1.Zhu Houze (1931–2010), appointed propaganda head in 1985 under Hu Yaobang, was widely respected for his fresh approach during a time of unprecedented openness in China, and for introducing a “three broadenings” policy of “generosity, tolerance, and lenience.” He was deposed along with Hu in 1987.
2.“Quanli shichang jingji zhidu” is a term Yang uses to refer to an economic system in which political power is the key market factor (as opposed to a plutonomy, in which the economy is controlled merely by the richest regardless of their political power).
1.The article, titled “A True Record of the Massacre in Dao County, Hunan Province, in Late Summer and Early Autumn 1967,” which was published under the byline Zhang Cheng in Hong Kong’s Open Magazine in 2001, was written jointly by myself and Zhang Minghong.
1.Black elements included landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, and bad elements. Landlords and rich peasants were classified by the possession of property; counterrevolutionaries could be categorized on the basis of activities prior to Liberation, such as service to the Kuomintang regime, or current resistance to the CCP or to socialism by word or deed. “Bad element” was an all-inclusive term applied to thieves, swindlers, murders, arsonists, hooligans, and others causing serious violations of public order.
2.Translator’s Note (TN): The Socialist Education movement, which some scholars regard as a dress rehearsal for the Cultural Revolution, was launched by Mao in 1963 to remove “reactionary” elements from the bureaucracy. Its goal was to “cleanse” politics, economy, organization, and ideology, as a result of which it was also referred to as the Four Cleanups campaign. The campaign, which lasted until the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, required intellectuals to go to the countryside to be reeducated by peasants.
3.This is the first of many appearances that Chen Zhixi will make in this book in connection with the killings in Daoxian. I will provide more-thorough background on him later in the book.
4.There are many versions of these 21 categories, but generally speaking, they consisted of landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, Rightists, capitalists, and spies; people who had served in the police, military police, or Youth Corps or as military officers or functionaries under the “puppet” Kuomintang regime; and moneylenders, concubines, peddlers, prostitutes, sorcerers, monks, Daoist priests, nuns, and vagrants.
5.TN: The official name for the Great Famine that occurred during the Great Leap Forward, killing an estimated 36 million people.
1.Translator’s Note (TN): The “smashing of the four olds” was a campaign that began in mid-August 1966, aimed at destroying “old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas.”
2.The Task Force later verified that Xianglinpu, Qingtang, and Shangguan Districts all posted notices of their killings.
3.TN: The Celestial Maiden is a Buddhist deity bringing blessings, depicted in a famous Peking Opera of the same name.
4.TN: In October 1933, Mao wrote “How to Differentiate the Classes in the Rural Areas” to clarify the classification of individuals and households during Land Reform. Mao delineated the rural classes as landlord, rich peasant, middle peasant, poor peasant, and hired laborer on the basis of possession of land and other assets. This classification, further refined with breakdowns into upper-middle and lower-middle peasant, formed the basis for the treatment of individuals and families (through inherited status) through the decades that followed.
5.TN: For an account of the notorious Guangxi killings, which included instances of cannibalism, see Zheng Yi, Scarlet Memorial: Tales of Cannibalism in Modern China, edited and translated by T. P. Sym (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996).
6.TN: Zhou Enlai first called for the modernization of agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology at the 4th National People’s Congress in 1963. The “Four Modernizations” were officially launched by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, marking the beginning of the reform era.
7.TN: The Third Plenum, held December 18–22, 1978, marked the launch of “reform and opening” under Deng Xiaoping and put an emphasis on economic development under the “Four Modernizations” and “seeking truth from facts,” while initiating a repudiation of the Cultural Revolution (which was finally publicly negated in 1981, five years before Tan Hecheng was assigned to report on the Daoxian killings) and ending the Maoist personality cult. The catastrophic Tangshan earthquake occurred in 1976, the same year as the deaths of Premier Zhou Enlai and Chairman Mao Zedong. An accurate death toll has never been reported, but estimates range from around 250,000 to 700,000.
8.TN: President Liu Shaoqi advocated this approach in his speech opening the CCP Central Committee’s Lushan Conference on July 16, 1959, which was marked by enormous conflict over the drawbacks and accomplishments of the Great Leap Forward. Liu reversed the order of discussing problems and accomplishments out of fear of offending Mao—a fact that contributes to the irony of this quote.
9.Wen Yu, China’s “Leftist” Disaster (Beijing: Chaohua chubanshe, 1993).
1.Xiong Bing’en was county CCP secretary, but at this time, the top CCP official at the county level was the party first secretary, Shi Xiuhua, making the CCP secretary the equivalent of a deputy CCP secretary. When the appellation of party first secretary was abolished during the middle period of the Cultural Revolution, many subsequent county CCP committee documents referred to Shi Xiuhua as CCP secretary and Xiong Bing’en as deputy CCP secretary. For the sake of consistency in this book, Xiong will be referred to by the formal title he held at the time, which was CCP secretary.
