Premier Wen says China needs political reform to avoid repeating Cultural

October 1, 2010
Hidden cemetery tells story that Chinese leaders won't
Tom Lasseter | McClatchy Newspapers

CHONGQING, China — At a lakeside park in Chongqing, tucked in the shadows between the trees and bushes is a cemetery that holds a story that many in China would like to forget.

Hidden behind high walls and locked iron gates are tombs for Red Guards killed during the dark days of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, a ruthless attempt to reinforce Communist party ideology beginning in 1966.

As with everything to do with Mao, the graveyard occupies an uneasy space in Chinese history.

When China's top leaders observed the 61st anniversary of the founding of Communist China on Friday with a flower-laying ceremony at the Monument to the People's Heroes in Beijing, they did so quietly, without the speeches extolling Mao that once marked all such events.

More than six decades after Mao declared the formation of the central government, the country is caught between competing narratives about the legacy of the Communist Party's patriarch.

His revolutionary triumphs are inscribed on monuments around the country, and his face is stamped on Chinese paper currency. A portrait of the "Great Leader" dominates the gates of the Forbidden City, where emperors once lived, and the Tiananmen Square across the street is home to his mausoleum.

On the other hand, few Chinese are eager to discuss the havoc and death Mao's ideological adventures wreaked on the country.

Although the Chinese government in 1981 formally admitted Mao's role in the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution — which together with his earlier Great Leap Forward initiative led to the deaths of millions — it also stated that Chinese should continue to uphold "Mao Zedong thought."

The underlying message then, as now: Officials have no interest in judging too closely the man who in large part built the Chinese Communist Party.

Some 900 miles southwest of the capital, though, the Chongqing cemetery is a reminder of what happened in the years that politicians prefer to leave blank.

The 130 or so tombstones — many marking multiple burials — evoke guilt and sorrow for those who survived, according to ordinary Chinese milling around the paths near the graveyard.

"Those people should not have died, but they had too much belief in Old Man Mao," said Li Xingxiu, 68, her eyes filled with sadness. "Me, personally, I also believed him too much . . . that time made a mess of peoples' lives."

The fighting between Red Guards factions — youth groups at the head of Mao's efforts to wipe out "counter-revolutionary" elements — in the city 1967 and 1968 was particularly violent as militants seized tanks and flame throwers from the city's munitions factories.

In Chongqing, now a fast-growing megacity, many still remember the chaos.

"Was I here at the time? I joined the Red Guards. I was on the side of the revolution, I was for Chairman Mao," said a retired factory worker in khaki slacks and a short-sleeved shirt.

Pushed for detail, he looked nervous.

"Back then it was correct, everyone had to follow Mao," said the man, who didn't want his name published.

State media announced earlier this year that the Chongqing graveyard had become the first Cultural Revolution site in China to be preserved under government order.

Asked about the implications of the decision, Wu Tao, a senior expert at Chongqing's bureau of cultural relics, said "we will only follow the decision made by the central government . . . we will not judge" the Cultural Revolution.

The plan to keep the cemetery was qualified, for access is shut for most of the year.

"It has historical value, but we should wait for a while before opening it, until the people who participated in that event (the Cultural Revolution) have passed away," said Pu Yongjian, a professor of tourism management at Chongqing University. "Many years from now, another generation will be able to view this period of history fairly."

Because students in China are given a sanitized account of Mao's life, and unauthorized texts are blocked, it remains unclear to what extent future generations will be able to consider the subject.

"For young people, we have a general idea about it," said Xiao Zhiqiang, a 35-year-old factory manager in Chongqing. And what do the legacies of Mao and the Cultural Revolution mean for today's China? "I have no idea," Xiao said.

Sitting with a group of friends at the park, Xie Xueru, a former cadre in the local government's agricultural department, said he doesn't like the cemetery at all.

"I don't think it's necessary for this graveyard to be here. It reminds us of the Cultural Revolution," Xie said.

He considered the matter for another moment before speaking again.

"They died innocently and should not be blamed," said Xie, 65. "But they deserved to die. They put too much trust in a 'holy person.'"

Having said as much, Xie looked around and seemed unsure of what to say next. Then it came: "That 'holy person' was Mao Zedong."

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Aug. 24, 2010
4 decades later, China still isn't discussing Cultural Revolution
Tom Lasseter | McClatchy Newspapers

BEIJING — The schoolgirls slapped and punched their vice principal, then grabbed table legs with protruding nails and beat her unconscious. Bian Zhongyun was left slumped in a garbage cart in the Beijing high school's courtyard. She'd urinated and defecated on herself, and died with blood and spit drooling from her mouth.

On that afternoon in August 1966, Bian became an early murder victim of the Cultural Revolution, a movement that would leave millions of Chinese dead, injured or mentally broken in the decade that followed.

Although 44 years have passed since the "Red August" that unleashed the floodgates of violence in the capital and across the nation, there's never been a complete public accounting in China about what happened. Bian's killers have yet to be named.

