The Pingle Massacre

by Xiao Ming

Introduction

I first met Xia Chunlin over a decade ago while I was conducting research, for an essay I was writing at the time, about the mass killings that occurred during the Cultural Revolution in Guangxi province. He gave me access to a huge amount of historical materials relating to the Pingle Massacre. He also provided me with his own eyewitness testimony. Since then we’ve been in contact often.

Recently I had the opportunity to meet up with him again. He spoke at length about his family’s terrifying experiences during the Cultural Revolution. He hoped that I’d be able to turn his memories into an essay, so that this bloody massacre is never forgotten.

Background

Pingle Country is located approximately 120 kilometers southwest of the city of Guilin. The Lijiang River flowing from Guilin, together with the Gongcheng and Li Pu rivers merge in Pingle, becoming the Guijiang River, which winds its way down through the province to the city of Wuzhou where it joins the Xijiang River, which, via Guangdong, ultimately drains into the South China Sea. During the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC), the area we now call Pingle was part of Guilin county; it emerged as its own county during the Han Dynasty (206 BC–220 AD), enjoying a history of more than 1700 years.

The residents of Pingle are primarily Han, accounting for about 83% of the population.  The remaining 17% is comprised of ethnic minorities from the Yao, Zhuang, and Hui peoples. By the 20th century, Pingle was relatively well developed in terms of commerce and culture, more advanced than neighboring counties due to its convenient land and water transport routes, a part of the civilized world.

However, in 1968, during the Cultural Revolution, an explosion of savage violence rocked the county. Egged on by Mao’s calls to crush ideological heretics, and under the direction of Wei Guoqing, the First Secretary of the Party Committee of Guangxi Province, the Chairman of the Guangxi Revolutionary Committee and the Political Commissar of the Guangxi Military Region, and the provincial authorities, Guangxi experienced large scale slaughter which left close to 100,000 people dead.  In Xia Chunlin’s family, a total of seven male relatives were murdered. Five members of his own household, and two members of his extended family. Xiao Chunlin was the target of numerous traumatic struggle sessions, narrowly avoiding the same fate of his less fortunate relatives.

Xia Chunlin’s Family on the Eve of the Cultural Revolution

The Xia clan of Pingle lived in the villages of Dafaxiang, Canbancun and Xiajiatun. Ethnically Han, their forefathers made a meagre living tilling the fields from sunrise to sunset. Xia Chunlin’s household was located in Xiajiatun village. In the last days of the Qing dynasty, the family moved to Pingle from Hengnan county in Hunan province. In the early days of Communist rule, the family had a good reputation in the village, due to his father’s elder brother, Xia Jingsheng, who, after fighting against the Japanese invaders as part of the Guangxi Student Army, joined the Communist Party in 1938. After the Communist government was established in 1949, he became the first appointed district chief of the village of Dafaxiang. Xia Chunlin’s father, Xia Kekuan, was an honest, hardworking peasant, after 1950, he also served as a village captain, working dilligently for the Party during the campaigns to eradicate banditry and implement land reform.

The Guangxi Student Army

As well as serving as district chief of the village of Dafaxiang, Xia Jingsheng worked at a hardware company in the county seat, Pingle Town. His wife was named Wang Lichu, their children died in infancy. As well as Wang Lichu, Xia Chunlin had two other aunts, his father’s sisters, Xia Lansu and Xia Yukun. Aunt Lansu lived in the county seat, a member of the people’s militia, she was childless. Aunt Yukun lived with her husband in the neighboring county of Gongcheng.

His father, Xia Kekuan, had five children. Xia Chunlin’s elder sister, Xia Yusu, was married to a worker from geological prospecting team. On the eve of the Cultural Revolution, she moved to Sichuan province, when her husband was relocated there to provide support for the Third Front development program. Xia Chunlin worked at a rice factory in Pingle Town, while his two elder brothers Xia Shaoqing and Xia Shaode worked together nearby at a freight company.  His younger brother, Xia Shaoxi was in the third grade at the local junior middle school when the Cultural Revolution began.

Top left to right: Xia Kekuan, Xia Jingsheng, Xia Shaoqing Bottom left to right: Xia Shaode, Xia Shaoxi, Xia Chunlin

Persecution and Wrongful Imprisonment

In 1951, during the Land Reform Movement, no landlord could be found to single out and punish in the village of Xiajiatun, the home of Xia Chunlin’s family, because the residents were all destitute peasant farmers. However the Land Reform team insisted that in order to rouse up the farmers and get them to participate in the campaign, they needed to classify someone as a landlord, regardless of their true status. Xia Chunlin’s father, Xia Kekuan, a member of the Village’s Farmers Association, and village captain of the People’s Militia, spoke out against this arbitrary and illogical persecution, consequently earning the animus of the Land Reform team. Xia Jingsheng supported his brother’s position so the Land Reform team reported them both to the county authorities, who charged them with the crime of ‘sabotaging the Land Reform Movement’. Both brothers were sentenced to time in prison. Xia Kekuan served one year, while his brother ended up spending over a decade in a Reform Through Labor camp in Liuzhou. He was finally released in 1962. Two years later he was officially rehabilitated, his Party membership was restored and he was allowed to return to his old job at the hardware company.