2.Translator’s Note (TN): Nan Batian was the name of a villainous local despot in the 1960 film The Red Detachment of Women.
3.While I was reporting in Daoxian, one of those responsible for the killings told me, “The incident shouldn’t be referred to as one of killing people, but of killing black elements.” I asked, “Aren’t black elements people?” “Of course they’re people.” “So what’s the difference between killing people and killing black elements?” “Now it looks like there’s no difference, but at that time the difference was enormous.”
4.TN: The “three types of people” who after the Cultural Revolution were investigated for ties with the Gang of Four included “rebels who succeeded by following the Lin Biao and Jiang Qing counterrevolutionary groups, people with strong factionalist tendencies, and people who took part in beating, smashing, and looting.”
1.In Toad Grotto, in the hills about 3 kilometers from Shouyan Town, an archaeologist in December 1993 discovered the remains of rice grains planted by human beings more than 12,000 years earlier, as well as a large number of earthenware pottery sherds dating back at least 14,000 years.
2.The words and actions of individuals in this narrative were recorded from the oral accounts of persons involved in the incidents, or are drawn from the files of the Task Force, and they have been corroborated through collateral evidence. This applies throughout the book.
3.When I wrote the first draft of this book around 1987, it was very hard to get a copy of the Bible in mainland China. Someone managed to skirt official restrictions by publishing a volume called Bible Stories, based on the Bible. When I read this passage in this book, it moved me so much that I recorded it in my notebook, and its inclusion here struck me as appropriate.
4.It is said that Zheng Shengyao slept outside Secretary Zheng Fengjiao’s doorway because the latter had raped his wife. Zheng Shengyao managed to run off to the Xiangyuan tin mine, but he was arrested on August 30 and brought back to Yangjia Commune, where commune cadres beat him to death and then placed a massive stone on his body to signify that he would never rise again.
5.Translator’s Note (TN): For a breakdown of the killing methods, see Appendix I.
6.Referring to the order issued on September 5, 1967, by the CCP Central Committee, State Council, Central Military Commission, and Central Cultural Revolution Small Group, which prohibited further killings. This order will be described in detail later in this book.
7.Zheng Yuanzan served under the KMT regime as Daoxian’s county head in 1948, and as Ningyuan’s county head in 1949. He organized his uprising in Ningyuan on March 29, 1950, and eventually died in Taiwan.
8.The files of the Task Force contain the following text: “Zheng Guozhi, male, born 1945, landlord class, main problems: (1) in order to save his own family, he personally killed one landlord element, (2) he concocted facts and compiled false information on several victims in order to exonerate people who directed killings behind the scenes, or who were themselves killers.”
9.TN: When the Great Famine exposed the disastrous consequences of the commune system, some localities began assigning households responsibility for cultivating certain plots of land and allowed them to retain crops in excess of the state quota. These fields came to be known as “responsibility fields.” Mao ordered that the practice be terminated by spring 1964, and it was not officially reinstated until 1978, but in the meantime, many localities continued to implement the responsibility field system in some form. See Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine 1958–1962, edited and translated by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), pp. 315–19.
1.For a breakdown of the killing methods, see Appendix I. These statistics are somewhat overstated because they include Lefutang Commune and Yangliutang Commune, which at the time of the massacre were part of Qiaotou District, but which by the time of the Task Force investigation had become part of Shouyan District due to an adjustment of district boundaries in 1984.
2.“Five chiefs” (or “four chiefs”) meetings typically related either to class struggle and killings or planting and harvesting. In the context of this book, I will be referring only to the former type.
3.The top three were Youxiang Commune’s Yuejin production brigade, Qiaotou Commune’s Shengli production brigade, and Gongba Commune’s Yanhetang production brigade. Coming in fourth was Lefutang Commune’s Longcun production brigade, with 51 killings.
4.According to statistics from the People’s Republic of China Agricultural Ministry’s People’s Commune Management Bureau, the average per capita annual income in China’s rural areas in 1967 was less than 70 yuan, among which some 200 million peasants had an average annual income of under 50 yuan, and 120 million earned only 10 cents per day. There were also a considerable number of peasants who labored all year without having any monetary payment distributed to them, and who were actually indebted to their production teams. In Daoxian, official data indicate that the average rural per capita income in 1967 was 64 yuan, with most work teams paying their laborers about 40 cents per day, and a small number paying less than 10 cents. Generally speaking, Daoxian was above average in terms of rural incomes nationwide.
5.Translator’s Note (TN): Throughout this book, the term “class enemy” will be employed in place of the more cumbersome designation of “landlord / rich peasant.”
6.TN: Xiong is employing the same language Mao Zedong applied to Chiang Kai-shek after the War of Resistance against Japan.
