The following account contains graphic descriptions of the deaths of victims of the Cultural Revolution in China.
La desvergüenza con que el revolucionario mata espanta más que sus matanzas.
(The shamelessness with which the revolutionary kills is more frightening than his killings.)
—Nicolás Gómez Dávila
I
The great Xingtai earthquake, registering 6.0 on the moment magnitude scale, struck Hebei province at 5:29:14 on the morning of March 8, 1966. Seismic shockwaves tore through the foothills of the Taihang Mountains, opening up yawning fissures in the landscape, while landslides, sand eruptions, and torrents of floodwater erased entire villages in a matter of moments. Five further earthquakes would follow, the strongest taking place on March 22, and the last on March 29. Three weeks of unrelenting tremors and aftershocks left the region, which had no prior instrumentally located seismicity, in a state of total devastation. Some 5 million homes were destroyed or damaged, and an estimated 8,000 lives were lost, mostly in the rural communities outside the prefecture-level city of Xingtai. Another 38,000 men, women, and children lay grievously injured, and hundreds of thousands more were rendered homeless and destitute amid the wreckage of their annihilated farmhouses and villages.
As the resulting fires were put out, tottering structures were pulled down — or propped up, depending on their state of preservation — and temporary shelters were hastily erected, it was only natural for the thoughts of at least some the affected populace to turn to the t’ien-ming, the Mandate of Heaven. Misgovernment, according to that ancient doctrine, invited dislocations in the natural order, and if any regime had invited divine punishment, surely it would be the one responsible for the botched Great Leap Forward, the ecologically catastrophic Smash Sparrows Campaign, and, worst of all, the Great Chinese Famine. Even Chairman Mao Zedong, a so-called scientific socialist who rejected the notion that natural disasters could be caused by maladministration, would feel a pressing need to justify his mandate in the aftermath of the unforeseen Xingtai earthquake.
Thousands of Red Army soldiers were, therefore, dispatched to Hubei province, bearing placards featuring inspirational quotes from Mao’s Little Red Book. Grieving villagers were reassured that “buildings fall but not the people’s will; the earth quakes but the people stand firm,” and that the party was “forging ahead in face of difficulties, battling the elements and transforming the earth.” So successful was this propaganda campaign, reported the regime organ Peking Review, that “earth-shaking changes are taking place in the Xingtai area” — an unfortunate choice of words, all things considered: “Not trusting in heaven or earth but having singleminded faith in Chairman Mao, people of the stricken area have risen one and all to tear down images of the gods, smash shrines and sweep away old customs and habits.” A genuine cultural revolution was in the offing, as:
The people there are destroying the old ideas, culture, customs, and habits in a big way. The creative study and application of Chairman Mao’s writings has become a new habit rising to take their place. The poor and lower-middle peasants say: “Of all the innumerable books in this world, I like Chairman Mao’s works best.” In day-time, they take placards inscribed with quotations from Chairman Mao to the fields with them so that they can study during breaks. In the evening, they go to their “institute of Chairman Mao’s works” where they study and hold discussions under the oil lamps. With boundless happiness they are talking about how, under the guidance of the great thought of Mao Zedong, they will carry on the socialist revolution and socialist construction, how they will build up new socialist villages and support the world revolution.
Millions had been unjustly persecuted during the Anti-Rightist Campaign (1957–1959), tens of millions had perished in the Great Chinese Famine (1959–1961), and China’s glorious religious and cultural heritage had come under sustained attack in the aftermath of the Xingtai earthquake, but still the regime’s propagandists insisted that “our nearest kin in the world is not as close to us as Chairman Mao,” and that the Chinese people could “never repay him for his kindness.”
II
Three hundred kilometers to the northeast of Xingtai, in Beijing, the radiating shockwaves of the great earthquake were distinctly felt. Situated atop a sedimentary basin in a highly active seismic zone, and crosscut by the dangerous Xiadian Fault, the Beijing region is susceptible to earthquakes of its own; in 1679, the Sanhe-Pinggu earthquake had its epicenter only 50 kilometers east of the Chinese capital. At the Experimental High School Attached to Beijing Normal University, the deputy principal, Bian Zhongyun, thought it best to plan for the worst, telling the student body that, in the event of another earthquake, everyone should calmly exit the classroom as soon as possible. One of her students asked whether, under those circumstances, they should take the classroom portrait of Mao with them. Taken aback, the principal reiterated that time would be of the essence in the event of an earthquake. She could hardly have foreseen the tragic consequences of her understandable non-answer.