After his father and uncle’s imprisonment, Xia Chunlin’s mother, left destitute and declining in health, died in 1952. Not long after, his grandmother passed away too, leaving his Aunt Lichu to single-handedly raise the family’s children. When Xia Kekuan was released from prison, he, together with his sister-in-law, worked the land in order to feed themselves and the family’s five children. Eventually, when they could no longer make ends meet, they sent the children to live in Pingle Town with their aunt Xia Lansu.

The Killing Begins

In 1968, between the months of July and September, five of Xia Chunlin’s relatives were murdered.

Xia Jingsheng, serving as a grassroots Party member, responded to Chairman Mao’s instructions urging cadres to “support the revolutionary actions of the Red Guards” by enthusiastically engaging in the activities of the Cultural Revolution. In 1967, after the January Revolution in Shanghai, where rebel factions of Red Guards had seized power from the central government, he joined Pingle Town’s ‘Revolutionary Rebel Army’, a small group allied with the ‘Grand Alliance’, the province’s rebel Red Guards.

During the Cultural Revolution in Guangxi there were two competing Red Guard factions, the Grand Alliance and the United Command factions. The United Command faction had the backing of Wei Guoqing, the provincial authorities and local PLA units. In 1967, Mao urged the Party to support the leftist rebel Red Guards in their struggle against the ‘bureaucratic’ provincial party establishment, dispatching troops associated with Lin Biao to support the rebels. This led to large scale armed violence in the streets of Guilin and other cities, essentially a proxy Civil War between rival elements of the Party hierarchy. By 1968, United Command had gained the upper hand and began arresting members of the Grand Alliance, forcing them to scatter into the countryside. By the start of August, facing total defeat, members of the Grand Alliance in Guilin had surrendered their weapons and closed down their headquarters.

On the 26^th of August, Wei Guoqing, seemingly following the instructions of Mao, replaced the conventional party structure with ‘Revolutionary Committees’. By the start of September, the Pingle Revolutionary Committee had established a Bandit Suppression Unit to hunt down the Grand Alliance members, now officially classified as ‘bandits’, who’d fled into the countryside. On the 9^th of September, Liang Peide, a Forestry Department cadre, and one of the local leaders of the United Command faction, led the Bandit Suppression Unit to the Fenyanshan area of Pingle County to capture Xia Jingsheng. When they found him, Xia Chunlin’s uncle was immediately gunned down in a hail of bullets. He was 52 years old.

Xia Chunlin’s father, Xia Kekuan, continued tilling the fields during the Cultural Revolution, never getting involved with any of the Red Guard factions. But due to his brother’s affiliations he was also targeted. One day, members of United Command captured him and brought him to Pingle Town where he was executed. He was 49 years old.

Xia Chunlin’s elder brother, Xia Shaoqing, like his uncle, also joined the local ‘Revolutionary Rebel Army’. He was also captured and executed by the United Command faction. He was 30 years old.

Xia Chunlin’s other elder brother, Xia Shaode, worked alongside Xia Shaoqing, and was also a member of the rebel faction.  To earn a living, he and a number of young workers often travelled to Guilin to work jobs. During the outbreak of armed conflict, the United Command beseiged the city, preventing him from returning to Pingle. For his own safety he and his friends took refuge in the area of the city controlled by the Grand Alliance. After the Grand Alliance surrendered their weapons, Xia Shaode was captured and brought back to Pingle, where he was shot dead. He was 25 years old.

When the Cultural Revolution began, his younger brother, Xia Shaoxi, was in the third grade at Pingle Middle School. He joined the school’s rebel faction, and took part in the activities of the time: going to meetings, writing ‘big character posters’, traveling freely around the province and neighboring areas with his friends. After the Grand Alliance were crushed in Guilin, he was forced to flee to the countryside, where he survived for several days in the mountains, but crippling hunger drove him into the fields in a search for food, where he was captured and brought back to Pingle Town.  They shot him by the side of the road and dumped his body in an abandoned lime kiln. He was 19 years old.

Two members of Xia Chunlin’s extended family were also murdered: Xia Keshun and Xia Shaoqun. Both were hardworking peasant farmers who never got involved with the factional struggles of the Cultural Revolution. They were killed merely because a spiteful neighbor exploited the political situation to avenge a prior dispute he had with the two.

And just like that seven members of Xia Chunlin’s family lost their lives. At the time not only were there no governmental bodies to look into the killings, but in actual fact it was the actions of the authorities that made it possible for people to believe that these killings were justified. It was the inevitable consequence of their propaganda.

A Political Analysis of The Pingle Massacre

While the killings were, of course, the result of Chairman Mao launching of the Cultural Revolution. The main reason the violence in Guangxi was so widespread and why it manifested itself in such a gruesome and barbaric manner was due to the actions of the most powerful man in the province, Wei Guoqing. As a high ranking cadre of the Communist Party, he had in his hands the collective provincial powers of the Party, the state and the army. His underlings hailed him as ‘The Most Excellent Son of the Zhuang People’. In reality, he was a despot, a sadistic tyrant, a butcher stained with the blood of the Guangxi masses.