"Even after all these decades, their crimes are still being covered up," said Wang Jingyao, 89, Bian's widower. Wang has kept the bloody, soiled clothes that Bian wore the day she was killed. He wants to know who killed his wife.

"But it's very difficult to find out in China," he said.

Unlike South Africa or Chile, which set up truth commissions to exhume painful pasts, China remains tight-lipped. The authoritarian government in Beijing has discouraged domestic attempts at critical examination of the legacy of the Cultural Revolution.

So even as analysts across the world speak of China's bright economic future, at home this August there remains a page missing from the country's past.

Observers say the reason is obvious: Mao Zedong, who fanned the flames of the Cultural Revolution out of fears that the government was growing too moderate, is the historical bedrock of the Communist Party. To delve into the destruction Mao wrought could lead to a questioning of the political system itself.

Chinese official histories acknowledge that the period was bloody and chaotic, but they give little detail about what happened, especially when it comes to individual murders. State museums often don't mention the event at all.

The Cultural Revolution formally began in the spring of 1966 with notifications at the Politburo, but the wider bloodshed began that August after Mao, dissatisfied with the government for not acting boldly enough, urged more radical action. Red Guard units attacked those with "bad class backgrounds" with impunity, universities were shut down and millions were sent to the countryside to do manual labor.

Other leaders later took the blame for the chaos, starting with the "Gang of Four," which included Mao's wife, but veneration of the "Great Helmsman" continued after he died in 1976.

"The Cultural Revolution changed the life of our generation completely, and it wreaked havoc on China. It was a catastrophe," said Wang Duanyang, who as a teenager led a Red Guard group in Tianjin, a city southeast of Beijing. "I feel regret. ... I have done a lot of things that you may think ridiculous and insane, but those things were done in a particular context."

Wang wrote a book that described the humiliation and beating of his school's leaders and local officials that he witnessed, and in 2007 he paid to have 1,000 copies published. In the forward he apologizes "to the people who I've hurt." He handed out the volume to friends and acquaintances, but commercial distribution wasn't an option.

"According to the Chinese government, any (unauthorized) book related to the Cultural Revolution is not allowed to be published," said Wang, whose own father, an author, was denounced as a "rightist" during the movement.

Why?

"You should ask the Chinese government," he said.

Beyond Mao's legacy, the history is sensitive because those involved in assaults on their fellow Chinese almost certainly included future leaders of business and politics.

Looking over pictures of himself with fellow Red Guards in 1966 and beyond, Wang pointed to young men who grew up to be a vice minister, an influential party official in Shanghai and the director of an important state history museum.

Wang Youqin, a former student at Bian's school who's written a book about the Cultural Revolution, named a prominent Chinese bank executive and a senior administrator at a Shanghai university as having knowledge about Bian's death.

"They have become people with power and with money," said Wang Jingyao, Bian's husband. "The central government wants to cover up for them and protect them."

The high school where Bian died was one of the best known in the country. The daughters of the general secretary of the Communist Party, Deng Xiaoping, and the head of state, Liu Shaoqi, attended the school. (The two men were named enemies of the party during the Cultural Revolution; Liu reportedly died in a jail cell, but Deng later became the country's leader.)

Despite the school's visibility, there's been no official investigation of Bian's murder on Aug. 5, 1966.

A Chinese filmmaker produced a short, powerful documentary about her death in 2006, but authorities forbade showing it in China. Wang Youqin, who's a senior lecturer of Chinese language at the University of Chicago, has created a website and ongoing research project about Bian's death and the Cultural Revolution, but Chinese authorities blocked the site.

"If there was a trial I would go to the court and give evidence, but there is no trial," Wang Youqin said. "They say that generation was fed by wolves' milk; they never really understood that what they did was wrong."

A moment later, Wang corrected herself, saying that there are former Red Guards who are sorry for their actions, but "for some people who were Red Guards, they don't want you to expose their bloody past."

During the afternoon of that Aug. 5, Wang said, she saw students pour black ink on administrators' faces and drag them around and then "people went to the carpenter's room and got broken table legs with nails in them." At that point, Wang said, she left the scene.

Bian already had been subjected to "struggle sessions" in which students kicked and beat her with wooden training rifles. They plastered her house with signs that accused her of party disloyalty and taunted that she'd "trembled all over" while getting doused with water and having her mouth stuffed with mud "just like a pig."

The day before her death, more than a half-dozen students whipped Bian and another teacher with belts and buckles.

One of the senior student leaders present the afternoon of Bian's murder, Liu Jin, agreed to talk with McClatchy about the experience. Liu was joined by a friend, Feng Jinglan, who was also there that day.

The pair, now in their 60s, recounted the political history of the Cultural Revolution and gave a chronology of events at the school; but after an hour of talking, neither of them had described a specific act of violence. Only when pressed on the murder did the two women say that Bian and four other administrators were frog-marched around the schoolyard and beaten. Both said they were in another part of the school when it happened.

So who, exactly, was responsible?

"It was a group action. A lot of students beat Bian Zhongyun, maybe just hitting her on the back or slapping her," Feng said. "But her death is not the responsibility of any one individual."