7.TN: The actual Chinese term used here is tuochan ganbu, or “cadre released from production.” It applied to cadres who were relieved of physical labor to handle administrative duties. We use the translation “administrative cadre” throughout the book for the sake of brevity and clarity.
8.A primary document regarding Deng Jiayu’s criminal acts states that Deng referred to himself as director of the “Commune Supreme People’s Court of the Poor and Lower-Middle Peasants,” and that apart from directing or authorizing the killing of 23 people, he personally tied up 10 victims.
1.Readers will notice that there is no District 3 in the above list. Before the Cultural Revolution, Daoxian had a District 3, Jiangcun District, which included Jiangcun, Shangwujiang, Tangdi, and Linjia Communes. On March 25, 1965, the Hunan provincial CCP committee issued a document that made Jiangcun District part of Shuangpai County. Notably, the largest number of killings in Shuangpai County occurred at Jiangcun Commune, which was formerly part of Daoxian.
2.Evidence indicates that county deputy CCP secretary Yu Shan also took part in this killing mobilization meeting and praised it as having been “run well, promptly, and with initiative.”
3.Translator’s Note (TN): Referring to Lin Biao, whom Mao had designated his successor until Lin was killed in an airplane crash while attempting to flee China on September 13, 1971.
4.Daoxian includes some well-populated natural villages (those that existed spontaneously rather than being created for administrative purposes) with long histories, and the largest of these is Dacun, with more than 1,000 households totaling 4,000 people (during the Cultural Revolution, the county seat, Daojiang, had only a little more than 4,000 people). Because Dacun had too many people for a production brigade, it was divided up into two administrative villages known as Dayicun and Da’ercun (literally, First and Second Da Village). During the Cultural Revolution killings, Dacun acted in strict accordance with the spirit of the upper-level directive stating that “one or two troublemaking bad elements could be killed,” and only two people were killed, one in Dayicun and another in Da’ercun.
5.Someone testified that the Yingjiang Red Alliance headquarters also had a “Supreme People’s Court of the Poor and Lower-Middle Peasants” with formal trials and a sign, which the Revolutionary Alliance was said to have confiscated and displayed at the entrance to the No. 2 High School. However, the Task Force’s files made reference only to the peasant court at Ganziyuan, so the sign displayed at the No. 2 High School might have been the Ganziyuan sign.
6. Authentic Record of the People’s Republic of China (Jilin People’s Publishing) states that from October 2 to 4, 1967, some localities in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region had “supreme people’s courts of the poor and lower-middle peasants” that randomly seized black elements and their offspring. On December 24, with the authorization of the CCP Central Committee, the Guangxi Revolutionary Committee Preparatory Committee and Military Subregion jointly declared the peasant supreme courts illegal and ordered them disbanded. TN: The notorious cases of Cultural Revolution killings and cannibalistic practices in Guangxi are described in Zheng Yi’s Scarlet Memorial: Tales of Cannibalism in Modern China, translated by T. P. Sym (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996) began in July 1968.
7.The Task Force identified one local supervising cadre (Ou Caiqing, former director of the CCP committee office of the Lengshuitan Paper Mill), one politics and law cadre (Zhou Renbiao), and one commune CCP secretary (Deng Yaochun, former deputy CCP secretary of Simaqiao District’s Yangjia Commune) who personally took part in the killings.
1.This banner was eventually seized by the Revolutionary Alliance and displayed at the entrance of Daoxian’s No. 2 High School along with a plaque for the “Supreme People’s Court of the Poor and Lower-Middle Peasants.”
2.Jiang Weizhu, born in 1948 to a landlord family in Qingtang Commune’s Jiangjia production brigade, was imprisoned in 1967 in connection with the New People’s Party case, ultimately saving her from being killed in the massacre. Rehabilitated after the Cultural Revolution, she became a teacher.
3.Translator’s Note: The political jargon “unify” (tuanjie) meant to win someone over so he or she could be included in the revolutionary ranks.
4.Zheng Youzhi specially arranged for logistics department head Zheng Mingchi to purchase several copies of the Investigative Report on the Hunan Peasant Movement to distribute to the conference attendees.
5.Referring to the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group’s official reply to the 47th Army’s “Social Situation Cable” forwarded by the Lingling Military Subdistrict.
6.Starting in February 1967, a meningitis outbreak in Daoxian’s villages affected 1,730 people in a year’s time, killing 212.
7.This includes Lijiaping Commune, which was still under Daoxian’s Chetou District at that time, although it fell under the jurisdiction of Shuangpai County by the time of the Task Force investigation.