Wei Guoqing (1913-1989)

During the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, Wei Guoqing suffered at the hands of the Grand Alliance. In both Nanning and Guilin he was the target of struggle sessions, and forced to wear a dunce cap. These incidents were the consequence of Mao Zedong’s rhetoric. It was Mao who encouraged young students to rise up and rebel against the ‘capitalists’, ‘party bureaucrats’ and ‘revisionists’ in the Party. Unsurprisingly, from this time on, Wei Guoqing held a grudge against the rebels.

Wei and the authorities under his control supported and encouraged the United Command faction’s repression of the Grand Alliance. In response, the Grand Alliance became ever more resolute in their desire to overthrow Wei and his allies.

In 1967, Mao began to openly support the rebel factions across China, he called for the PLA to defend the rebels against the factions backed by the provincial authorities. As a result, in November of that year, Wei was forced to submit a self-criticism to the Central Committee in Beijing, acknowledging the error of ‘backing one Red Guard faction while suppressing another’ and ‘inciting the masses against the masses’. He humbly apologized to Mao and the victimized rebel faction. But it was later proven that his apology was merely a stalling tactic to hoodwink the people of Guangxi while he waited for the opportunity to retaliate.

That same month, representatives from Guangxi’s two Red Guard factions arrived in Beijing in order to negotiate a peace agreement, presided over by the Central Committee. Meanwhile, the Central Committee distributed a report to its lower level cadres, titled ‘Decision on How to Solve the Guangxi Problem’, declaring that Wei had been installed as head of the ‘Guangxi Revolutionary Preparatory Group’, to mediate disputes between Red Guard factions.

At this point, if Wei had been able to work in the public’s interests, maintaining an impartial position that treated both factions equally, it’s very likely that the inhuman violence that broke out cross the province would never have occurred. However, even though both parties had ostensibly achieved parity, the situation began to detoriate at an alarming rate. The simple reason was that Wei Guoqing and his allies, concerned that their own self interest was at risk, were absolutely terrified of the ‘ultra-leftist’ Grand Alliance. Their hostility toward these rebels was so overwhelming that nothing short of total annihilation would satisfy them.

They continued to support the United Command faction and suppress the Grand Alliance. Party cadres who defended the Grand Alliance were viciously slandered and smeared as the “capitalists, turncoats, spies and conspirators”, they were accused of conspiring to “seize the power of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” turning it into the “Dictatorship of the Capitalist Class”. Therefore they had to be crushed.

Mere weeks after Wei had apologized to Mao, the authorities and armed forces in Guangxi began to openly support the United Command faction and encircle the rebels. In many locations across the province, Grand Alliance members were forced to flee either to the countryside or to the cities still possessing rebel strongholds.

From January 1968 until April, the Revolutionary Councils established across the province only served to accelerate the victory of one faction over another. Defeated rebels fled to the remaining Grand Alliance strongholds in Nanning, Liuzhou and Guilin.

It was under such desperate circumstances that the desperate rebels in the three big cities seized weapons from the army in order to defend themselves from the United Command factions besieging the cities. This moved played right into the hands of Wei Guoqing, who immediately launched a propaganda blitz accusing the rebels of “Opposing the newly created Revolutionary Councils”. He called the three big cities “Fortresses of counterrevolution”, infested with traitors, spies and unrepentant capitalists who represented the “lingering elements of the Kuomintang”. Wei called on the ‘revolutionary proletariat’ to unite in thoroughly eradicating them.

Wei Guoqing’s government then had the Grand Alliance faction officially classified as counterrevolutionaries, resulting in widespread arrests, assaults and killings. As this was going on, Wei Guoqing and his allies lied about the situation to the central government in Beijing, framing the self-defense of Grand Alliance members as ‘a counterrevolutionary uprising’. In response, the Central Committee under the direction of Mao Zedong issued the ‘July 3 Public Notice’, aimed specifically at the crisis in Guangxi, demanding the immediate halt of all armed conflict.

On the 25^th of July, representatives from both factions met with members of the Central Committee in Beijing to resolve the crisis. The Central Committee twisted the facts in order to place the blame solely on the Grand Alliance. As a result, for three months, from July to September, the entire province of Guangxi rained blood. Captured members of the Grand Alliance were publicly executed. They were shot to death, stabbed to death, beaten to death with sticks, their skulls were crushed with rocks, they were drowned, they were burned alive, they were raped, and some were even eaten.

It was against this backdrop of political fanaticism and brutal armed conflict that the Pingle Massacre unfolded. This savagery and hysteria was stoked by the Chinese government, a national disgrace!

Aftermath

After the factional struggle had finally ended toward the end of 1968, Wei Guoqing and his underlings made sure to strictly forbid all mention of the killings. Those who dared expose the extent of the violence were arrested and tried as ‘active counterrevolutionaries’ . After Mao’s death and the downfall of the Gang of Four, Wei Guoqing began blaming the violence in Guangxi on the Gang of Four and their provincial allies. However it’s impossible to conceal the truth forever. In the more liberalized political atmosphere after Mao’s death, a large number of victims began to speak out, defying censorship, they bravely exposed the heinous crimes of Wei Guoqing and his murderous commanders.

