Although the killings ended, a new saga began for survivors who were determined to obtain justice for their murdered family members. Among them was a woman whose family was among the last victims of the killing wind at Dapingpu Farm, and whose fate intersected with that of a young boy orphaned in the killings in Futian Commune’s Dongyang production brigade.
The killings at Daoxian’s Dapingpu Farm started with a poster of a Mao quote. While the killing wind was blowing throughout Daoxian’s countryside in late August 1967, no one had been killed here yet, because “educated youth” who had been “sent down to the countryside” were under a separate administrative jurisdiction. Even so, a former “educated youth” who had been sent down to Dapingpu at the time told us, “The killings in the communes around us stirred up calls at our farm to kill people. Without a concrete directive, no one made a move right away, but we were like a pile of kindling waiting for someone to strike a match.”
That match was finally struck after the Red Alliance’s defeat in the armed confrontation on August 30. After the Red Alliance lost its turf in Yingjiang, Zheng Youzhi and the other leaders led the militia’s withdrawal to Qingtang, but, still feeling vulnerable, Zheng Youzhi called a meeting of district People’s Armed Forces Department (PAFD) commanders at Dapingpu Farm and decided to establish a militia contingent at the No. 3 High School in Shouyan, from which they could stage attacks but also retreat to Guangxi’s Guanyang County. After the meeting, Zheng Youzhi sought out the director of the Dapingpu Farm to gain an understanding of local battle-readiness, and found it sorely lacking. Zheng warned, “If you don’t kill a few troublemakers, you’re going to have big problems later.” After discussion, they decided to puncture the arrogance of the class enemy by “suppressing” a counterrevolutionary named Xie Zhishang, who had once been a medical officer in the Kuomintang Army (although subsequently serving in the Korean War as a People’s Liberation Army [PLA] medical officer), and a counterrevolutionary offspring named Yu Zhen’e.
That very day, one of the revolutionary masses had discovered a Mao quote poster in the latrine, and the entire farm exploded in outrage; this action constituted at least two major crimes: the crime of “current counterrevolution” and the crime of “venomously attacking the Great Leader,” either of which could draw a death sentence. The farm’s Red Alliance immediately organized a search for the culprit, and suspicion ultimately fell on Xie Zhishang’s 11-year-old son. The inference was that Xie had instructed his son to throw the poster into the toilet as a means of venting his deep-seated hatred toward Chairman Mao. In accordance with this logic, Xie Zhishang, his wife, and their son and second daughter all were taken into custody. The eldest daughter, Xie Shuxiang, who had been crippled by polio as a child, was spared, since she had already married by then and lived in Daojiang, and the two younger daughters, aged 16 and 13, were “treated with leniency.” The condemned family members were taken to the hillside behind the farm and blown to smithereens with dynamite, along with a young doctor, Yu Zhen’e, who apart from his problematic family background was allegedly a member of the Revolutionary Alliance.
Xie Zhishang’s surviving eldest daughter, Xie Shuxiang, was mentioned many times in the course of our interviews and was referred to as Big Sister Xie. This frail and crippled woman, repeatedly battered by fate, spent years petitioning government departments in Yongzhou, Changsha, and Beijing demanding justice for her parents, sister, and brother. She was like a little drop of water constantly dripping from an eaves onto a solid rock foundation, sustained by the conviction that there must be some kind of justice in this world. Her husband, a simple and kindly ceramics factory worker, didn’t completely understand his wife’s actions, but he silently gave her his full support even as her ceaseless petitioning drove the family ever further into penury. In order to bring in more money, Big Sister Xie operated a book rental stall next to the long-distance bus station across from the No. 2 High School. This stall became a meeting place for family members of victims who came to the county seat on business or to petition. Naturally it also attracted the close surveillance of the Daoxian public-security bureau and letters-and-visits office.