1.Chetou District was renamed Meihua to commemorate the female revolutionary He Baozhen (1902–1934), the first wife of former president Liu Shaoqi and a native of Daoxian’s Meihua Township. She joined the CCP in March 1923 and married Liu Shaoqi that same year. After being arrested by the Nationalist authorities in 1933, she was executed in 1934 at the age of 32. When Liu Shaoqi was labeled the CCP’s “biggest capitalist roader of the faction in power,” He Baozhen lost the respect of her home village, but when Liu Shaoqi was posthumously rehabilitated in 1978, He Baozhen likewise regained her good name.
2.He Wencheng earned less than 30 fen per day, so 180 yuan was the equivalent of two years’ pay.
3.Translator’s Note: Lijiaping Commune’s killings aren’t included in the total for Chetou/Meihua District, because the commune was under the jurisdiction of Shuangpai County by the time of the Task Force’s investigation.
4.During the Cultural Revolution, the Zhangwufang production brigade was under Chetou District’s Meihua Commune, but when the administrative areas were restructured in 1984, it was made part of Qingxi District’s Qingkou Township. The Zhangwufang production brigade killed 33 people during the Cultural Revolution.
5.At that time, commune members were highly restricted in their movements, and leaving the village to work required permission from one’s production team and production brigade as well as a certificate. Income from a sideline occupation had to be handed over to the production team according to a quota and was converted into work points, which were then distributed at the end of the year.
6.The Task Force files reveal that the production brigade’s deputy head, He Kaixian, was also implicated in the revenge killings of He Dingxin and his son because during the Socialist Education movement, He Dingxin had followed his work team’s directive to publicly criticize He Kaixian. During this “random killing,” when the brigade discussed the name list of people to be killed, the majority were against killing He Dingxin, but He Kaixian insisted, and militia head He Ziliang supported him.
7.Hua Guofeng (1921–2008) was first secretary of the Hunan provincial CCP committee during the Cultural Revolution. He was appointed premier of the State Council in 1976 and became China’s supreme leader in October following Mao’s death. Because he adhered to “whatever Mao directed or ordered” and committed “ultra-Leftist line errors” by maintaining conservative policies and rejecting reform, he was removed from his position as state council premier in September 1980, and as chairman of the CCP Central Committee and Central Military Commission that December.
1.Two were provided by the Dongjin brigade, and one each by the Dongfang and Dongfeng brigades, but none were provided by the Dongyuan brigade, where cadres were unable to reach a consensus.
2.According to what the Task Force was able to ascertain, brigade CCP secretary Jiang Shiming had additional motivation for killing He Shanliang, who had criticized him during the Socialist Education movement.
3.Translator’s Note: To make the text less confusing for a non-Chinese readership, the translators have removed many names of minor figures, but we wish to state here that Tan did include the names of the perpetrators, with a few stated exceptions.
4.On August 8, 1966, the 11th plenum of the Eighth Central Committee passed the “Stipulations regarding the Proletarian Great Cultural Revolution,” which defined and elaborated on the nature, aims, targets, and methods of struggle and policies pertaining to the Cultural Revolution. It was divided into 16 clauses and therefore came to be known as the “Sixteen Articles.”
1.He Shaoji was from a prominent family of officials and scholar farmers. His father, He Linghan, served as a top-ranking official in the court of the Qing emperor Jiaqing. He Shaoji himself was a successful candidate in the highest imperial examination in the Daoguang era, and he served as a minor official in other parts of the country. He’s three younger brothers, Shaoye, Shaoqi, and Shaojing, were all master calligraphers in the Qing dynasty, resulting in the appellation of the “four outstanding He brothers.” He’s grandson, He Weipu, was a nationally famous artist during the Republican era.
2.From what the Task Force was able to ascertain, during the Cultural Revolution killings, Guo Chengshi repeatedly raped women and served as an executioner. Among the 14 people killed in his brigade, seven died by Guo Chengshi’s hand.
3.During our reporting in Wanjiazhuang, an informed source told us that Liu Fucai had a dubious relationship with CCP secretary Jiang Fangru’s wife, and since Jiang wasn’t able to satisfy his wife, he was forced to tolerate it. When the killing wind blew up in 1967, Jiang Fangru took this opportunity to have Liu killed.
4.Translator’s Note: The “Five Winds” referred to “unhealthy tendencies” of “communist wind,” “exaggeration wind,” “coercive commandism wind,” “cadre privilege wind,” and the “chaotic directives wind,” relating to production that arose during the commune movement in 1958 and contributed directly to the Great Famine.
5.The Task Force investigated the rape and killing of Liang Xianlian, but due to lack of evidence they were unable to ascertain the facts or reach a conclusion. What I have recorded here is drawn from the original complaint. As a matter of principle, this book recounts only what the Task Force was able to verify, but because the story of what happened to Liang Xianlian was circulated so widely in Daoxian, I decided to make an exception and include it here.
1.See Appendix I for a breakdown of killing methods. In the course of repeated statistics gathering, inaccuracies crept in. The figures here are from the final written record, but the totals don’t add up neatly.