The Central Committee, with Hu Yaobang as General Secretary, finally learned the truth about the killings in Guangxi, and by 1982, after having dispatched an investigation team to the province, began uncovering the real history of this traumatic period. Their official investigation revealed that over 1900 people were killed in Pingle County, among them: 221 party cadres, 155 workers and 1446 peasants and villagers, primarily those accused of being landlords, rightists or counterrevolutionaries.

Of the killers, only 50 were brought to justice, verdicts included: 1 death sentence, 2 life sentences and 47 prison sentences of between 4 and 15 years. An additional 1115 people avoided legal prosecution and received inner Party discipline instead: some were expelled from the Party, others were downgraded in rank. Many others avoided all punishment whatsoever.

While for relatives of victims, this outcome was extremely unsatisfactory, there were a few signs of progress: the Party officially condemned the actions of the Guangxi government and reversed the charges against the wrongfully accussed, including the five surviving members of Xia Chulin’s family

However, Xia Chunlin believes that only by establishing a constitutional democracy governed by the Rule of law can the Chinese people fully resolve the problems that led to the Cultural Revolution in the first place, and prevent such barbarism from ever occurring again.

My Crimes Against the Party

by Wang Shuqian

In the summer of 1957, during the ‘Hundred Flowers Campaign’ the public were encouraged to ‘air their views’, the Party told us:

‘Don’t seize on others’ faults, don’t be overly harsh; if you know about something speak up, and speak without reserve; if you’ve made mistakes correct them, if you haven’t made mistakes, avoid making them; don’t blame the speaker, take heed of his words’.

I took these words at face value and began airing my views, speaking without reserve. By January of the following year, the ‘Anti-Rightist’ campaign had begun. My ‘airing of views’ was interpreted as a desire to overthrow the Communist Party leaders, I was labeled a rightist, demoted three ranks and transferred to the countryside to do manual labor. On the 6^th of May 1966, I was assigned statistical work at a tea company in Xianning county. By this time, the ‘Socialist Education Movement’ had already reached the district. Because I’d just arrived, they didn’t immediately go after me, but a little over a week later, Mao issued his ‘May 16 Notification’. The Prefectural Party Committee Secretary, who also happened to be the head of the Socialist Education Task Force, arrived and suddenly things became a lot more tense. By the time June came around, the opening shots had been fired in my direction.

One morning I suddenly found that the the conference room and the walls in the corridor were entirely covered in posters about me. I was completely baffled, what had I done wrong?

It turned out that, a letter I’d written to Chairman Mao in 1962, pertaining to the situation at the time, had been returned and entered into my file. The posters were based on the contents of the letter. I was treated as a ‘big tiger’ to be attacked, they said I opposed the ‘Three Red Banners’, I was a ‘spearhead’ pointed in the direction of Chairman Mao, they called my letter a ‘ten thousand word manifesto’ rebuking Mao for his ignorance.

In August, I found that I could no longer eat or drink without throwing up. I was pregnant. I ended up spending the month in a Chinese medicine hospital in Wuhan. When I came back to Xianning, I found out that they’d raided my house and confiscated all of my photos, my scrapbooks, my diaries, as well as a hardback copy of ‘Dream of the Red Chamber’.

By September, my due date was only a month away, and I’d done no preparation, I had no diapers, no baby clothes, etc. One morning, around 5am, I realized I was going into labor, but I lay there waiting for sunrise when the other workers would be awake. My eldest son was only eleven years old, his father was away on business, I’d no choice but to summon the courage to ask the accountant if she’d take me to the hospital. At that time, the people at the company were already shunning me. After arriving at the hospital, I gave birth at 3 o’clock in the afternoon.

After maternity leave had ended, I didn’t go back to my old position, instead I was given odd jobs to do, cleaning the toilets, emptying out the urine buckets, etc. After doing this for almost a year, I was sent to Dongmen tea warehouse and then not long after that I was relocated to Baidun Commune’s tea purchasing station, first to do odd jobs, and then later on I became a cook. In September 1967, I was again relocated, this time to the tea purchasing chasing station at a commune near the town of Maqiao, I was a cashier. In 1968, the entire country was swept up in another anti-counterrevolutionary movement. My county was no exception.

During a company meeting I was made to confess to my historical and current counterrevolutionary crimes. These charges were completely fabricated, what could I confess to? But when I refused I was beaten. During struggle sessions against me, I was forced to have a blackboard, weighing about ten kilos, hanging from my neck.

On the blackboard it said that I was an ‘Active and historical counterrevolutionary,  and an old right winger’. Stooped painfully at a ninety degree angle, I could hardly bear it. The pain was worse than any beating. For about thirty minutes after every struggle session I was incapable of standing straight, instead I would lie paralyzed on the ground in total agony.

This kind of torture was more than I could handle, so in the middle of the night on the 20^th of June, I ran away from the commune. Usually they locked my bedroom door, but on this night they forgot. Unwilling to waste the opportunity, I made a break for it. I only wanted to seek help from the people of Maqiao, I thought the people there were basically good, they could protect me. I avoided the main roads and stuck to small trails, by the time I reached Maqiao, the sun had risen. I headed to the clinic. Seeing me, the people were panic-stricken, they frantically called the county tea company, who then sent somebody to take me back to the commune, handing me over to the rebel faction to be dealt with. My hands were tied behind my back, they punched and kicked me. During this beating my sandals fell off, so one of them picked them up and used them to hit me in the face. My face was so swollen my eyes were barely visible.