At her book rental stall, Big Sister Xie became acquainted with a street kid who foraged around the bus station. This was Liang Yueming from Futian Commune’s Dongyang brigade, whom I mentioned in chapter 10 in connection with the killing of his father, mother, and aunt, when as a toddler he was left to the care of his 46-year-old grandmother. His grandmother remarried a worker at the Daojiang Shipping Company surnamed Jiang, and Liang took his step-grandfather’s surname. Jiang Yueming, as he was now known, grew up in Daojiang bereft of the love and discipline of his parents, an “artful dodger” who eventually gained a criminal record as a thief. Mencius believed that people are born good, while Xunzi believed they are born evil, but neither of these absolutist philosophies can fully explain the complexity of life. Although people have the power to choose the road they take, fate also plays a role.
Big Sister Xie was very sympathetic toward Jiang Yueming and treated him like her own son. While not insensible to the boy’s vices, she was firmly convinced that he would go straight. Jiang Yueming once told someone, “No one in this world has been as good to me as Big Sister Xie,” and I’m sure this was true.
In March 1985, more than 80 family members of victims of the Daoxian massacre secretly planned to travel together to Beijing to petition the authorities, setting Shuinan Village as their gathering place. But the Daoxian Public Security Bureau (PSB) got wind of their plans and staged a roundup the day before, with a dozen leading members, including Big Sister Xie, arrested and prosecuted. Big Sister Xie was sentenced to two years of reeducation through labor but was released after eight months. Following her release, she heard that Jiang Yueming had been the PSB’s “earphone,” but she adamantly refused to believe it.
Of all the surviving family members in Daoxian, Big Sister Xie and Jiang Yueming were the people I most hoped to interview, but because of the trouble they’d been in, I didn’t dare approach them. When I visited Daoxian a third time in 2006, I learned that Big Sister Xie had become ill and died. Meanwhile, Jiang Yueming had managed to turn his life around, owning a small business and driving a Chery sedan.
While I never got to meet Big Sister Xie, I eventually established contact with an even more notoriously intractable petitioning family member who led others on petitioning drives. Reading through his file, I learned that he had petitioned Deng Xiaoping regarding 76 major cases from the killing wind, that he had posted an antithetical couplet on the injustices of the era at the entrance of the State Council’s Office of Letters and Visits, and that he had waylaid the limousine of the provincial Chinese Communist Party (CCP) secretary, Mao Zhiyong, at the entrance to the Hunan provincial CCP committee’s office building in order to make his complaint… . In sum, he was not considered a law-abiding citizen.
I’d wanted to interview Li Niande right from the outset, but well-meaning people warned me off. A leading comrade from the Task Force who had provided enormous support to our reporting opposed the suggestion outright: “This man is very cunning and knows how to use policy loopholes to go around petitioning. It’s taken an enormous effort to get him settled down, and if you interview him now, he could get the wrong idea and trigger another mass petitioning incident.”
In any case, we had the investigation file on the killing of Li Niande’s 13 family members, so a face-to-face interview wasn’t essential. But as it turned out, I encountered Li Niande by chance at the home of a friend during my third visit to Daoxian in 2006. By then Li had a family and had become a lawyer, and he cut an imposing figure with gray hair that he didn’t bother to dye. “My hair went completely gray 20 years ago,” he told me. It turned out that for all his petitioning, Li knew no more about the specifics of his family members’ deaths than I did as an outsider. This was not unusual, however; very few of the survivors we interviewed were able to describe the circumstances of their family members’ deaths.
Li Niande fled Daoxian right at the outset of the killings, when he was 21 years old. While in Daojiang on business in August 1967, Li had learned from an old classmate that black elements were starting to be killed in the villages, and he relayed the news to his parents after returning home. Killings had started in Shouyan and their own Yangjia Commune at the time, but the news hadn’t spread, and Li’s parents were skeptical. As one of the commune’s less well-behaved black-element offspring, however, Li was nervous and proposed going into hiding for a while, and his parents finally agreed that it made sense. Early the next morning, Li Niande left Jinshi’an Village with 40 yuan his parents had given him.
