If Zhou Qun is the most miraculous female survivor of Daoxian’s killing wind, Xiao Weiren must be counted among the most miraculous male survivors, having managing to escape from the execution ground.
The first time I saw Xiao Weiren was at Simaqiao Market, which I happened to be visiting on market day. As I roamed through the bustling market to gain a sense of what county market days were like, I noticed a dignified man of around 50 with bushy eyebrows and large eyes, wearing a white shirt and black trousers and a rather formal-looking narrow-brimmed straw hat of a type seldom seen on local villagers. Wondering if he was a vendor from outside the county, I surreptitiously kept an eye on him, but he quickly noticed that someone was watching him, and turned to me with a smile that made my heart tremble—it was the same expression I’d seen on the faces of prisoners I’d interviewed in Changsha Prison. Who was this man? I went up to him and said, “You don’t look like a local man.”
“Actually, I’m from here, but I’ve just come back recently,” he replied with a typical Daoxian accent.
“So you’ve been working elsewhere for a long time?”
“No, not working, hard labor. Do you often come to this market?”
I told him, “I’m a journalist and I’ve come down to report on the Task Force’s work.”
His eyes glowed and he said, “I’m a survivor. Can I tell you about some problems?”
“Of course! But you have to know that we don’t have the authority to resolve any issues.”
Assuring me he understood, he led me to a home near the market, presumably belonging to a friend or relative, and fetched two stools for us to sit on as he told his story.
The problems Xiao Weiren brought up were these: compensation for confiscated property, and punishing those responsible for the killings. These same problems were raised by all the survivors I’d been in touch with, but Xiao Weiren was an educated man, so he made his points differently: “The government is compensating us for homes that were torn down, belongings that were taken, and people who were killed. I feel it shouldn’t be the government but rather the killers paying the compensation. They shouldn’t have to pay for more than what they originally took, but they shouldn’t enjoy any economic benefit from killing people or taking their wives. Killers needn’t pay with their lives or even go to prison, but they should admit their wrongdoing and make a formal public apology. Otherwise, how can we distinguish right from wrong and bring order out of chaos? It shouldn’t be like now, where they flaunt their power in our faces and warn us not to talk or act irresponsibly. When did we ever do that?”
What follows is Xiao Weiren’s narrative of how he escaped from death.
I’m a native of Hanhetian Village in Yangjia Township of Simaqiao District, born in 1932 to a rich peasant family. After graduating from Lingling Junior Normal School in the 1950s, I was assigned to teach physical education at the Jinshi’an Primary School in our commune [Yangjia]. After the “years of hardship” ended in 1962, I was sent back to my village; the actual reason was that I was purged from the teaching ranks because my family’s class status was too high. At the time I didn’t worry too much about being sent down; I had a big appetite and taught physical education, so my teacher’s food ration of 13.5 kilos of rice really wasn’t enough, and I’d wanted to go back to the village but hadn’t dared request it. They wanted me to write an application volunteering to be sent down to the countryside, and I did. My thinking was that I was physically fit and strong, and I also had some bone-setting skills handed down in the family, so I’d be better off there than as a primary-school teacher.
After returning to the production team, I lived well enough. My wife was a capable woman, and quite a few people came to me for bone setting, which brought in a little extra money. Generations of my family had practiced martial arts; my father was quite a famous local kung fu master, and I’d started learning kung fu as a boy. Anyone who practices martial arts knows bone setting, because they’re bound to be injured, and if they can’t heal their injuries, how can they continue to fight? Our family was known far and wide for a secret bone-setting formula handed down through the generations. Eventually when the tail of capitalism was lopped off,1 I wasn’t allowed to take money for bone setting, but people would bring me things such as chickens, ducks, pork, or oil. This gave us a better life than many others.
The Cultural Revolution killings began very suddenly. I don’t know about anyone else, but I never saw it coming; otherwise, I wouldn’t have sat at home waiting to die. I remember that day clearly. It was the 14th day of the seventh lunar month in 1967, just after the Festival of Hungry Ghosts, and the moon was bright. I’d come home from work and had just finished dinner when militiamen from the production brigade came and notified me to attend a meeting at the brigade headquarters. When I reached the headquarters, only the brigade’s public-security chief, Xiao Xinjue, was there with a team of militiamen—Xiao Xinjue was also a leader of the rebel faction [Red Alliance]. As soon as I stepped inside, Xiao Xinjue shouted, “Tie him up!” The militiamen grabbed some rope and tied me very tightly, and I yelled in pain while asking, “What’s the matter? What is this?” Xiao Xinjue said, “What is this? Kneel down and confess all the crimes you’ve committed!” What else can a person do in this situation? I knelt down and said, “I haven’t broken any laws. If you’ve seen me doing anything wrong, please tell me.”