2.Subsequent investigation determined that this allegation was false.
3.Zhou Renjie’s story was told to me by a surviving family member after my book was published in Hong Kong. This family member, who was still badly shaken by the events of that time, also told me stories of many other victims, but I didn’t add them to the revised version of the book, in accordance with my principle of including only those stories backed up by official documentation. I made an exception for Zhou Renjie’s story, because there are very few accounts relating to suicide cases.
4.Some have challenged the details I provide in these narratives: “You write in such detail; did you see it yourself?” On this I am willing to make the following declaration: first of all, before black elements were killed, all of them had persons assigned to keep watch over them—“Their every word and action was under close surveillance by revolutionaries.” Second, these details were told to me by villagers when I did my reporting in 1986, and they all gave the same version of events. Third, historical records need to place an emphasis on detail in order to portray as much as possible the real feelings of those times. The truth is that I haven’t reproduced villagers’ descriptions of the killings verbatim, because it would be too overwhelmingly horrific for readers.
1.Translator’s Note (TN): This is a different person from the Qingxi District PAFD commander of the same name.
2.After Yang Meiji ran off, he was killed in Simaqiao’s Henglinggaoqiao Village while the local militia was searching the hills. It remains a mystery how he learned he was on the killing list. Yang’s son, Yang Yanggu, was subsequently also sentenced to death by the brigade’s peasant supreme court.
3.The information concerning Gongba Commune is drawn from the Task Force’s files.
4.TN: Aesop’s fable: One winter a farmer found a snake stiff and frozen with cold. Pitying the creature, he picked it up and tucked it into his shirt. Revived by the warmth and resuming its natural instincts, the snake bit its benefactor. With his dying breath, the farmer lamented, “I am rightly served for pitying a scoundrel.” Moral: the greatest kindness will not bind the ungrateful.
5.The Task Force’s files reveal that Tian Zibi was killed at the instigation of two “revolutionary teachers” and the principal of the school where he taught.
1.Translator’s Note (TN): Mao in late 1956 initiated a campaign to “let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend” to encourage people to speak out about how the CCP should improve its operations. Once too many criticisms were raised, however, the movement turned into an Anti-Rightist campaign in July 1957, resulting in the persecution of hundreds of thousands of those who had spoken out.
2.TN: The “Communist Wind,” “Exaggeration Wind,” “Coercive Commandism Wind,” “Cadre Privilege Wind,” and “Chaotic Directives Wind” that arose and then were combated during the Great Leap Forward.
3.TN: This encounter is mentioned by Xu Zhensi in his narrative below.
4.TN: This encounter with Zhu Xianhou and several companions (not actual brothers) is also referred to in Zhu Xianhou’s narrative below.
5.TN: See the narrative by Xu Zhenzhong above.
6.TN: Lei Feng was a PLA soldier who after his death in 1962 was promoted as a model of selfless and modest devotion and became the subject of a nationwide propaganda campaign to “learn from comrade Lei Feng.”
7.The Task Force’s investigation confirmed that Jiang Rutian took part in the killing of 19 people during the Cultural Revolution massacre.
8.TN: See Xu Zhenzhong’s narrative above.
1.Translator’s Note (TN): See Appendix I for the breakdown of killing methods.
3.Baimadu is one of Daoxian’s eight main markets and is where the Qingxi District government has its offices. The marketplace was relocated to a hill 200 meters back when the original location was flooded with the construction of the Shuangpai Reservoir in 1961.
4.TN: Liquor into which blood has been dripped, which is shared among a group to signify an oath of loyalty.
5.TN: Not to be confused with the district secretary, whose name has the same pinyin spelling.
6.The Task Force’s investigations determined that all these accusations were unfounded.
7.The Task Force’s files reveal that Youxiang Commune PAFD commander He Wenzhi was one of the main people responsible for organizing, planning, and carrying out killings at the commune.
1.Translator’s Note: In 1963, Mao arranged a campaign to encourage all of China’s peasants to follow the example of self-sacrifice and political awareness set by farmers in Dazhai, Shanxi Province. The campaign was reinforced in the later stage of the Cultural Revolution.
1.The Xinche pontoon bridge, 100 meters long and composed of 23 conjoined boats, spans the Yanshui (Yongming River) between Xinche Market and Bajia Village in Daoxian’s southwest region. The Zhu clan of Bajia Village contributed the funds to construct the bridge in 1795.
2.Translator’s Note: Mao Zedong, “Inscription on a Picture Taken by Comrade Li Chin” (November 17, 1961), in Mao Zedong, Poems (Utrecht, The Netherlands: Open Source Socialist Publishing, 2008).
1.Translator’s Note: This university was an important Kuomintang training ground before the Cultural Revolution.