On June 1, 1966, the People’s Daily published its infamous editorial “Sweep Away All Cow Demons and Snake Spirits,” with its call to “completely eradicate all the old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits that have poisoned the people of China for thousands of years, fostered by the exploiting classes.” Red Guard–affiliated students at Chinese high schools and universities adopted the slogan “It’s right to rebel” (zaofan youli) and instituted a campaign of harassment against authority figures deemed insufficiently committed to the nascent Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Deputy principal Bian Zhongyun, despite being a longtime communist and having worked at the People’s Daily, came under suspicion for her lack of deference towards Mao’s sacred icon the previous March. Bian was set upon and beaten by some of her students at the beginning of the summer and was attacked again on Aug. 4. She told her husband, Wang Jingyao, that she feared for her life but rejected his suggestion that they flee the capital. Instead, on the morning of Aug. 5, she headed back to work at the Experimental High School, never to return.
Ian Johnson, in his recently published book Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future, described the harrowing events of Aug. 5, 1966:
Bian was tortured all day. In a moving and detailed documentary on the killing by the underground filmmaker Hu Jie, witnesses say the girls wrote slogans over her clothes, shaved her head, jabbed her scalp with scissors, poured ink on her head, and beat her until her eyes rolled into her head. When she started foaming at the mouth, they laughed and ordered her to perform manual labor by scrubbing the toilets. She collapsed and died there, her clothes soaked in blood and feces. Hours later, some students carted her away in a wheelbarrow. When students mentioned Bian’s death to party officials, they brushed it off as not inconsistent with Mao’s orders.
One of the ringleaders of the Red Guard students at the Experimental High School was named Song Binbin, daughter of Song Renqiong, one of the “Eight Elders” of the Chinese Communist Party. On Aug. 18, Mao received Song at a ceremony held at the Tiananmen Gate, and in front of 1 million cheering Red Guards allowed the teenaged militant to tie a red band on his arm. The chairman then gave her a nickname, Song Yaowu, meaning “be valiant” or “you’d better fight,” thereby implicitly condoning, and even celebrating, the ongoing bloodshed. Later in life, Song Binbin could hardly deny being a Red Guard organizer at the time of the unrest but always maintained that she was not personally present when Bian was tortured to death. Other perpetrators were later identified, including Deng Rong (the youngest daughter of future paramount leader Deng Xiaoping) and Liu Pingping (daughter of Vice Chairman Liu Shaoqi). Elias Canetti, in Crowds and Power (1960), analyzed the phenomenon of “reversal crowds,” in which “those who have been defenseless for so long suddenly find teeth” through acts of revolutionary violence, but it is noteworthy that the perpetrators in this case were far more privileged, and far better politically connected, than their beleaguered victim.
Bian Zhongyun was the first casualty of the Cultural Revolution. Millions more would follow. The triumph of Experimental High School Red Guards inspired similar acts at schools all over the People’s Republic. At Beijing’s 8th Middle School, the principal Hua Jin was imprisoned and tortured to death. At Beijing’s 101st Middle School, the art teacher Chen Baokun was beaten and drowned in a fountain. At the Middle School Attached to the Beijing Teachers College, a biology teacher named Yu Ruifen was dragged down a flight of cement steps and then had a vat of boiling water poured over her. She died after two hours of abuse, whereupon the local Red Guard rounded up other faculty members who had been accused of being ox demons and snake spirits and forced them to beat Yu’s corpse with sticks. Gao Yun, the principal of the 2nd Middle School Attached to Beijing Teachers’ University, had thumbtacks pressed into his forehead. Gao Benqiang, a teacher at the Guangzhou Railway Middle School, was made to drink a bottle of ink and thrashed until he vomited a bilious purple mixture of blood and ink. He committed suicide in September of 1966. These were far from isolated incidents, as thousands more would be murdered, hounded into suicide, maimed, or ritually humiliated in the months to come, in this the opening salvo of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
Teachers and administrators at middle schools, high schools, and universities in Beijing and throughout the provinces were made to sing the “Howling Song,” composed by student at Beijing’s 4th Middle School and made popular nationwide:
I am an ox-ghost and a snake-demon
I am an ox-ghost and a snake-demon
I am guilty, I am guilty
I committed crimes against the people
So the people take me as the object of dictatorship
I have to lower my head, and admit my guilt
I must be obedient
I am not allowed to speak or act without permission
If I speak or act without permission
May you beat me and smash me
Beat me and smash me
As Youqin Wang noted, “at the height of the violence in late August 1966, in the middle schools in Beijing a phrase began to circulate which went: ‘It is just a matter of 28 yuan to beat a person to death.’ Twenty-eight yuan was the price of cremation for one corpse. The cremation fees for those who were beaten to death were paid by their families, who did not dare to say a word of protest.” After Bian Zhongyun’s murder, communist cadres under the command of Zhou Enlai visited her grieving husband, ordering him to keep quiet about the incident and “to have a correct attitude toward the revolutionary masses.” Such was the kindness that the Chinese people were told that they could never repay.