This made him lose his temper completely. He stood up and grabbed a piece of firewood—a chunk of pine almost a meter long with sharp edges, weighing 2 kilos or more. “You dishonest son of a bitch! You dare ask me what laws you’ve broken!” He swung that hunk of firewood at me, and as I instinctively turned, the firewood struck me square on the left side of my forehead. I heard the impact and saw stars, then fainted dead away. Xiao Xinjue and the others splashed water in my face, and I felt like my head was about to explode. Blood plastered my hair and half my face. Xiao Xinjue told me again to confess my crimes, and I bent my head, afraid that if I said the wrong thing, I’d be hit again. Xiao Xinjue sneered, “You capitalist roader persisting in your reactionary standpoint, death is too good for you!” To be honest, at that point it still hadn’t occurred to me that they might kill me. I just wanted to get through it with as little suffering as possible.
Around midnight, they took me and some others, all class enemy offspring, to the reservoir at the base of Luojia Mountain. I later learned there were several abandoned pits there, and they intended to throw us in. When we got there, the militiaman escorting me ordered me to kneel down, and at that moment, my brain swelled and my heart leapt to my throat. Seeing a saber gleaming in his hand, I stammered, “Are—are you going to kill us?” Then I heard my cousin Xiao Weiyi, who had also been led there, shout out, “They’re going to kill us! Run for it!” I saw someone throw off his ropes and run toward the field. There was a steep ridge next to me, and I jumped down with the intention of running as well. Seeing me take off, the militiaman swung his saber at me. I ducked my head while twisting at the waist, and the knife missed my head but struck me in the back. I later realized that this stroke of the knife saved my life, because while injuring me, it also sliced through the ropes around my arms. I scrambled up and ran for the hills.
Several militiamen chased after me. I was still bound, so I couldn’t run fast, and they soon caught up with me and stabbed me in the right foot. This gave me a burst of energy, and I fought my way out of my ropes. Less panic-stricken now, I saw the Luojiashan Reservoir ahead and ran toward it. I was a good swimmer, so my plan was to jump into the reservoir, where they wouldn’t be able catch me. I was wearing canvas army shoes, and one fell off as I ran. When I stopped to pick it up, the militiamen caught up with me. I pulled myself together and grabbed a rock off the ground, telling them, “Don’t come any closer. We don’t have any grievance among us in the past life or now, so don’t force me to fight you to the death.” They knew I was skilled in martial arts, so they just stood there shouting as I ran up the hill. When I reached the reservoir, I stripped off my clothes and shoes and jumped into the water, swimming across the reservoir to the mountain on the other side.
I got away, but my cousin Xiao Weiyi didn’t. He shouldn’t have run into the field. The uneven ground slowed him down, and he hadn’t been able to loosen his ropes, so the killers caught up with him and hacked him to death there in the field.
Our village was near the border with Ningyuan County, and on the other side of the reservoir was Jiuyi Mountain. When I reached the Ningyuan border, I was soaking wet, wearing only a pair of shorts and an undershirt, and wounded. Fortunately the cut on my back wasn’t deep, but the injury to my head was serious and ached in the mountain wind. My head swimming, I wondered if I’d grabbed my life back from the gate of hell only to die in the mountains. Then I recalled an old man, nicknamed Old Fang, who lived in the mountains there in Suoyichong. He was from a poor peasant family, and I had once saved the life of his young son. I could think of nothing else to do but ask him for help.
I had no ties of kinship or friendship with Old Fang and hadn’t even known him until a few years earlier, when his son had gone up the mountain to collect medicinal herbs and had fallen off a cliff and been badly injured. Local medics couldn’t heal the boy and told them to hurry to the county. Old Fang had no money, so he brought his son to me. The boy looked like he might not make it, and I was afraid to take him, but Old Fang pleaded with me and said he would blame fate and not me if the boy died. Hearing him say that and pitying him, and seeing that the boy was young and healthy, I brought him inside. After a month of treatment, the boy was able to walk again. Seeing how poor his family was, I considered it a charity case and didn’t ask for payment. Old Fang told his son to regard me as his godfather, but I said that was inappropriate, given that I wasn’t much older than the boy, but Old Fang said that someday he’d repay my act of mercy. After they went home, the boy continued to come to my home for herbal medicine for half a year, and he always brought me local products from the mountains. I never took any payment from them, and in that way we became like family.
I hurried to Suoyichong and found Old Fang’s home, knocked at the door, and went in. My appearance shocked him. He joked, “Aiya! Doctor Xiao, whose woman did you grab to get beat up like that?” I told him about my situation, and because there had not yet been any killings in Ningyuan, Old Fang simply couldn’t believe it. He just kept saying, “Don’t joke around with me!” He called for his wife to boil some water, and they washed my wounds and gave me a clean change of clothes.