Li Niande made his way to Jiangyong County’s Taochuan Township, which had a dozen brick-and-tile factories requiring large quantities of firewood. Collecting firewood from the hillsides was hard work, and most who did it were people from poor areas who were trying to make some extra money. Young and strong, Li Niande built himself a thatch shack and supported himself by collecting firewood for the kilns.
About 10 days after Li Niande left, the killings began in his brigade. On August 22, 1967, at the height of the “double rush” planting and harvesting, Li Niande’s father, Li Guangwei, as well as his two uncles and a cousin, were executed along with three other men. A week later, on August 29, the brigade began “eliminating roots and branches” by killing nine more members of Li Niande’s extended family, including his mother, Wang Manzhen. This was the very day that the PLA 47th Army’s 6950 Unit entered Daoxian and held its telephone conference ordering a halt to the killings, but by the time the order reached the Jinshi’an brigade, the death sentences had been pronounced. “Tell the commune that we’ve already killed them,” said the brigade’s poor-peasant association (PPA) chairman, Liu Daixiu, and he ordered the militiamen to take the condemned out and kill them quickly, saying, “If we’re blamed, I’ll take responsibility.”
After the killings, the Jinshi’an brigade established a movable-property disposal group headed by accountant He Xiuwen, and they ransacked all the belongings of the murdered families. That night, the brigade’s leaders held a feast in the brigade hall to celebrate their victory.
A total of 19 people died in the Jinshi’an brigade during the killing wind, including two who committed suicide. Among the 17 people who were murdered, 13 were members of Li Niande’s family, including all of the family’s men except for Li himself. Li’s remaining family consisted of his two sisters and a female cousin. For Li Niande, the only remaining male descendant, real suffering had just begun.
What kind of family could bring on this kind of annihilation? A famous architect once said, “A building is a piece of history.” We can observe the rise and fall of the Li family through its mansion in Jinshi’an Village.
Li Mansion was built by Li Niande’s grandfather, a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine, who, while the richest man in Jinshi’an, ranked much lower in Yangjia Township and lower yet in Simaqiao District, not even making the grade for Daoxian as a whole. Dr. Li built the house around 1941 with a bereavement pension awarded to his third son, who had laid down his life resisting the Japanese invasion at Lugou Bridge on July 7, 1937. It was the largest residence in all of Jinshi’an Village at the time, standing out like a Daozhou gray goose in a flock of ducks. By the time I visited in 2006, however, it was woefully shabby and dwarfed by several new concrete and red-brick villas that had been built around it. Now it housed only pigs and cattle and a single human occupant, the former brigade PPA chairman, Liu Daixiu. Some said Li Mansion was a haunted house and that anyone who lived there was jinxed. Liu Daixiu was not afraid, however. He said, “Screw that! I’ve been through enough that the worst that can happen to me now is death, and that would be almost a relief.”
Calling it a haunted house was reasonable enough, given that most of the people who lived there came to a bad end. Reportedly, when Dr. Li built the house, he had a geomancer come to check out the feng shui, so it’s hard to know the exact source of the family’s woes. During Land Reform in 1951, most of Li Mansion was divided up among several of the village’s poor peasant families, leaving just some side rooms for the Li family. Li Niande’s grandmother was beaten to death during a denunciation rally, and his second uncle was killed along with an aunt.
Doctor Li, an old man by then, was spared because of his medical skills, and when the Lijia Commune Health Clinic was established, Dr. Li was employed there along with his son Li Guangwai (Li Niande’s father), who served as his apprentice. However, the family still wore the landlord label, so even working in the health clinic they were considered to be serving penal labor under surveillance and had to keep their heads down and their tails between their legs.
When the Great Famine struck Daoxian in 1960, Dr. Li drowned himself in the Gongba River after being humiliated while trying to buy some meat. Somehow the rest of the Li family made it through the famine, but during the Socialist Education movement in 1964, Li Guangwei and his wife were purged from the health clinic and sent back to their village, where they once more took up residence in the side rooms of Li Mansion.