III
It is tempting, and basically accurate, to attribute the horrific events of the Chinese Cultural Revolution to a collective fit of insanity. How else are we to explain the image of otherwise ordinary people running amok, ranting about ox-demons, murdering innocent people, and desecrating corpses? The Red August reign of terror, and the dark decade that followed, was a macabre bacchanal, but those who carried it out were not themselves insane. Song Binbin, for example, would go on to pursue graduate studies in geochemistry at Boston University and complete a doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, becoming a naturalized United States citizen — albeit using a different name, Yan — before returning to China to serve as chairwoman of the Beijing Cobia System Engineering Co., Ltd. In 2007, Song was named one of 90 “honorary alumni” in a booklet celebrating the 90th anniversary of the Experimental High School Attached to Beijing Normal University’s founding, much to the chagrin of the late Bian Zhongyun’s husband, Wang Jingyao, who held the former organizer of the school’s revolutionary committee personally responsible for the events of Aug. 5, 1966, and was horrified to see his wife’s picture facing Song’s on opposite pages without any comment or concession.
By 2014, Song was ready to offer a sort of apology, prefaced with the claim that she had tried but failed to disperse the rampaging mob but also admitting that she had “followed those making errors,” and “for this, I have responsibility for the sad death of Principal Bian.” (This was quite a reversal for Song, who back in 2003 had threatened to sue the University of California Press for publishing Chinese Femininities, Chinese Masculinities: A Reader, which included an essay that mentioned her having “led” the student attack on Bian Zhongyun. The publisher issued an errata expressing regret for having presented Song as “responsible for violent acts that occurred near the start of the Cultural Revolution. Including these statements in the book was a serious error in judgment.”) Yet Wang Jingyao deemed the apology “hollow,” while the Beijing Film Academy professor and social critic Cui Weiping added that “considering her identity, this is not enough. She is an important figure in the Red Guards, and the demands on her should be higher than ordinary people. She said she had witnessed a murder. After they said that they do not know who the murderer is, this makes no sense.” These debates were hardly to the liking of the Xi Jinping regime; as Ian Johnson observed in Sparks, “after a brief flurry of reports, the government issued a circular to editors banning news on Song’s apology and ordering websites to take down posts about it.” From the party’s perspective, “it was more unwanted publicity about who did what during the Cultural Revolution — a not obscure topic given that Chinese leader Xi Jinping and other leaders came of age in that era and some may have participated in the violence.”
The case of the Experimental High School teenaged cultural revolutionaries is indicative of the manner in which the madness of crowds differs from the madness of an individual, but we are still left wondering how, and why, otherwise normal people can so quickly, thoughtlessly, and unashamedly fall prey to frenzies of extravagant violence. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Sigmund Freud explored how the mental state of an individual in a crowd could become hypnotic, and how emotions within a teeming mass can be amplified and distorted through gegenseitige Induktion, or “mutual induction.” This goes some way toward providing us with the how, but not really with the why. Slavoj Zizek has suggested not bothering to look for that why in the first place, for “in every authentic revolutionary explosion there is an element of ‘pure’ violence … it is a goal in itself … one should directly admit revolutionary violence as a liberating end in itself.” Nicolás Gómez Dávila, for his part, felt that it was not nihilism but stupidity that was the fuel of revolutions (la estupidez es el combustible de la revolución). That’s as may be, but it still behooves us to investigate why it was that Bian Zhongyun, Chen Baokun, Yu Ruifen, and so many others met such nightmarish ends at the hands of their formerly obedient students.
It was the historian Ban Wang, in his compelling study The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China (1997) who best explained the socio-psychological origins of the Cultural Revolution, with its “gigantic spectacles of mass rallies in Tiananmen Square, the horrifying, brutal scenes of torture and mutilation at street corners, the numerous lofty images of the great Helmsman, and the degraded ‘devils and demons’ (niu gui she shen).” Like Freud, Wang acknowledges that “most people who plunged into political activities [during the revolution] were riding high on waves of emotional ecstasy and excitement,” but he delves further into the aesthetics of revolution. Recall the aftermath of the Xingtai earthquake, when the Chinese soldiers with their empty slogans marched into devastated villages and proceeded to destroy shrines, temples, and religious texts. In their place, Maoist “Loyalty Halls” were erected and filled with icons of the Great Helmsman and copies of the Little Red Book and other Maoist works. Life was being systematically drained of greater meaning precisely at a moment when that meaning was more necessary than ever. “Cultural life during those years was barbarized,” wrote Wang, “aesthetic taste was crude and primitive, the feelings of the populace became impoverished and uncouth; sensory and artistic enjoyment was reduced to the most arid, infantile, and repetitive expressions and was rendered uniform everywhere. Material life was no less impoverished.”
