Review China's Great Terror By Jonathan D. Spence Mao's Last Revolution by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 693 pp., $35.00
<clip> [I]t was in the afternoon of August 5 that we have the first recorded details of the death of a teacher at the hands of students. The students were girls at a prestigious middle school not far from Party headquarters at Zhongnanhai, who had formed their own Red Guard organization to "answer the call" of Chairman Mao. The teacher they beat to death was named Bian Zhongyun. Bian was a fifty-year-old mother of four (three girls and a boy), who had been at the school ever since the Communists took over the country in 1949, and had risen steadily to her current position as assistant principal. She had joined the Communist Party secretly in Sichuan province back in 1941, and in the job at her school had encountered a wide range of elite pupils including the daughters of Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, and Deng Xiaoping.
>From June 1966 onward Red Guard units composed of female students
began to accuse Bian of a battery of crimes, many of which were
written out on big character posters. They charged her with engaging
in counterrevolutionary activities while serving on the Beijing
municipal Party committee, planning to foment a military coup, working
against the class lines laid down by the Party, and lacking due
respect for Mao Zedong. (This last charge arose from an incident in
March 1966, when Bian briefed her students on earthquake drill, and
emphasized the importance of leaving the school buildings as quickly
as possible. When one of the students asked if it were not equally
important to save the portrait of Mao that hung in the schoolroom,
Bian apparently failed to answer with the correct level of
enthusiasm.)
On August 5, after she had been so badly beaten in another struggle meeting that she could no longer move, the students dumped Bian's body in a hand cart, covering her with copies of big character posters, weighted down with a road sweeper's broom. After some hours, when her body was already stiff, somebody from the school pushed the cart across the road to a nearby hospital. When her husband and her eldest daughter came to the hospital, no one would tell them what had happened, and the cause of death was listed as "unknown." Bian's husband did go and buy a camera, with which he took a photo of his dead wife, showing the fearsome extent of her injuries. But still nobody in the school chose to take responsibility, though among the Red Guard leaders was Deng Xiaoping's own daughter.[2]
Around two weeks after Bian's death, the first of a series of eight Red Guard mass rallies was held in Tiananmen Square, with Mao on the reviewing stand atop the old gate to the Forbidden City. An estimated one million Red Guards participated, and Mao himself wore a military uniform. When some of the girl students were invited to join Mao at the rostrum, one of them, who was from Bian's school, slipped a Red Guard armband onto his uniform. When Mao asked her for her name, she replied that it was Song Binbin. Mao commented that "Binbin" had the meaning of "refined" and hence was not a suitable name for the current period of violent upheaval in which the young should strive to be militant. Shortly thereafter, Binbin changed her name to "Be Martial" and the school was subsequently also renamed the "Red 'Be Martial' School."________________________________
There is obviously a difficult question here: Why were so many of the early radical activists so young, in many cases just middle school or even primary students, and why were girls often prominent in the violence? The answer given by MacFarquhar and Schoenhals is that these younger students were mainly from highly privileged elite Party families; they lived in the same compounds, and were tightly bonded together through work and leisure activities. In this closed setting, sheltered from the real worlds of farm and factory, girls were under intense pressure to appear as revolutionary as boys.
Furthermore, through their high-ranking parents, these privileged youngsters were privy to much confidential information about the shifting ideological lines in the top councils of the Party. They were fiercely competitive, and wanted to be seen as fiercely revolutionary. They also had a pungent view of the issues at hand: as one early big character student poster put it, the central rule of the radical groups should be to "beat to a pulp any and all persons who go against Mao Zedong Thought." The somewhat elder college students, on the other hand, came from all over China, and had widely different backgrounds and interests. Like the workers, peasants, and PLA soldiers later caught up in the turmoil, they already had established their career plans.
Especially in the early phases of the Cultural Revolution, another factor may also have been involved, a kind of sexual excitement or challenge that came with the violence. Evidence for this is elusive, but present in various sources, both official and anecdotal. The members of one of the work teams sent to Peking University in June 1966, for example, accused one of the male radical students of repeatedly making unwanted sexual contact with a female cadre being "struggled against." The British chargé d'affaires reported similar aggressive and unwanted sexual advances being made to female members of his staff when the British mission was sacked in August 1967. The authors also cite a powerful passage from one of the strongest memoirs ever written about the Cultural Revolution, Spider Eaters by Rae Yang.[3] In the cited passage, as Yang and her fellow Red Guards are "struggling" with a middle-aged man, the man shocks them all by suddenly dropping his shorts and exposing himself. In the rage and embarrassment that follow, he is beaten to death.________________________________
<clip>