In spite of their grim circumstances, the Li family seemed to have an innate ability to take root even in the rockiest soil and lived nearly as well as anyone else—right until the family was largely wiped out during the killing wind of August 1967.
The poor peasant families who were allotted portions of Li Mansion during Land Reform enjoyed no better fates. It goes without saying that some died of starvation during the Great Famine, but even in ordinary times they were scarcely better off than Li Niande’s family. Former PPA chairman Liu Daixiu was eventually sentenced to 10 years in prison on February 3, 1986, for killing nine members of Li Niande’s family. Liu’s crime was exacerbated by the fact that he’d carried out the killings after being explicitly directed not to, and Li Niande had ensured that Liu Daixiu wouldn’t fall through the cracks, filing complaints at the highest possible level so that even the leader sent by the Central Committee to inspect the Task Force’s operations had asked after the matter. Liu Daixiu had to be sentenced, and his sentence could not be too light.
I can say with confidence that Liu Daixiu truly bore enormous culpability, but there were many people like him in Daoxian, and few served any prison time, while Liu was handed the heaviest prison sentence of all of them. No wonder Liu Daixiu hated Li Niande so much and stamped his feet and beat his breast while saying, “It’s too bad we didn’t kill all of them. Then the government wouldn’t have to pay compensation to anyone, and I wouldn’t have gone to prison.” He accepted his sentence calmly, however: “I’m not as bad as some who were involved in all kinds of dirty dealings for personal gain. I killed people to defend Chairman Mao and the Red regime, and to be imprisoned for that is an honor.”
In 1994, after growing vegetables in a Hengyang Prison for eight years, Liu Daixiu was released early for good behavior, but he was expelled from the CCP and barred from any further role in village affairs. From then on, Liu Daixiu lost his erect bearing and resonant voice. His wife left him for another man, and his sons became estranged from him. The poverty that had plagued the family for three generations extended through another two. Liu Daixiu was left to pass a hard and lonely existence in Li Mansion. The Lijia Township government established an old folk’s home for unsupported elderly people, but since Liu Daixiu had two sons, he didn’t qualify for aid. Fortunately, Liu was used to hardship and was still fit and able, so he didn’t let his problems get to him, but his hatred of Li Niande only grew. He said, “I’m in no hurry. Let him enjoy himself now. Next time the higher-ups call for killing, the first one I kill will be him!”
The place where Li Niande settled in Yaochuan, Jiangyong County, was called Liushigong, and as it happened, another person from Yangjia Commune was also working there and reported him to the commune. The brigade sent men to apprehend Li Niande and bring him back, but the head of the Liushigong brigade brick kiln refused to hand Li over. Although Jiangyong County had also been influenced by Daoxian and was also killing black elements, the situation was less serious, and in remote areas such as Yaochuan, almost no one was being killed.
Li Niande was hard-working, honest, and nimble, and the brick kiln head thought well of him, so he told Li Niande that someone had come for him and also that his family had been killed. Li Niande was shocked and terrified, but he didn’t know where to go, so he decided to stay and work until it came time to pay his wages. He remained on the alert, however, and when people came again from the Jinshi’an brigade, he managed to escape into the Dupangling Hills and travel by bus to Guilin. In Guilin he took a train to Beijing.
Li Niande had an uncle, Li Guanglun, who had been a low-level cadre in the Beijing Railway Department but was now relegated to cleaning toilets at Yongdingmen Station, near Beijing’s Temple of Heaven. Li Guanglun was shocked when his nephew burst into his home, and gaped in horror when Li Niande told him what had happened back at home. The uncle and nephew decided that what was going on in Daoxian couldn’t possibly be in accordance with CCP policies, so Li Niande wrote out a formal complaint and took it to the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group reception office to report the problem. When the PLA comrade at the reception office saw this landlord whelp who’d dared to file a complaint against the poor and lower-middle peasants, he flushed with anger and roared, “Get the hell out of here!” When Li Niande didn’t move fast enough, the man kicked him out the door.
