivings, I could only do my best to carry out my mandate.
Let’s now turn again to Simaqiao District, where the killing of Zhong Peiying’s family sparked off the massacre in the rest of the county.
After Jiang Wenjing and the others killed Zhong Peiying and her sons at Yangjia Commune, another meeting of the district’s Red Alliance leaders was held at Simaqiao on August 17. At this meeting, Zhong Peiying was transformed into the mistress of a counterrevolutionary rebellion leader, an underground secret agent of the Kuomintang, and the commander in chief of a black-element insurrection. The commune’s poor and lower-middle peasants were now on high alert against a black-element insurrection, and Jiang Wenqing’s vivid rendering of its timely discovery and suppression mesmerized the meeting’s participants, some of whom expressed regret that their own communes didn’t have villains of similar stature to battle against.
After that meeting, Dapingling and Hongtangying Communes invited Jiang Wenjing and the other Yangjia Commune leaders to come over and pass along their valuable experience on August 18 and 19.
Hongtangying Commune (now known as the Hongtangying Yao Ethnic Township) was situated in the Jiuyi mountain range in southeastern Daoxian. Its majority Yao population was highly assimilated into the dominant Han culture and was indistinguishable from their Han neighbors. Among Daoxian’s 37 communes, Hongtangying Commune covered the largest area and had the smallest population, its rugged physical environment a source of hardship to its residents. A folk song passed down to the present day explains why this locality had more bachelors than average: “Don’t marry off your daughter to the distant hills / to freeze and starve all year, / living in a wood plank thatched hut / and eating yams and corn ears.” Women were a factor, and possibly the main reason, for many of the killings that occurred in this commune.
After absorbing the “real-life revolutionary experience” of Jiang Wenjing and the others, the leader of Hongtangying Commune’s People’s Armed Forces Department (PAFD) and seize-and-push group, Lai Xinghao, called a “four chiefs” meeting for the production brigades on August 20, 1967, during which he played up the rumors passed along by Jiang Wenjing and related what had happened at Yangjia Commune’s Zhengjia brigade. He declared the formation of a Supreme People’s Court of the Poor and Lower-Middle Peasants, and said that poor and lower-middle peasants were allowed to kill any class enemies who were “acting up,” specifically directing the Honghua production brigade to “lead the commune in the struggle against the enemy.” After the meeting, a total of 43 people were killed within five days.
On August 26, Hongtangying Commune’s deputy CCP secretary, Pan Jiarui, demonstrated his revolutionary mettle by establishing ad hoc people’s militias and calling another “four chiefs” meeting, during which he criticized some brigades for “conservative thinking and tardy action” while commending the Honghua, Zhengjia, and Huangjiatang brigades for their quick action and numerous killings. Pan Jiarui then said, “Following discussion by the poor and lower-middle peasants, a couple more of the worst black elements can be killed.” The production brigades took immediate action, resulting in 47 killings that day. Some of the brigades criticized at the meetings made a special effort to catch up with the others. Another 86 people were killed in Hongtangying Commune on August 27, with Lai Xinghao and Pan Jiarui directing operations by telephone from the commune office. On August 28, Pan Jiarui and two commune cadres went to the Dongjiangyuan brigade, which was too remote to take part in the “four chiefs” meeting, and pushed the brigade to kill some of its black elements. Pan observed, “If you don’t kill a batch, won’t you waste a lot of manpower keeping them shut up in their houses?” After discussion, the brigade decided to have nine black elements killed by lepers from the nearby leprosarium.
On August 29, the situation changed somewhat; following the Red Alliance’s “politics and law cadre conference,” a telephone call came from the upper level saying there could be no more random killings, and the commune summoned all the principal production brigade cadres to an urgent meeting the next day, August 30. When the militia commander of the Dongjiangyuan production brigade telephoned the commune to confirm the time of the meeting, Pan Jiarui told him to focus on the killing instead of attending the meeting. Accordingly, the Dongjiangyuan brigade had the lepers come and kill 22 people—13 more than originally designated.
That brought the total in Hongtangying Commune to 189 deaths (including five suicides), with 133, or 70 percent, killed in just two days, August 26 and 27. The Honghua brigade led the field with 42 deaths.
One commune member, Li Boqing, became addicted to killing and repeatedly took the initiative, ultimately killing 26 people. He was probably responsible for the largest number of deaths in the entire county, given that Tangjia Commune’s Lei Kanggu exaggerated the number of people he killed. At that time, Li Boqing was 45 years old, which made him nearly elderly at a time when death at 60 was not considered at all premature. In examining the data, I found that Daoxian’s famous killers were typically around 20 years old, and it was very uncommon for a killer to be over 40 years old unless revenge, material gain, or a woman was involved. What could have led Li Boqing to become such an eager killer? After the Task Force began its work, Li Boqing was quickly arrested, and when asked to explain his motivation, he replied, “To earn more work points.” At first, this may seem absurd and hard to credit, but on further thought it makes sense. If killing became a revolutionary act that brought no blame but rather reward in the form of monetary payments, grain rations, and work points, many would be willing to do it.
