Qingxi District’s Baimangpu Commune was one of those that held its killing-mobilization meeting rather late, on August 25. In order to catch up with other localities, the commune that afternoon sent a group of cadres as “special emissaries” to each production brigade to oversee and push forward operations. Commune accountant Zuo Changqi was sent to the Zhushan brigade. Zuo Changqi was head of Baimangpu Commune’s Red Alliance and was the commune’s most enthusiastic student of Mao’s works. It was said that he could recite from memory Mao’s three pre-Liberation classics—“Serve the People,” “In Memory of Norman Bethune,” and “The Old Man and the Mountain,” as well as 500 other Mao quotes. Upon arriving at Zhushan, Zuo Changqi immediately convened a meeting of brigade cadres and core militiamen to implement the spirit of the commune’s three-level cadre meeting, but some cadres had reservations about killing people, and brigade Chinese Communist Party (CCP) secretary Bai Fuzhang noted that none of the brigade’s black elements had aroused enough public indignation to warrant killing.
Zuo Changqi felt he needed to respect the views of the brigade’s cadres, so he didn’t impose his authority as “special emissary,” but after returning to the commune, he discovered that he was the only emissary to have returned empty-handed, a severe loss of face. The next day, August 28, Zuo returned to the Zhushan brigade and sought to dilute the influence of opposition voices by calling an enlarged meeting that also included key production team cadres, core militiamen, poor-peasant association (PPA) members, and rebel faction leaders.
Appealing to the attendees’ class consciousness, Zuo Changqi said, “Some comrades have been misled by the class enemies’ semblance and don’t recognize their counterrevolutionary nature. The Great Leader Chairman Mao teaches us that ‘They haven’t given up,’ and if we allow them to successfully restore the old order, the first heads to roll will be ours.”
As soon as he finished speaking, some people planted in the crowd began leading the others in chanting slogans: “Don’t forget class suffering, remember blood vengeance!” “Sweep away all ox demons and snake spirits!” “Firmly suppress overthrow by class enemies!” At that point, cadres came forward to take a stand for killing, and those who had expressed reservations two days before were now among the most vehement supporters, afraid of committing a class standpoint error, which would put them at a great disadvantage.
Zuo Changqi left it to the brigade to decide whom to kill. It is said that he had a more realistic ideology and disagreed with killing as many people as possible; he particularly felt that killing suckling infants was excessive, and that CCP policy dividing lines had to be followed. As a result, the killing list ultimately included only two names: a man surnamed Bai and his wife (the parents of the protagonists of this story, Bai Yuanying and her three siblings).
Bai Yuanying’s parents were harvesting rice in the field when several militiamen called them out, bound them, and took them away to be killed. The family’s home was then ransacked, and all their farming implements, food, livestock, and other movable property were seized. The best rooms in the house were closed off, and Bai Yuanying and her siblings were forced to share the shabbiest room. At that time, Bai Yuanying was 17 years old (according to local custom, under which a girl’s birth year was added to her age); her brother Bai Yuanzheng was 12, another brother, Bai Yuantan, was 8, and the younger sister was only 5. They couldn’t waste time mourning but had to think of how to survive, starting with food. Bai Yuanying was an incredibly brave girl; where others would have stayed home trembling with fear, she went to the production team and requested an advance ration of unhusked rice, as was permitted in emergency situations. All she received was a harsh berating, however, and as she sat staring blankly at the family’s cold stove, her brother Bai Yuanzheng quietly approached her and asked, “They won’t kill us, will they?”
Perhaps it was these words that steeled Bai Yuanying’s resolve: they had to flee rather than sit at home waiting to die. She washed up some sweet potatoes left behind by the looters, cooked them, and had her siblings eat their fill and then packed the remaining potatoes in a basket. Once night fell, she went out and quietly looked around, and seeing no sentries posted near their home, she hurried back, lit an oil lamp, and quickly packed a blanket, some clothes, an enamelware cup, and an aluminum bowl with the potatoes into a wicker basket. Finally, she dug out some money that her parents had concealed in a crack in the wall behind the stove and hid it inside her clothes. She told Bai Yuanzheng to carry their little brother, Bai Yuantan, and she placed their little sister in another wicker basket that she carried along with their belongings on a shoulder pole. Bai Yuanying and her siblings then slipped out the back door.
Between the village and the hills behind it lay a vegetable field where production team members raised their own vegetables, each household’s plot marked off with waist-high stone walls. From there a path led to the main road outside the village, and Bai Yuanying decided this was their best route for escape. The four children crept along the low garden wall, winding their way out of the village and finally relaxing when they saw nothing stirring around them. When they passed the pond outside the village, Bai Yuanying picked up a pebble and tossed it into the water as a final farewell to this place that had brought them so much suffering, humiliation, and injustice; the saying in Daoxian is that a person won’t return until a pebble rises from the water. Bai Yuanying and her siblings then quickly disappeared into the murky darkness of the night.