2.One of Yang Tianxun’s brothers, Yang Tianbao, was a high-ranking officer in the Nationalist Army. He went to Taiwan in 1949 and reportedly served as a deputy commander of the Quemoy (Jinmen) defense force. When mainland China bombarded Quemoy in 1958, the local county government sent Yang Tianxun to the Xiamen frontline to try to convince his brother to change sides.
3.A “venomous attack against the Great Leader Chairman Mao and the Glorious, Great and Correct Chinese Communist Party” was the greatest crime that could be committed during the Cultural Revolution.
4.The number killed was actually 25.
1.According to the Task Force’s files, Xianglinpu Commune’s Langlong brigade killed two other schoolteachers who were still in service: the principal of Shenzhangtang Junior-Senior Primary School, and a locally funded schoolteacher in the brigade.
2.See chapter 10.
1.Translator’s Note (TN): Although involved with Qingtang rather than Xianglinpu District, Zheng Youzhi is included in this chapter because he was interviewed at the same time as Yuan Lifu.
2.The Task Force file on Zheng Youzhi describes him thus: “Zheng Youzhi, male, 50 years old [in 1985], Han, CCP member, upper-primary-school education. Enlisted in the Army in 1950, transferred to civilian work in 1955, served as commander of Daoxian’s Qingtang District PAFD from 1962 to 1968. During the Cultural Revolution he was commander of the Daoxian Red Alliance Frontline Command Post and is now an ordinary cadre in the Daoxian sugar refinery.”
3.The Task Force file described Yuan Lifu thus: “Yuan Lifu, male, 45 years old [in 1985], university education, CCP member, native of Daoxian, currently a cadre in the Dong’an County township enterprise bureau. During the Cultural Revolution, he was deputy district head and secretary of Xianglinpu District, and leader of the district militia headquarters in Shangdu.”
4.All of them unjustified.
5.TN: Mao Zedong, “Reply to Mr. Liu Yazi,” 1949.
1.The name of this leader was Huang Yida, whose story I’ll tell at the end of this book.
2.Translator’s Note: Vaclav Havel, “New Year’s Address to the Nation,” January 1, 1990 [http://old.hrad.cz/president/Havel/speeches/1990/0101_uk.html].
1.Daoxian has two places called Qiaotou (“bridge head”); one is Qiaotou Market in Qiaotou Township, and the other is Qiaotou Village in Gongba District’s Xingqiao Township.
2.Translator’s Note (TN): Wang Jinxi gained his nickname for his heroic exploits laboring in the punishing environment of Liaoning’s Daqing oil field in the early 1960s.
3.TN: Defense Minister Peng Dehuai (1898–1974) was purged and replaced by Lin Biao after criticizing Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward during the Lushan Conference in July 1959. Held under house arrest until vindicated by an official investigation and the obvious failures of the Great Leap, Peng was once again assigned work in September 1965, only to become one of the first public figures attacked when the Cultural Revolution was launched in 1966. Accused of being a “great warlord, ambitionist, and conspirator” who had “infiltrated the party and the Arm,” Peng spent the rest of his life in prison, dying after a protracted illness.
4.In Daoxian, land basins surrounded by hills were referred to as “caves.”
5.Twelve People’s Communes were initially established in Daoxian under the communization movement, but after Liao wrote this letter, in May 1961, these communes (with the exception of Daojiang People’s Commune) were subdivided into 40 communes. Qiaotou Commune became Qiaotou District, and the Lefutang production brigade became Lefutang Commune.
1.Translator’s Note: Huang Shiren was the despotic landlord character in the Chinese opera, film, and later ballet The White Haired Girl. Zhou Bapi (“Zhou the skin-peeler) was a semifictionalized landlord who reputedly stirred up the roosters to wake up his laborers earlier. Nan Batian is the evil landlord in the revolutionary film and ballet The Red Detachment of Women. Liu Wencai (1887–1949) was the brother of a warlord, reputed to cheat peasants in their leases to ensure they remained permanently in debt.
1.Daoxian was peacefully liberated on November 15, 1949, and some officials of the KMT county party committee and county government rendered meritorious service in the liberation.
2.I have another similar case in hand, which occurred in the Shijia brigade of Xianglinpu District’s Xianglinpu Commune. Yang Xiyou and Yang Xilian, among others, carried out a revenge killing on landlord offspring Yang Juejin and his four minor children, then gang-raped his wife, Yang Damei (age 25), and forced her to marry a 60-year-old poor peasant named Yang Xixuan.
1.According to the Task Force’s files, He Daijing criticized He Daiyu only because the Socialist Education movement work team put him up to it.
2.Translator’s Note: This quotes Mao’s speech at the Second Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee on November 15, 1956.