Stories of Li Boqing’s killings spread far and wide, with inevitable exaggeration and embellishment. The Task Force’s official report, the content of which Li Boqing himself fully admitted to, found that Li had voluntarily pushed 24 of the brigade’s class enemies and offspring into a mine pit on the night of August 26. Then, on August 27, when escorts of three class enemy offspring from the Huangjiatang brigade asked Li for directions to the mine pit, Li led them there and pushed two of the victims into the pit himself. Li Boqing was undoubtedly rewarded for the killings in his own brigade, but was he able to collect work points for killing the two class enemies from another brigade? This casts doubt on Li Boqing’s claim that he killed people just for the work points, and leaves us with much to ponder.
During my reporting, I posed this question to local cadres: most of the production brigades at Hongtangying Commune had few killings, ranging from a minimum of one or two to twenty-odd. Why was the Honghua brigade so exceptional? One comrade involved in the aftermath work gave the following answer:
The Honghua production brigade was less than a kilometer from the commune, close enough to hear a dog bark, and its proximity meant that the production brigade’s cadres were in close contact with the commune leadership. During the “killing wind,” commune leaders Pan Jiarui, Lai Xinghao, and others established this brigade as a focal point of class struggle and repeatedly went to the brigade to supervise and encourage the killings—that’s one reason. The second reason is that the Honghua brigade had always been the commune’s most advanced, so it had to kill more people than any other brigade and take the lead in “suppressing a class enemy insurrection,” “safeguarding Chairman Mao’s proletarian line,” and “safeguarding the Red regime.” So the cadres of the Honghua brigade enthusiastically took the lead. The brigade’s CCP secretary, Chen Mingfeng, personally took the lead in killing people, and the 25-year-old poor-peasant association (PPA) chairman, Yang Longkuan, was absolutely rabid; whenever there were killings, he grabbed a fowling gun and rushed to set an example by killing people himself. The head of the brigade militia, Zou Jinggui, was also head of the commune militia, and he led militia all over to assist with the killing. He was a really vile character, not only killing people but also taking the opportunity to rape the womenfolk. With top cadres such as these leading the way, how could other cadres stand back? And once production brigade and production team cadres took the lead, how could ordinary people do nothing?
The third reason is that the Honghua production brigade killed a wider range of people. Although the killing wind is referred to as random killings, there actually were limits, but once the limits were breached, the number of people killed multiplied, from black elements to offspring to women and children. Some people killed for the sake of a woman, and in order to prevent future trouble, the woman’s family would be wiped out. The Honghua brigade killed not only class enemies, but also “capitalist roaders among poor and lower-middle peasants”; for example, someone who engaged in a sideline occupation without handing money over to the production team, or a slacker, or someone who argued with cadres. Nowadays we would consider these minor issues, but at that time, it became a matter of principle and two-line struggle, and being accused of undermining the foundations of socialism or resisting the CCP’s leadership was enough to put your head on the block! The truth is that the Honghua brigade stuck pretty close to official policy; otherwise they’d have killed double the number they did.
Even so, the number of killings increased with each batch, and apparently they had a fifth round in the works when the communes were ordered to halt the killings on August 29. That night, Lai Xinghao held a meeting of administrative cadres7 to pass on the order and separately notified all the production brigades. The Honghua brigade, being located closest to the commune, stopped all killing immediately, but the Dongjiangyuan production brigade, where Pan Jiarui was, somehow got left out, as a result of which nine more people were killed there on the morning of August 30, and a few more the next day.
Yet, what is most shocking, or perhaps most distinctive, about the Cultural Revolution killings at Hongtangying Commune is not the Honghua brigade, which recorded the most killings, or the Dongjiangyuan brigade, which pushed through a last round at the end, but rather the Huangjiatang brigade, which doesn’t stand out in any way at first glance. The killings at this production brigade were not orchestrated by commune cadres, but by a telephone operator named Deng Jiayu. It was the only instance of its kind that we heard of. A commune telephone operator was at best a contract worker for the county postal and telecommunications apparatus. What would qualify him to issue a directive to kill people, and why would anyone in the production brigade obey him?
We asked a Task Force comrade, “Did a commune leader tell Deng Jiayu to pass along this directive?”