Not long after the Dragon Boat Festival, I was dragged back to Maqiao for another struggle session. Middle school students paraded me through the streets, people from every work unit took part. Every time someone came up to say a few words against me they’d smack me in the face as they passed. Some folks struck me with such ferocity that a pool of blood began to grow at my feet. When the struggle session was over, I was once again paraded through the streets, this time they placed a two feet tall dunce hat on my head with a sign stuck on it. The sign said that I was a ‘KMT spy’ and an ‘Old Rightist’. I didn’t make it very far before I was knocked to the ground. Because of the board hanging around my neck, my hands couldn’t reach the ground, preventing me from pushing myself back up, as I struggled to get back on my feet, students came up and kicked me. The pain was so overwhelming that I could hardly breathe. Finally a student pulled me up by the hair, and in this way, I continued to walk down the street, while the students chanted slogans. Afterwards I’d no idea how I’d make it back home, or where my shoes went.

Back at the tea station, I collapsed in the warehouse onto the wooden planks on the ground where bags of tea were stored. I felt utterly paralyzed. They wouldn’t let me return to my room, instead they borrowed two comforters, and made a ‘bed’ out of the wooden planks. During the night I was eaten alive by swarms of mosquitoes.  One of the workers helped me clean up, when she saw the state I was in, she tutted, “You’ve been beaten so badly you look like a flowersnake”, alluding to my bruises. Standing beside her was the young daughter of the station chief, she announced in a loud voice, “Chairman Mao wants a cultural struggle, not a violent one, they’ve disobeyed Chairman Mao!”. Her father immediately roared at her to get away from me.

After a week or so, my wounds had healed a little, so they took me to Maqiao again to confess to my counterrevolutionary activities, I was at a complete loss as to what to do, what exactly did they want? When I just made up some crimes to keep them happy, they tied me by the wrists to a roof beam in the warehouse and beat me with a bamboo pole. After letting me down, they beat me some more. I couldn’t take any more, I yelled, “You tell me what to write and I’ll write it.” They replied, “So-and-so has already told us that the both of you are part of a right-wing clique, and still you don’t confess!?” Afterwards I couldn’t lift my arms, not even to comb my hair.

During April 1968, when my sister passed through on a work trip, she decided that my young daughter had no one to look after her, so she took her back to Beijing to stay with our mother. Right after the Spring Festival of 1969 I was brought to the county to be struggled against. It was snowing heavily that day. One individual named He Ansheng split my head open with the leg of a stool, spilling blood everywhere. I needed seven stitches and a week’s recovery in the hospital. By March, my mother’s health began declining, so she sent my daughter back to me. At this point I’d already been transferred to a May Seventh Cadre School. Every day I traveled to the Dongmen warehouse to make tea, a nurse took care of my daughter during the day, she returned in the evenings.

By mid-November my mother’s illness became serious, she told me she didn’t want to be cremated, she asked my sister to come and help handle things. Not long after, she died. My sister called me that day to tell me the bad news, the people at work knew but they didn’t even bother to let me know. The last bus of the day had already left, I had to walk home, by the time I got there it was dark. My mother was already in her coffin, I never got to see her face for one last time.

I sent my daughter to live at the district kindergarten, leaving only my son left at home. He was now fifteen, every time the boy who lived behind us caught a glimpse of him, he’d start hurling abuse, saying his parents were villains, members of the ‘Five Black Categories’. One day my son lost his temper and gave him a beating, this was the first time he’d ever hit anyone, it was also his last. After this incident, the neighbor’s son never bothered him again.

In 1971, the investigation into my counterrevolutionary activities finally ended, just after the New Year I was summoned to hear their verdict. Originally I’d been accused of being a spy, but during the investigation they’d discovered that all my classmates said I was a good person, that I’d never been involved in any organization; and that my progress had been good, that I’d devoted much time and energy into my work. When asked, I said that I came from a family of functionaries, they didn’t agree with this. They went to my hometown in Liaoning, but they couldn’t disprove my claim, they assembled a group of elderly folks to grill them about my family background, but none of them knew of my father. When they brought up my grandfather, had no idea that he had a son, since he was never at home. They had no proof that my father owned much land or collected rent, consequently they drew up a document that stated that he had ‘renounced the interests of the landlord class’ and took it back to the county task force.

Some people would argue that those who’ve ‘renounced the interests of the landlord class’ can no longer by any rationale still be considered ‘landlords’. Not so! They continued their investigation, going to the Beijing post office my father worked at to rifle to examine his records. They discovered that when filling in a form, my father put down his family status as ‘rich peasant’. The family were in fact rich peasants thirty years before Liberation.