First thing the next morning, Old Fang said he’d go down to the village to see what was going on there. I was still trying to figure out why they wanted to kill me, and I didn’t know what had happened to my wife and three children, so I hoped he could find out.
Grinning, I asked him, “Weren’t you afraid Old Fang would go fetch the militia to arrest you?”
He replied, “I wasn’t afraid, and even if I was, it would be no use. I was in fate’s hands. I didn’t think Old Fang was that kind of person, and if he brought the militia back, then it was my fate to die. At that time, leaving Old Fang’s home would have meant death to me. I didn’t think any more about it, but I put my life in Old Fang’s hands.” He then continued:
Around mid-afternoon, Old Fang returned, shaking his head. “I never guessed they’d really be killing people. When I arrived in your village, they said a big-time criminal got away last night, and they’d sent people out to catch you. They also said you had kung fu skills that could cut through rope, and the militia would kill you where they caught you. When I heard this, I didn’t dare go see your wife for fear of being found out.” When I heard this, I was so anxious that I wept, and I said to Old Fang, “I never did anything wrong or broke any law.” Old Fang said, “I know that. You can’t go back to Hanhetian. Just stay here with us and let your wounds heal. You saved my kid’s life, and now I’ll repay you by saving yours.” When I heard him say this, I kowtowed at his feet.
I stayed in Suoyichong for five or six days, and as my wounds began to heal, it occurred to me that I couldn’t stay much longer. By then killings had begun in Ningyuan as well, and the reports were horrifying. Old Fang said nothing, but I could see he was really worried. Old Fang told me he had friends who were stonemasons and were preparing to go to Guangxi to earn extra money. He asked if I’d be willing to go with them, in which case I could learn a new profession and also find safety. He said I could tell them I was his relative. I immediately agreed to go but said I first wanted to go home late at night to look in on my family. He scolded me: “Are you looking to be killed? A husband and wife are like birds in the forest—when disaster strikes, the best thing is to scatter. If you don’t go back, they’ll get along fine, but if you go back and something goes wrong, you’ll not only lose your own life but bring disaster on them as well.” Anyone could understand his reasoning, of course, and I reluctantly abandoned my idea of returning home.
Old Fang was truly a good man, and I’ll never be able to repay his kindness. He insisted on accompanying me down the mountain, and that’s how I went with a group of Ningyuan stonemasons to Guangxi’s Fuchuan County. We did our stonework in a place called Xianglujiao. Stonemasonry was hard work, but easy in its own way. It required a certain amount of skill, but mostly it required hard labor. In Fuchuan I mostly worked on irrigation ditches and stone bridges. I learned fast and did my job well.
Many people from the Yao minority lived in Fuchuan, and Xianglujiao was a Yao stockaded village. A villager surnamed Pan had six daughters and no sons. The daughters were all fine girls who had been married off except for the youngest, who was scarred from a childhood case of smallpox. In the village they called her Pan Mamei, or Pockmarked Girl. I’d been working in Xianglujiao for a long time when one day a matchmaker approached me and asked if I had a family back home. Thinking of my home back in Daoxian that I’d never be able to return to, I said my family was poor so I’d never been able to marry. The matchmaker asked if I was willing to marry Pan Mamei. As a roving craftsman, I longed to settle down. I knew Pan Mamei, and while disfigured, she was a good person, young and capable, and 10 years younger than I. Added to that, she came from a poor peasant family, and I’d suffered all my life from my high class status. If I married into the Pan family, I would become a poor peasant, and no one would bother me anymore. So I agreed to marry Pan Mamei, but I told them honestly that I was from the rich-peasant class. My father-in-law felt that was unimportant as long as I was a good man. So we went to their commune and carried out the formalities for me to marry Pan Mamei.
I thought I’d be able to spend the rest of my life peacefully in Xianglujiao, but fate was toying with me. Right after the Spring Festival in 1970, there was a major purge in the villages as Fuchuan County sent down cadres for the “One Strike and Three Antis” campaign.2 They found out that I was a fugitive black element and arrested me and sent me back to Daoxian. Somehow, even after marrying into a poor peasant family, I’d been elevated from an offspring to a full-fledged element.
After I was sent back to Daoxian, the production brigade sent militiamen to fetch me. Taking a ferry on the way back to the brigade, one of them said, “There’s no use taking this fellow back—he’ll just cause problems for the production team. Let’s drown him here.” I was bound, and I thought I’d die for sure this time, but the ferry captain said, “You can’t do that. Indiscriminate killing is prohibited now. There will be consequences.” The militiamen decided it wasn’t worth the risk, so they took me back to the brigade.