That comrade answered, “No, he did it on his own. We initially made the same assumption you did, but after repeated inquiries, we established that not a single commune cadre had instigated his behavior; Deng was simply sitting by the telephone with nothing better to do, and when he saw that all the other brigades were killing people but nothing was happening at Huangjiatang, he telephoned the brigade and told them to get going.” Huangjiatang wasn’t on our original itinerary, but when we learned of this case, we decided to go there to find out more.
The production brigade (village) of Huangjiatang was situated in the northernmost portion of Hongtangying Commune, bordering Gongba Commune and squeezed into a saddle-shaped dip between Mao’er Mountain on its east and Fengmu Mountain on its west. Its geographical position suggested that it was the closest to Daojiang of all the commune’s production brigades, but this was belied by its inferior transport links. At that time, all of southeastern Daoxian had only one basic highway, a gravel road running from Daojiang to Tanshuiping via the Xiangyuan tin mine, and Hongtangying was linked to it by an even-cruder roadway, followed by a 7-kilometer walk along a winding mountain path. The alternative was to reach the village by ferry from Simaqiao Market. We took the highway to the village to do our reporting, and then returned by ferry.
In spite of a less-than-warm reception by the production brigade cadre, we were able to learn essentially what happened. After the Huangjiatang brigade’s CCP secretary, Zhu Yuliang, and others attended the commune mobilization meeting on August 20, they discussed the matter back at the brigade. Unable to identify any class enemies who absolutely had to be killed, they decided to simply put these individuals under “supervision and control” for the time being, and Huangjiatang continued focusing on “pushing production” instead of “seizing revolution” even after most of the other production brigades had already taken action. This came to the attention of the commune telephone operator, Deng Jiayu. Although he was not a commune leader, Deng sat all day at the switchboard listening in on the telephone calls between the commune and the various production brigades (at that time, only the most politically reliable individuals could be telephone or switchboard operators), so he knew everything about the killings throughout the commune.
Deng Jiayu later said, “I noticed that Huangjiatang hadn’t taken any action up to then, and I knew the commune would be holding a ‘compare and assess’ meeting and thought they would come under criticism, so out of the goodness of my heart, I telephoned to warn them. I never guessed they would accuse me of ordering the killings. I’m just a commune telephone operator, not even at the rank of an administrative cadre, so how could I order any killings?”
It’s hard to argue with Deng Jiayu’s logic. However, the Huangjiatang brigade’s cadres and masses gave a slightly different version of events. Zhu Zhongcheng, who was the brigade’s accountant at the time and who took the call, said:
At noon on August 25 [1967], I was working at the brigade headquarters when a phone call came from Deng Jiayu, the chairman of the commune’s “killing office.” He asked why our brigade hadn’t done anything, criticized us for holding the entire commune back, and told us to get moving. I quickly reported the call to party secretary Zhu Yuliang and brigade leader Zhu Yusheng. The production brigade held a special meeting and decided to kill five class enemies before Secretary Zhu had to attend the commune meeting. We also telephoned Chairman Deng to report it to him. The next morning, Chairman Deng telephoned again, and this time party secretary Zhu Yuliang took the call. Chairman Deng said that two class enemies (in fact, offspring) had escaped from our brigade and had been apprehended at District 1 (Gongba District), and we should send someone to fetch them. Secretary Zhu asked, once we’ve brought them back, what should we do with them? Chairman Deng said we should do away with them along the way. So those two people were also killed. After the commune meeting on August 27, the brigade still had several class enemies in custody, and we telephoned the commune and asked Chairman Deng for instructions on whether or not to kill them. Chairman Deng said “Kill them all,” so those three were also killed.
I should add here that Deng Jiayu categorically denied the official title of “chairman of the killing office.” He said, “Of all the terrible titles, ‘killing office chairman’ is the worst! I would never be that stupid!”
In any case, this is a minor quibble; whatever the title, the crux of the matter is the perception of the poor and lower-middle peasants of the Huangjiatang production brigade.8 It would thus appear that the main difference between the killings in Huangjiatang and the other production brigades was that the commune’s directives to other brigades were the “real thing,” while the directive to Huangjiatang was “counterfeit.”
But there’s something Zhu Zhongcheng didn’t mention about his August 27 telephone call to Deng Jiayu: he also asked, “Some people aren’t class enemies, but they don’t pull their weight in production and just roam around engaging in sideline occupations. Should we kill this sort of people?” Deng Jiayu replied, “Capitalist roaders can also be killed!” Having received this directive, Zhu Zhongcheng went with others the next day to arrest and kill Zhu Zhongdao, who was engaged in a sideline occupation outside the village. Zhu Zhongcheng then conveniently forced the dead man’s wife to marry his younger brother. During the aftermath work, this case was classified as one of killing a man to seize his wife.