This was how he identified himself in this form, three years before liberation. At that time, my grandfather had already passed away, he died young and the family property had already been divided up decades prior, but at that time being called a ‘rich peasant’ wasn’t by any means a bad thing, so he continued self-identifying as one. I was charged with ‘consistently concealing my rich peasant family status’. I tried to oppose this verdict, explaining that this status only reflected the family situation thirty years before Liberation. They responded that his class status had been confirmed by the Beijing post office, it had been stamped, therefore it was more or less official.

They also concluded that I’d concealed my father’s past service as a military instructor for a warlord. I was utterly baffled, when my father was 25 years old he entered into the postal service, and he stayed in that position until his death. Where did they get this stuff from? Later on, in 1982, I ran into my elder brother, I asked him if he knew anything about this story. He told me that before working in the post office, our father worked for a year as a Phys Ed. and music teacher at a school run by Zhang Xueliang‘s mother-in-law. Without our father’s knowledge, his name was included among false employees added to the payroll of the military school, connected with Zhang Xueliang, for embezzlement purposes. Such instances of corruption were all too common at the time.

My third crime was that my second eldest brother was a senior officer in the military in Taiwan, I told them that I’d never even heard about that, then later, in 1979, I made contact with him and found out the truth, that he was only a middle school teacher.

My fourth crime was that I was alleged to have said that I wanted nothing to do with the Communist Party, I wanted to do my own thing. When I told them I’d never said this, they pulled out my diary, opened it at a page with a passage underlined in red. I try to show them how this was taken out of context, the lines before explained that this was how I felt before, noting that previously I neither wanted anything to do with either the Kuomintang or the Communist Party, but my attitude had changed. They told me that they were only interested in this one sentence, and asked me if I was denying that I’d written it.

And so, I was officially classified as a rightist and removed from my position. I lived on 16 RMB a month doing manual labor. I worked at Hesheng Tea Farm, doing all the dirty work, with no time off during public holidays, and only three days off at the end of Spring and Fall. Anyone had the right to verbally attack me whenever they felt like it, even children, groups of them would often surround me and hurl abuse.

In 1974, my son graduated high school and my partner was sent to a May Seventh Cadre School for having an affair,  the only person left was my seven year old daughter. I’d no choice but to send her to live with my sister in Heilongjiang. The following year my sister fell ill so she brought my daughter to the home of our younger sister in Beijing. My younger sister planned on letting her spent just a few days in Beijing, and then, after the New Year’s celebrations, bringing her back to me. But on New Year’s Day she went to play in the park with her cousin and fell off a climbing poll, breaking her thigh bone. After she was released from hospital at the end of the March, my younger sister finally plucked up the courage to write me a letter, telling me what happened and asking me to come pick her up. My daughter needed crutches to walk, it was just one disaster after another.

In the latter half of 1976, I finally managed to take her back to Hesheng to enter the farm’s school for children. The other children would mock her and tell her I was a rightist. She got angry with me about this, she’d ask me why I had to be a rightist. If I wasn’t, no one would pick on her.

In 1977, after Mao’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, a new policy was introduced in regard to rightists. The people in county told me, “It’s not that you haven’t made mistakes, your record cannot be changed, but our policy toward you is better now. You should be grateful to the Party.” But I wasn’t grateful, I wanted the false accusations and words attributed to me to be removed. I wanted my diaries and other possessions returned to me. They didn’t, even now I still don’t have them. And I’m still labeled a ‘rich peasant’. Even now the Xianning Municipal Party Committee still claim that “Wang Shuqian has persistantly opposed the Party, she has many prior convictions.”

Take a look at my life, have I persisted in committing crimes against the party, or has the Party persistented in committed crimes against me?

 

The Siege of Changchun

by Lung Ying-tai

I decided to take a trip to Changchun because within Changchun lurks a secret that I don’t quite understand.

My flight arrived at the crack of dawn on the 13^th of May. Despite it being the middle of the night, as I gazed upon the vast, desolate central square illuminated only by the dim light of street lamps, the city exuded a peculiar atmosphere. Wide boulevards radiated outward from the city center in all directions. Changchun is a city with an unusually high number of public squares and unusually large public parks; if you’ve ever walked through Moscow, Berlin or Budapest, the first impression Changchun will give you is: huh, this city has the feel, the atmosphere of a capital.

Changchun in May: the wind is still a little chilly, a mother holds her child, she wraps a scarf around his neck; a little face, exposed to the cold wind, peeks out like a rosy apple. I stand on the edge of the People’s Square looking upwards toward a towering monument in the center, The Soviet Red Army Martyrs Monument.

Standing twenty eight and a half meters tall, the granite monument thrusts into the heavens, a fighter jet rests at its peak, overlooking the city. On a tablet, alongside text in Russian is a quote in Chinese: ‘The Soviet Army Martyrs Live Forever in the Hearts of the People’. This is credited to ‘The People of Changchun From All Walks of Life’. In Russian there are twenty three engraved words, the names of the pilots who sacrificed their lives in the attack on the Chinese Northeast. The Soviet Red Army entered the region on the 9^th of August, 1945. After capturing the main communications hubs of the region, the first thing they did, in Harbin, Changchun, Shenyang, etc, was erect monuments to the ‘Soviet Red Army Martyrs’.