3.The Xiyuan Reservoir is located in Xiaojia Township in eastern Daoxian. Construction began in October 1958 and was completed in February 1959. As soon as water was stored in it, the dam began leaking and required emergency repairs every year. Early in the morning on June 20, 1968, the reservoir burst and inundated four communes downstream, destroying 5,420 mu of paddy fields and 309 homes. The reservoir was rebuilt later that year, with work completed at the end of 1970.
1.Early on in the Cultural Revolution, during the campaign to “smash the four olds” in August 1966, Xianzijiao Commune was renamed Hongyan Commune, and the Qijiawan production brigade was renamed Qixing. However, the original geographical names were subsequently restored, so they will be used here.
2.According to the Task Force’s files, Zhou Guizhang and Zheng Qibing, as well as the commune’s deputy CCP secretary Wu Yaozhi and others, all were implicated in the killings at Xianzijiao Commune, either by inciting, directing, or authorizing the killings. For example, when production brigades requested instructions from Zheng Qibing, he said, “It doesn’t matter if you kill a few troublemakers.”
3.Translator’s Note: Referring to the slogan “lopping off the tail of capitalism.”
4.This is the same Liao Mingzhong who was deputy commander of the Red Alliance Frontline Command Post in Yingjiang.
5.During the Cultural Revolution killings, 16 people were killed in the Dajiangzhou brigade.
1.The person referred to here is Pan Xingyue, who was vice chairman of Daoxian’s county revolutionary committee during the Cultural Revolution and later became county deputy head. Like the vast majority of the county leadership, Pan explicitly supported the killings, although his overall performance during the Cultural Revolution was relatively moderate. During the subsequent investigations of the killings, the only county-level leaders called to account were people such as Xiong Bing’en and Wang Ansheng—and only because of the persistence of their opponents in the Revolutionary Alliance.
1.Translator’s Note: A very popular novel by Qu Bo, published in 1957 and made into a movie in 1960. The novel related the thrilling tale of soldiers sent into the mountains to search for bandits and brigands.
2.Inquiries subsequently found that the militia grabbed Zhang Hanfan and forced him at gunpoint to say where he’d hidden Zhou Qun.
1.Translator’s Note: That is, when peasants were no longer allowed to earn income from private enterprise. This prohibition came into effect in the late 1950s.
2.A campaign to attack counterrevolutionaries and oppose corruption, extravagance, and waste, carried out from 1968 to 1970.
1.According to the Task Force’s files, most of those killed were former KMT military personnel who had taken part in the peaceful liberation of Daoxian in 1949. The question that needs to be answered is who exposed the histories of these people and ordered them targeted.
2.The Revolutionary Alliance believed they were under mortar attack by the Revolutionary Alliance, but in fact the Red Alliance was firing homemade cannonballs that Zheng Youzhi and others had manufactured at Dapingpu Farm and delivered to Daojiang on the afternoon of August 29. Zheng ordered the cannons to fire at the No. 2 High School at midnight, but since lack of accuracy diminished their lethal power, the barrage was discontinued.
3.Translator’s Note: The original quote by Mao is “China belongs not to the reactionaries but to the Chinese people” (“The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains,” June 11, 1945, in The Selected Works of Mao Zedong).
4.The Hunan Provincial Revolutionary Committee Preparatory Group was established on August 19, 1967, after a delegation from Hunan was received in Beijing by Premier Zhou Enlai. Under the authorization of the CCP Central Committee, the members of this group were:
Chairman Li Yuan (commander of the 47th Army); Vice Chairman Hua Guofeng (Hunan provincial CCP secretary); Zhang Bosen (alternate Hunan provincial CCP secretary and provincial vice governor); members Liang Chunyang (vice chairman of the provincial economic commission), Jia Yong (deputy commissioner of the provincial water and electricity department), Zheng Bo (deputy commander of the 47th Army), Liu Shunwen (director of the PLA political cadre school), Tan Wenbang (political commissar of the Hunan provincial military district), Lin Guoxing (deputy political commissar of the Hunan provincial military district), Hu Yong and Tang Zhongfu (leaders of the Changsha Workers’ Alliance), Ye Weidong (leader of Xiang River Storm), Zhu Shunxiang (leader of the University and College Revolutionary Rebel Headquarters), Zhang Chubian (leader of “Changsha Workers”), and Xie Ruobing (leader of “Jinggang Mountain”). On September 5, 1967, the provincial preparatory group issued its Proclamation No. 1, which “invested all of Hunan’s party, government, financial, and cultural authority in the Hunan Provincial Revolutionary Committee Preparatory Group.”
1.It appears that Liu Xiangxi lacked the most basic understanding of China’s classical poetry. Claiming that this doggerel follows the strict prosodic rules of qilü heptasyllabic verse reflects his rudimentary education.
2.Translator’s Note (TN): Abbreviated pinyin for the Revolutionary Alliance.
3.TN: Abbreviated pinyin for the Red Alliance.