Li Niande managed to make his way back to his uncle’s home, and when Li Guanglun heard what had happened, he bowed his head and said nothing. From then on, the two of them had a tacit understanding never to mention what had happened in Daoxian.
After several days, Li Niande saw that he couldn’t stay with his uncle much longer, and when he proposed leaving, his uncle silently bought him a ticket for Lengshuitan. The household registration system made it impossible to do anything without a certificate issued by his local CCP organization. However vast the world might be, Li Niande could only go home to Daoxian.
By the time Li Niande circled back to Daoxian, the killing wind had subsided, but Li still didn’t dare return to Jinshi’an. Recalling an uncle at the Yueyan Tree Farm with whom the family had lost contact, Li sought him out. The uncle knew about the killings, so he was very sympathetic to his nephew and helped him find temporary work planting pines on the hills. Li Niande had finally found a place to settle down.
In October of his second year at the tree farm (1968), Li Niande had reason to go to Daojiang, and while there he ran into Old He, whom he knew from working on the Jinshi’an road repair team. Old He was a “historical counterrevolutionary,” so Li Niande immediately clasped his hand and asked about his family’s circumstances. Old He told him that his two sisters were still alive, and he invited him to a small restaurant for a bowl of noodles. While the noodles were cooking, Old He said he had to go out for a minute and Li Niande said he’d wait for him. But the next person who came through the door was an inspector with the county public-security bureau. After confirming Li Niande’s identity, the inspector pulled a rope from behind his back and said, “You’re under arrest.”
Li Niande was taken to the PSB’s temporary custody center and placed in a cell designed for 4 people but now holding at least 20. There was only about a foot of space for each person, and the most recent arrival had to sleep next to the waste bucket in the corner. Fortunately, Li Niande was willing to sleep anywhere. Meals consisted of 280 grams of rice each day, but inmates confined to the cells had to give up 30 grams of their ration to those who worked outside.
After a few days in these conditions, the military policeman in charge of the custody center called Li Niande to his office and asked, “What crime did you commit?”
Li Niande said, “I don’t know.” He explained how he had come to be arrested, but before he could finish, the supervisor said, “All right, that’s enough. Tomorrow you’ll start carrying water.”
Few places in Daoxian had running water at that time, and all the water used at the custody center had to be carried from the Xiaoshui River. Li Niande considered this a stroke of luck: not only would he get a double portion of rice, but he’d be able to enjoy the comforts of the outdoors instead of spending all day and night in the stench of the cell.
After Li had spent a month fetching water for the custody center, the supervisor called him into his office and said, “You can go home.”
Li Niande said, “I don’t want to go home. I like it here, and if I go back I might be killed.”
The supervisor said, “This isn’t a hotel where you can stay as long as you want. If you’re unwilling to go home, I’ll have to take you to the detention center.”
That’s how Li Niande came to spend 17 months in prison. He was offered release on two occasions but refused to leave, having come to find life in the detention center much more congenial than outside. Here all he needed to do was bow and scrape to a few guards, while he could be as arrogant as he liked to others, and by the end he was even allowed to serve as team leader.
One day in March 1970, the new county PAFD commander and county CCP secretary, Chen Fengguo, came to inspect the detention center, and he mobilized Li Niande to return to his production team. Li Niande raised three demands: (1) not to be killed, (2) to be given a grain ration, and (3) not to be publicly denounced.
Chen Fengguo laughed and said, “I can guarantee you all three. But you have to promise to work hard in production and reform your thinking and not go running off.”
Chen Fengguo was as good as his word and immediately assigned two militiamen to escort Li Niande back to Simaqiao, where in accordance with Secretary Chen’s instructions, district government secretary Yan wrote a letter of introduction for Li Niande to take back to Jinshi’an.