In August 1945, after living under Japanese rule for fourteen years, the Soviet Red Army entered the city as ‘liberators’ and installed a towering monument in the city center. How did the people of Changchun feel about the fact that it was erected in their name? At the same time that these monuments paying tribute to the Red Army were being completed, ‘The People of Changchun From All Walks of Life’ were being burned alive by the Red Army and their city pillaged.

In the winter of that year, Xu Zhangqing, a twenty one year old from Taipei stood outside Shenyang train station, after bidding farewell to a friend, he witnessed the following scene:

Outside the station is an enormous square, about the same size as the Presidential Palace in Taipei. As I was leaving I saw a woman on the square, dragging along a child on each hand, another child clung to her back, and another, slight older, carried a straw mat, altogether five people. Seven Soviet troops surrounded them and in plain view of passersby, began to brutalize the mother, the children, too, were assaulted. The child that had been knocked off her back sobbed bitterly. After they were finished, they ordered the woman and her children to lie down in a row on the ground. Using their machine guns, the Soviets sprayed their bodies with bullets.”

What Xu Zhangqing witnessed was most likely a Japanese mother and her children. However the Chinese people lived in a similar state of terror.

In 2010, officials from both China and Russia visited Changchun and laid wreaths at the foot of the Red Army monument. In the winter of 1945, Yu Heng was in Changchun, he noted that “everywhere the Red Army went, women were raped, buildings pillaged and houses set on fire”. No matter if they were Chinese or Japanese, the women all cut their hair short and wore men’s clothing, otherwise they wouldn’t dare set foot outside. The so-called ‘liberators’, were, in actual fact, a frightening rabble, but people were too afraid to say so and their descendants still have to queue in front of the Soviet monument, take off their hats and show reverence.

The siege began on the 15^th of March 1948, when the Communists had captured the neighboring city of Siping, leaving Changchun isolated. By the 23^rd of May, even small aircraft had no way of landing. The city remained closed off until the 19^th of October.

During this period, how many people starved to death? When the siege began, the city’s population was 500,000, but taking into account the huge number of refugees that entered the city from surrounding villages, the total number has been estimated to be around 800,000 to 1.2 million.

After the siege had ended, Chinese communist statistics state that the population had fallen by 170,000. Estimates for the number of those who starved to death range from 100,000 to 650,000, a median figure of more than 300,000 people, which just happens to be the same number that the Communist Party believe were killed in the Nanking Massacre.

What I still don’t understand is, considering the enormous number of war casualties, why isn’t the Siege of Changchun given the same treatment as the Nanking Massacre: the subject of countless academic studies, its history spread far and wide through word of mouth, its anniversary covered annually in the press, with monuments of every size erected in commemoration, young students photographed lined up in uniform saluting it, the expensive construction of magnificent memorial halls visited constantly by political leaders, city residents shown on the news observing a moment of silence, and bells rung in its memory year after year. Why isn’t Changchun treated in the same way as Leningrad, as a famous historical city, a frequent topic of novels, made into screenplays, turned into Hollywood films, the subject of independent documentary makers, broadcast on public television throughout the world, ubiquitous to such an extent that schoolchildren in New York, Moscow, Melbourne, are all aware of its name and its history.

This discrepancy is the reason why I began to conduct a ‘public opinion poll’ among those around me. In the process I learned that although the Siege of Changchun resulted in about 300,000 to 650,000 deaths from starvation, the majority of my friends in Taiwan had never even heard of it, while my friends on the mainland just shook their heads and said they weren’t quite sure. Afterwards I thought, outsiders are clueless but the people of Changchun will surely know, in Changchun there must be a monument somewhere, no matter how inconspicuous. But when I arrived in Changchun, all I saw was the monument of ‘liberation’ with the Soviet Red Army fighter jet on top. I suddenly realized, oh, even the people of Changchun know nothing about this chapter of history.

My driver, Xiao Wang, was a thirty-something resident of Changchun, as I told him about the siege, his eyes bulged as if he were listening to a fantasy tale from the Arabian Nights, politely but cautiously he asked me “Did this really happen?” Afterwards he couldn’t hide his astonishment, “I was born and grew up here, how come I’ve never heard of it?”

Then it suddenly came to him, “I have an uncle, he used to in the PLA, I recall him saying that he was in the Northeast during that period, fighting the Kuomintang, but whenever he spoke of the old days, we kids would run off, no one was interested in listening. Perhaps he knows something?”

I urged him to phone his uncle and ask about it, “When the PLA surrounded Changchun, a lot of their troops were actually from the area. You should ask your uncle if he took part in the siege.”

That evening, while having dinner, Xiao Wang called his uncle. He picked up after one ring. The connection was clear enough that I could hear him at the other end of the table. As it turned out, he was part of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army and he really had taken part in the siege.

“Ask him where he was stationed.”

“Hong Xi Street”, his uncle replied with a Northeastern accent, “where Red Flag Street is today, that’s where the most people died.”

Obviously he had no idea people would all of a sudden take an interest in his past, excited, he spoke breathlessly for forty minutes straight. Xiao Wang ate with one hand while the other held the phone to his ear.

