Joanna
Jerry Monaco wrote:
> Volume 53, Number 14 · September 21, 2006
>
> 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.________________________________
>
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>
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