Bai Yuanying had no way of knowing that by the time they took flight, the 47th Army’s 6950 Unit had arrived in Daoxian and had just held a telephone conference with all the communes, prohibiting further killing. The communes had notified their production brigades that no more indiscriminate killing was allowed and that detained black elements were to be released. On receiving these instructions, the brigade militias stood down; otherwise, Bai Yuanying and her siblings could not possibly have escaped—even if they’d managed to flee their brigade, they’d have been apprehended in some other locality.
Knowing none of this, the four siblings concentrated on getting as far from the village as quickly as they could.
As dawn began to break, they reached the home of an aunt, where they planned to seek refuge. The aunt was already up and performing various household tasks before going out to the fields. Upon seeing her nieces and nephews suddenly appear, she had an idea of what must have happened. “Where are your mama and papa?” she asked, and at that question, Bai Yuanying could no longer hold back her tears, and the other children began crying with her. Their aunt was alarmed: “Stop crying if you don’t want to be killed!” Then she told them, “Go away now! I can’t help you! You’ll just kill us as well!” Bai Yuanying stared at her aunt with tear-filled eyes, hardly believing that this cold face belonged to the affable woman she’d always known.
Because the Zhushan brigade had started its killings relatively late, Bai Yuanying’s parents had heard of killings in other brigades and prepared for the worst, telling Bai Yuanying that if anything happened to them, she should take the others to her aunt’s home to hide for a while, because their aunt’s family members were upper-middle peasants and less likely to be targeted. Now, after making their way there at such great risk, their aunt wouldn’t even let them in the door. Deeply disheartened, Bai Yuanying said, “Aunty”—but her aunt said, “Don’t call me aunty; I don’t know you.” There was nothing the children could do but turn and walk away.
After waiting for them to leave the village, the aunt crept out the back door of her house and caught up with them, giving them several cakes to eat and telling them to hurry home. But by then Bai Yuanying hated her aunt even more than the people who had killed her parents, and she refused the cakes without even looking at her. She was too young and too ignorant of life and of how terrible the world could be. All she knew was her aunt’s rejection, never thinking of her quandary. Under the conditions at that time, even a poor or lower-middle peasant wouldn’t have taken them in, much less an upper-middle peasant such as her aunt. Upper-middle peasants were regarded as fence sitters who could easily be pulled over to the side of the class enemy, and any false step would result in being treated as a class enemy. Their aunt had children of her own, and she, too, was afraid to die.
Ah, Bai Yuanying, you should have begged your aunt to have pity on you and help you or at least teach you how to survive! The older generation had experienced a great deal and had seen everything. Instead, Bai Yuanying took her siblings away and began a life of wandering and begging to survive.
Bai Yuanying is dead now, and her two brothers were too young at the time to remember clearly what their beggars’ existence was like. What they remember most was that “Our sister had a bad temper and thin skin. She couldn’t bear to beg, so she sent us two boys out to find food. Our little sister was too young to keep alive this way, so our elder sister had no choice but to give her away to someone else.”
Begging was in any case not a long-term solution, especially for a girl Bai Yuanying’s age. The killing wind was followed by an upsurge in marriages between impoverished old bachelors and the wives and daughters of victims, who often had no other way out. Someone noticed that Bai Yuanying was an attractive and decent girl and suggested arranging a match for her. Bai Yuanying probably knew this was her fate, and she said she’d be willing to marry as long as the man was from a lower social class and allowed her to bring her younger brothers with her. The first condition was easy enough, since men from higher social classes who had been spared death could hardly expect a wife as well. The second condition, however, narrowed her choices considerably. In my reporting I found that many young children from class enemy families were killed, in part to “destroy the roots and branches,” but also because no one wanted surviving women to bring along extra mouths to feed in these hard times. Fortunately, Bai Yuanying was considered a desirable match in her own right, and since she wasn’t particular, that gave her more room to maneuver. Eventually a 30-year-old poor peasant bachelor from Hongyan Commune’s Shenxiantou brigade agreed to her terms, and Bai Yuanying and her brothers finally found a place to rest their heads.
Even so, the boys presented a problem. Bai Yuanying’s husband had to be very poor to accept a beggar girl with two extra mouths to feed. Bai Yuanzheng and Bai Yuantan were able to work but were still too young to support their own upkeep, and the production team refused to provide them with food rations. Poor to begin with, Bai Yuanying’s husband now found his hardships compounded. He was used to eating sweet potatoes and congee all year, but now the congee was so thin that even a dog wouldn’t lap it off the floor. His marriage wasn’t looking like such a bargain anymore, and Bai Yuanying’s husband began looking for ways to get rid of the two boys. Bai Yuanying already felt she’d married beneath her, and she would never have agreed to the marriage if not for her brothers. Husband and wife fought constantly, and the situation brought out the worst in Bai Yuanying’s husband, who began to beat her.