A blockade line of more than 100 kilometers and a guard with a gun every 50 meters, prevented refugees from either leaving or entering. A large number of the refugees were Changchun residents that had been kicked out of the city by the Kuomintang and were now trapped on the land between the Nationalists who were defending the city, and the siege line of the Communists surrounding it. Heaps of corpses were spread out all over this area of wild land, thousands at a glance.

Thin as matchsticks, their lives hanging by a thread, grasping their infants, they crawled up to the feet of the guards and begged tearfully to be allowed to pass. “I wept too, but I couldn’t defy orders.” Xiao Wang’s uncle continued, “One day, when I was sent to Erdao River to collect wood, I came across an abandoned house, peering in through the window, I saw something terrible, a family of about ten people, all dead, either lying on the bed, spread out on the floor or lying against the wall. Standing on the threshold, I looked over the scene, an entire family, young and old, all of them dead of starvation, and I began to weep.”

On the 30^th of May, Lin Biao issued his instructions for the siege:

1. Block all passageways and tunnels, large and small. Build fortifications on the main front, control the airport outside the city.

2. Use long distance firepower to control Freedom Road and the airport inside the city

3. Strictly prohibit the entry of food and fuel into enemy territory

4. Prevent the masses inside the city from leaving.

5. Turn Changchun into a city of death.

To bolster morale among troops, the Communists devised a slogan: ‘Don’t give the enemy a grain of food or a blade of grass. Chiang’s bandits must perish.’

100,000 Communist troops surrounded the city, 100,000 Nationalist troops defended the interior, nearly 100,000 people remained trapped in their homes. Unwilling to passively await their own doom, they headed toward the city limits, but the perimeter was locked down. In addition to artillery and concentrated forces of troops to contend with, there were also deep trenches, barbed wire and high-voltage fencing.

The Yitong River that runs through the city, blessed with rich vegetation and a plenitude of fish, that rush through the water like shuttles, has been the gentle mother river of Changchun and its residents for endless generations. But in 1948, every bridge on the river was guarded by Kuomintang troops, one could try to leave but re-entry was impossible. Below the bridges lay the four kilometer wide area of wild land that separated the Communist and Nationalist forces. In this space were countless corpses as far as the eye could see.

By July, the temperature had soared, the scorching city streets were clogged with corpses. Packs of emaciated dogs with wild blood red eyes tore at the decomposing remains of Changchun residents. Soon after the dogs themselves were eaten by desperate, starving people.

Yu Qiyuan, an editor of the ‘The Local Chronciles of Changchun’ publication series, was just sixteen years old at the time of the siege. Every day on his way to school he would walk through a stretch of wild country on the grounds of the Geological Palace Museum, covered in tall grass and weeds. That summer, he began to smell something. Overcome with curiosity he made his way into the grassland through dense foliage and came across mounds of rotting corpses. Later on, again walking through this stretch of wild land in downtown Changchun, he saw something moving in the distance. Moving closer, he encountered a truly disturbing sight: a pile of naked, abandoned babies with prolapsed rectums, due to starvation, wriggling feebly on the ground like worms, suffocating, incapable of crying.

Yu Qiyuan was born on the same year that the state of Manchukuo was founded, his father served as a minister in the court of Emperor Pu Yi. After experiencing an idyllic, carefree, childhood, the intense misery of the siege became indelibly marked in his memory.

“When the siege began, everyone still had provisions, but who could have expected that they’d need to last for six months. The provisions people started out with quickly disappeared. After killing all the cats, dogs, horses and rats, they started to shave the asphalt off the roads, there was no land to cultivate, and by the middle of August, it was already too late to wait for harvest. I ate tree bark, grass, the ferment used for making liquor, once that was gone, I ate red distillers grain, it was like dry fermented soy paste…”

“How do you eat distillers grain?”

“If you take the grains, rinse them repeatedly with water until the stickiness is gone, you end up with a small piece of dry material. After being left to dry in the sun it looks like buckwheat husk. Once it’s ready you grind it up, add water and eat.”

The evening sun illuminated the room, enveloping it in warm color. Despite the gory details of Yu’s testimony, his tone remained calm and dispassionate, he had really seen a lot. I asked him, “So, was there cannibalism?” “That should go without saying”, he replied. He told me a story about an old granny who sliced pieces of flesh off the legs of her dead husband and cooked them.

On the 9^th of September, 1948, Lin Biao sent Mao Zedong a field report from Changchun:

“The famine situation is becoming more and more severe, hordes of hungry people swarm our outposts day and night, after we push them back, they end up in the area between our outposts and the enemies, as a result the death count is extremely high. Within the district of Baipi alone there has been approximately two thousand deaths. We cannot allow the hungry masses to exit the city, the hordes must be driven back, this policy is very difficult for both the starving citizens and our troops to comprehend. The starving people express their dissatisfaction toward us with abusive language. They say, “You see us dying and you do nothing”. They kneel down in front of my sentries and beg them for the right to leave, some drop their babies on the ground and make a run for it, others bring rope and hang themselves in view of our guards.”

Nowhere in the official narrative, passed down from generation to generation through Chinese education, which celebrates the siege as a ‘bloodless victory for the glorious revolution’, is there any room for the reality of the horrors of the Siege of Changchun.