After I returned to the brigade, things got tough for me. Before they’d treated me as a black-element offspring, but now I was a full black element. They subjected me to public denunciations and ordered me to reform myself through labor. My first wife had long ago married our brigade PPA [poor-peasant association] chairman, Li Sineng, and had taken our children and belongings with her. I didn’t have so much as a roof tile to shelter me or an inch of ground to stand on. This isn’t figurative, but my actual situation at the time. The production team gave me a place to live that was little more than a cattle pen. I worked like a beast of burden and ate like a pig or a dog. My former wife turned away if she saw me at a distance, and my children cut off all relations with me. Sometimes I’d see them from afar and just want to die. I wondered what the point was of living, and to what end I’d escaped from the execution ground. I felt it would have been better if they’d chopped me up and thrown me in the pit.
Fortunately, just at that time my wife, Pan Mamei, came to Daoxian looking for me, very pregnant. At first my brigade wouldn’t accept her, but she had a certificate from her commune and was a poor peasant, so finally they accepted her. That wife of mine! Without her, I wouldn’t be alive today. After I was sent back to Daoxian, my father-in-law advised her to forget me and find someone else. But she was unwilling and had a falling-out with her family, and she came looking for me. Being a bachelor is hell, and having a woman in your home changes everything. I was still a strong worker and not afraid of hardship, and Mamei was used to making do. After that we had a daughter, and we gradually turned our home into something acceptable. There’s no need to go into the rest; under the circumstances back then, you bent yourself to fit under the eaves.
In September 1971, our district built the Yongquan Dam at Fushitang in order to improve irrigation in Yangjia Township, and I was part of the crew our production team sent to work on it. Since I had stonemasonry skills, I was assigned to build the Yongquan Canal. At that time, a major event occurred in the upper level of government, which you must know about—Lin Biao’s attempt to betray our country and go over to the enemy. At first we didn’t know anything about it, but news finally reached our village at the end of the year. We black elements weren’t informed, but we knew something major had happened. The situation was extremely tense, even more than during the 1967 killings. Every time something happened at the upper level of government, the village would have to engage in class struggle, and we’d be in trouble again. I was educated and experienced, so I understood this. At that time, rumors circulated at the worksite and in the village that black elements would be killed again. In Simaqiao Commune’s Mawan brigade, a class enemy offspring who had fled the “killing wind” returned to his production team in 1971, and the brigade’s militia commander had beaten him to death with a hoe. When I heard of this, I couldn’t sleep all night. At that time, my wife came to the worksite looking for me and said people in the village were saying I’d be killed, and that this time I wouldn’t get away. She said the brigade had sent someone to the county to buy iron wire so I couldn’t break through it with my kung fu skills.
I can state here that this information was not entirely accurate. There were people in the brigade calling for Xiao Weiren to be killed, but it wasn’t the brigade leadership’s idea, and the iron wire was being bought for production purposes.
As the saying goes, when you’ve been bitten by a snake, you’re scared of even a rope. I felt I couldn’t sit there waiting for death and should run off immediately. I told my wife what I thought, and her response was simple: if I was going to run off, we’d go as a family. I told her to take our child back to Fuchuan but she refused, saying that if we were to die, we’d die together. I knew that if she went back to Fuchuan she’d become part of someone else’s family, and we’d never see each other again, and I couldn’t bear that. So we agreed to flee together. In any case, she was a poor peasant, and if the worst happened, she was unlikely to be killed.
I devised a careful plan for escape, telling my wife to return to the brigade and quietly carry out the necessary preparations without attracting attention. Then I requested leave from the worksite, saying I had to go back to collect my grain ration. I had arranged to meet my wife outside the village. We owned nothing of value, so all we needed was two bags and some extra clothes, and we took our child and ran off. Afraid of being followed, we detoured around Yejipu and set off from Jianghua. Since Mamei was from the Yao minority, and Jianghua was a Yao area, that seemed a good place to start. From there we went to Guangxi, stopping off in Liuzhou, where we made a living by cutting hay for horse feed and gathering scrap. Later we went to Yuezhou (Yueyang), where we cut reeds for a living and pulled handcarts, all heavy labor. We just needed to earn enough to support our family.
In 1984, we heard that rehabilitation was being carried out in Daoxian, so I brought my family back. Now there’s been some redress, but a lot of things are still not right… . In short, those people at the higher levels are still treating me differently. For example, reporting our situation to a prefectural leader, I’ve repeatedly told him of the attempt to kill me and the snatching of my first wife, but he just gets impatient and says, “Fine, you say they tried to kill you and someone took your wife. Do you want me to tell Li Sineng to give your wife back to you?”