When Bai Yuanzheng saw his sister being treated so badly, he told her, “You stay here. I’ll take our brother and go out begging.” But Bai Yuanying clutched the boys to her and wept: “I promised Father and Mother that I’d find a way to preserve the family line… . If it weren’t for you, I’d have drowned myself long ago.”
The days of fighting and crying continued, one after another, and after a year or so a new source of conflict arose: Bai Yuanying’s womb remained empty. In the countryside, getting married wasn’t like buying a painting to hang on the wall; it was for having children and another pair of working hands. Bai Yuanying satisfied neither requirement, and the brigade’s busybodies buzzed around her like flies around a pile of manure, berating her as a jinx. Life was even harder for Bai Yuanying than for her brothers as she spent her days being chided and beaten.
Bai Yuanzheng and Bai Yuantan told me, “When our brother-in-law beat our sister, he wasn’t beating his wife but rather a class enemy. One day, our sister somehow got him so angry that he hit her until she spit up blood and lay motionless on the floor. The two of us ran out at that point, because if we’d stayed inside the house he’d have beaten her even worse. By the time we got back, our sister was dead. She couldn’t take it anymore and hanged herself. She was too set on fighting her fate. She told us to hang on, but in the end she was the one who gave up.”
With their sister dead, there was no way their brother-in-law would let the boys stay on. Bai Yuanzheng and Bai Yuantan took to the streets again and begged for a living. Now that they were experienced, they didn’t find their situation so hopeless. As it happened, Daoxian was just launching its largest water management project, the Shangba Reservoir, which also involved constructing a simple highway from Qiaotou Market to the Shangba worksite along with dozens of big work sheds. Thousands of workers descended on the locality from surrounding districts and communes, along with engineers brought from outside; it was a grand spectacle. Because this was a priority project, apart from money and grain provided by the work teams the county was distributing cash and providing food subsidies, and begging was much easier here than in the villages. By the time the Bai brothers arrived at the worksite to beg, they’d gone a day and a night without eating and were half starved. A canteen cook, old and kindhearted, took pity on the beggar boys and scooped them two bowls of rice along with some vegetables. It was the most delicious and satisfying meal the boys had ever eaten. After all these years, they still don’t understand what made this meal so wonderful and why it instantly spread warmth from their bellies to their limbs and refreshed their entire bodies so comfortingly. They told me, “We’d die for that feeling again.”
The boys decided that the Shangba Reservoir was heaven on earth and that they’d stay there until they died. After eating their fill, the brothers immediately set about working for the cook. When the cook saw that the boys were clever, diligent, and compliant, he took a great liking to them, but he didn’t have the authority to let them keep eating at the canteen, so he told the company commander of the situation. The commander looked askance at the scrawny boys and asked, “Can you carry a load?”
The boys immediately replied, “Yes, we can do it!”
The company commander gave Bai Yuanzheng a carrying pole and Bai Yuantan a hoe and took them to the worksite, and he saw that although small and thin, the boys were strong and energetic. Bai Yuanzheng could carry enough for half a laborer, and Bai Yuantan, while smaller, could handle odd jobs. The company commander said, “All right, you can stay, and we’ll feed you, but you won’t get work points.” When the brothers heard that they’d be fed, they fell to their knees and kowtowed before the company commander. That’s how the Bai brothers settled down at the worksite of the Shangba Reservoir. They continued to live and work there for many years.
When the Task Force began its aftermath work in Daoxian in 1984, the brothers heard the news and returned to the village they’d left 18 years before. Four of them had left the village, but only two returned. By then, Bai Yuanzheng was 30 years old and Bai Yuantan was 28. Their home and belongings were long gone, and they had nothing to their name. When the comrades in the Task Force learned of their situation, they were very sympathetic, and at their urging the Zhushan brigade provided the brothers with a responsibility field and a hillside where they could gather firewood. The Task Force also promptly provided the brothers with the various compensations they were entitled to and helped them settle in. The brothers shed tears of gratitude.
The brothers told us that their chief remaining wish was to move their sister’s grave from Shenxiantou to the Bai ancestral plot. They couldn’t allow her to remain alone outside. Bai Yuanzheng said, “Back then, our sister tossed a pebble into a pond and said she wouldn’t return until it emerged from the water. Now that pond has gone dry and was turned into a field during the Learn from Dazhai campaign,1 but our sister wasn’t fated to come home.”