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution offered a temporary respite from this soul-crushing collective Weltschmerz. Rallies, struggle sessions, denunciation sessions, temple demolitions, the public humiliation, torture, and execution of “class enemies,” all provided an outlet for a populace that been stranded in the cultural desert of Maoism. What came next, in Ban Wang’s words, was an “overwhelming explosion of sensory stimulus,” one “captured in the phrase the ‘ocean of red’ (hong haiyang); it was indeed a tumultuous and raging ocean. The sensory and nervous pressure was both overpowering and all-consuming: the individual became submerged and ‘drowned’ in the surging crowd. It was also uplifting and empowering.” The resulting “peculiar psychic state was one of tremendous exhilaration and intense gratification, as the crowd’s libidinal energy was instantly and powerfully released upon seeing the loved object, the figure of Mao.” Whether or not one accepts the Freudian lens through which Wang views these events, it seems undeniable that the Cultural Revolution “came as a welcome opportunity for many young Chinese to assert and aggrandize their increasingly diminished ego.”
It turned into an extended exercise in masochism, namely, the unrelenting struggle sessions, self-dunciations, and unhinged pledges to “climb the mountains of knives and plunge into the sea of fire [shang daoshan xia huohai]” for the sake of Mao, but unthinking sadism was even more central to the movement. As Ban Wang sadly concludes, “the maniacal masses have a tendency to carry out their intentions and satisfy their passions immediately: between violent ideas and actions there must be a shortcut.” That shortcut ran through the Experimental High School and other Chinese institutions of secondary and higher learning. And that is precisely how an “ocean of red” can arise out of a cultural desert.
IV
In the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel, college campuses all across the country were convulsed by pro-Palestinian, and effectively pro-Hamas, protests, attended by exultant shouts of bloody and eliminationist slogans like “Glory to the martyrs!” and “From the river to the sea!” At a rally held just off-campus from Cornell University, Russell Rickford, an associate professor of history, infamously told the crowd how hearing news of the attacks “was exhilarating. It was energizing.… I was exhilarated,” even declaring that you “would not be human” if you felt otherwise. A University of Pennsylvania student spoke of “feeling so empowered and happy, so confident that victory was near and so tangible. I want all of you to hold that feeling in your hearts. Never let go of it. Channel it through every action you take. Bring it to the streets. Go down to the streets every day.” A crowd at Princeton chanted, “Globalize the intifada!” and “There is only one [presumably final] solution: intifada revolution!” (What an intifada would look like in Mercer Country, New Jersey, is left unclear, though it would in all likelihood involve pogroms.) At another protest at UCLA, students took turns hitting a piñata featuring Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s picture; one of them was caught on camera shrieking “Beat that f***ing Jew!” At Cooper Union, a group of Jewish students were forced to barricade themselves in the library as the mob outside pounded on the doors and chanted slogans like “Globalize the intifada from New York to Gaza!” Other examples, unfortunately, abound, and the outrageous litany grows longer with each passing day.
Ban Wang demonstrated how the “increasingly enfeebled narcissistic ego” of the resentful collective “vented its aggressive rage in the destruction and persecutions so rampant during” Red August and the rest of the Cultural Revolution. The vertiginous descent into moral insanity evident on our college campuses differs (for now) only in degree, but not in kind. To witness GoPro and surveillance footage, and ample other documentary evidence — of families murdered in their beds, homes set on fire, Holocaust survivors murdered and kidnapped, women violently raped, children tortured, and unborn children torn from wombs — and to feel “exhilarated,” and to go so far as to deny the humanity of anyone rightly revolted by those atrocities, is to partake of the very psycho-social pathologies exhibited so flagrantly during the Cultural Revolution. Wang had hoped that his exploration of China’s debasement under Mao would perhaps “reduce the not too slim chances that we will be victimized once again,” but the stark lessons furnished by the past are going increasingly unheeded. It would seem that the cultural desert of modern life, together with the ascendancy of decolonization studies and identitarian politics, have combined to create the ideal conditions for a new cultural revolution. And while such revolutions invariably sow the seeds of their own destruction, as revolutionaries devour their own while providing no positive agenda beyond “pure” violence and hatred, the terrible prospect of an “ocean of red” opens up before us.
Consider, if you will, how George Washington, in his letter of Aug. 18, 1790, to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, wrote so eloquently of his hopes that:
the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid. May the father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy.
That the shadow of Cultural Revolution should darken such a land must surely rank as the ultimate indictment of our day and age.