4.Wang Enchang was also the secretary in charge of the county CCP committee’s rural work committee.
5.TN: “Rulers of Destiny” comes from a phrase in a poem by Mao titled “Changsha—in the Rhyme Pattern of Qingyuanchun” (“Who rules over man’s destiny in this boundless land?”)
1.I later learned that this was Yang Qingxiong from Gongba Commune’s Guangjialing brigade, whose story was related in chapter 12.
2.Translator’s Note: A quote by Mao referring to the difficulty of turning the peasantry into a proletariat with advanced consciousness.
1.When the CCP Central Committee launched the Cultural Revolution with its “May 16 Notice,” some people in Daoxian’s county CCP committee treated it like a more advanced stage of the Socialist Education (Four Cleans) movement, continuing with the traditional campaign methods of dispatching work teams to schools and major cultural work units to mobilize the masses, develop class struggle, etc., which Mao Zedong subsequently referred to as Liu Shaoqi’s “bourgeois reactionary line.” Huang Yida was targeted for his involvement in such activities as an official who supervised cultural and educational frontline work and as a leader of the Socialist Education movement at the county and prefectural level.
2.Translator’s Note (TN): Deng Tuo, Beijing’s municipal secretary in charge of culture and education, became caught up in the controversy over the historical play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, which sparked the Cultural Revolution, and he was driven to suicide in 1966.
3.This was the August 18 Battle of Yijiawan, famous in the history of the Cultural Revolution in Hunan.
4.They presented two reports, one on the state of the struggle between the two roads in Daoxian’s Cultural Revolution, and the second on the Daoxian PAFD’s support of the conservative faction and suppression of the rebel faction. Huang Yida wrote the first report; Huang Chengli, the second one.
5.From 1958 to 1966, Zhang Bosen served as alternate secretary of the Hunan provincial CCP committee, and vice governor of Hunan Province. In 1967 he became vice chairman of the Hunan Provincial Revolutionary Committee Preparatory Group, and in 1968 he became vice chairman of the Hunan Provincial Revolutionary Committee. In March 1984, he was expelled from the CCP and was dismissed from all positions inside and outside the CCP due to errors he committed during the Cultural Revolution.
6.Subsequent inquiries established that Liang Chunyang gave a similar five-point directive. The directive was probably decided by the main leaders of the provincial revolutionary committee preparatory group after a special meeting and discussion.
7.Members of the Revolutionary Alliance such as Liu Xiangxi referred to the “September 23 Tragedy” as the “Battle of September 23,” while the Red Alliance said it wasn’t a battle but a massacre. In my humble opinion, referring to it as the “September 23 Tragedy” is more appropriate.
8.TN: The Chinese term for “Royalist” sounds the same as the term “protect Huang [Yida].”
9.For the content of the notice, see chapter 30.
1.Translator’s Note (TN): “Bombarding the three reds” consisted of “opposing the Great Leader Chairman Mao and the proletarian headquarters under his command, opposing Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line, and opposing the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution personally launched by Chairman Mao.”
2.TN: The “Great Wall” was typically a reference to the People’s Liberation Army.
3.Huang Yida spoke this sentence the first time I interviewed him, focusing at that time on the killings. I wasn’t aware of the full implications until he later told me the rest.
4.In his “Self-Criticism and Admission of Guilt” (December 3, 1967), Huang Yida reported that during the Socialist Education movement in July 1966, the prefectural leader of the movement ordered him to come up with a list of the county’s “little Deng Tuos”: “In the phase of arresting ‘little Deng Tuos’ alone, 73 people from county organs and secondary schools were struggled, and after large and small rallies, 29 were labeled anti-party anti-socialist elements, while another 24 were not labeled and 20 were helped.”
5.It is an irrefutable fact that the relevant authorities arranged for He Xia and others to secretly monitor other inmates. Someone told me that he felt a compulsion to strangle He Xia.
6.The Dongwei coal mine was relatively backward and accessed by a wooden ladder dozens of meters long. Even the strongest laborer, not to mention someone in Huang Yida’s condition, could easily fall to his death while lugging a sack of coal. Such accidents had already occurred at the mine.
1.Li Zhenxiang (Li Yuan, consultant), Record of the 47th Army’s Three Supports and Two Militarizations in Hunan, April 2004, Hunan publication permit No. 2004-021. The title refers to supporting the Left, the workers, and the peasants, and providing military control and training. The section on the Daoxian massacre is in chapter 2, section 5.
2.Translator’s Note (TN): The Chinese poem matches the seven-syllable cadence and some of the words in Mao Zedong’s poem “The Long March.”
3.TN: Bertrand Russell, “Prologue,” in Autobiography (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1951).
4.TN: Bertrand Russell, Why Men Fight: A Method of Abolishing the International Duel (New York: Century, 1917), p. 179.