I’ll summarize Li Niande’s return to Jinshi’an Village with a passage from one of Li’s own petitions: “They said I ‘attacked the newborn Red regime’ and ‘opposed the proletarian headquarters.’ I was beaten four times until I spit up blood, my left arm was broken, and my skull was fractured. I was diagnosed with post-traumatic brain injury, and I’m now disabled.”
In April 1974, when the production brigade planned another public denunciation, Li Niande fled once again, making a living through manual labor and as an “illegal medical practitioner.”
In 1979, the CCP held the Third Plenum of its Eleventh Central Committee, and order was brought out of chaos throughout China. Li Niande took a train to Beijing and began his long and arduous career as a petitioner in hopes of gaining justice for his dead family members. He became the most famous petitioner in Daoxian.
In winter 1981, as Beijing lay covered in snow, the vagrant Li Niande, suffering from hunger and exposure, posted an antithetical couplet on the door of the State Council’s Letters and Visits Office:
Another year sighing in regret, hair gray and still a bachelor, with no shelter in the dead of winter, alas!
Sleeping in the streets half my life, only my shadow for company as I petition, with no department accepting my complaint, alack!
The couplet remained on the door of the Letters and Visits Office for four days.
In early 1982, Li Niande was taken into custody and repatriated to Daoxian. Near Gongba Bridge he ran into Teacher Xu, a Rightist he’d met in the detention center in 1968. The two men were ecstatic to find each other alive. In particular, Teacher Xu had already been near 50 while in prison, and his constitution was weak, making it hard for him to adjust to the prison rules, so he’d been constantly punished with kneeling and being beaten more than anyone else, his four limbs numb and nearly paralyzed. The prison provided no medical treatment, but Li Niande had pitied him and used his knowledge of traditional Chinese medicine, massaging him every day. Discussing their experience since prison made both men break down weeping. Teacher Xu had been slightly more fortunate in having his Rightist cap removed during the rehabilitation campaign and receiving his teacher’s salary again. The two sat alongside the road and talked for more than two hours, and during this conversation, Li Niande became aware of two problems: first, Daoxian’s killing wind was not a batch of scattered killings but a complete historical incident, and if the problem of the killing wind wasn’t resolved, no individual cases of justice could be resolved. Likewise in the case of “Rightists,” the entire issue had to be addressed; otherwise, those whose Rightist caps were removed were still “rehabilitated Rightists.” Second, if the Communist Party continued to regard class struggle as its guiding principle, it would be impossible to resolve the issue of the killing wind. If the Communist Party was to truly focus on building the economy, the issue of the killing wind must be resolved.
After returning home, the minimally educated peasant Li Niande took up his pen, and by the light of an oil lamp he wrote a letter to the vice chairman of the CCP Central Committee, Deng Xiaoping, asking the Central Committee to investigate the Daoxian massacre and prosecute its perpetrators in accordance with law. Li listed dozens of cases. That same year, hundreds of family members of victims went in a group to Beijing to “cry out their grievance and file their complaints.”
The petitions were the “straw that broke the camel’s back” as pressure mounted to investigate the killing wind. In March 1968, the 47th Army’s 6950 Unit and the Daoxian Revolutionary Committee had conducted its “exposure and study session,” but the investigation work came to a premature end, and most of those involved came under attack in varying degrees. In 1974, the Daoxian county CCP committee had carried out a token handling of a small number of criminal cases, but the killings were still largely defined as revolutionary actions that followed the correct general orientation. Then, in winter 1978, Lingling prefectural CCP secretary Deng Youzhi led a small task force deep into Daoxian to carry out investigations and submitted an investigation report to the provincial CCP committee. This was followed by visits to Hunan by two native sons, CCP general secretary Hu Yaobang and Chief Justice Jiang Hua. In 1982, the petitions Li Niande and others wrote were included in the agenda of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. The Task Force to Deal with the Aftermath of the Cultural Revolution Killings was formed two years later.