Land at the international airport near Beijing and you cannot fail to be impressed by the spectacular terminal, its great wings stretched wide. Not to mention the soft light filtering through the glass roof of the arrivals hall. Yet here, in Daxing District, 325 defenceless people were massacred in August 1966. Men, women and children. Twenty-two families were wiped out in their entirety. The youngest recorded victim was a baby about five weeks old; the oldest was eighty.
Sixty years have now passed, but the massacre is still rarely discussed in public.
It was simply horrific. Chairman Mao had launched his “Cultural Revolution”, a drama that would last for ten years. The aim was to crush the “class enemy”: former landlords and rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, “bad elements” and rightists – and anyone else alleged to be an enemy of the revolution. Mao claimed they were lurking everywhere, thirsting for revenge for their defeat in 1949.
The movement began on a small scale in May 1966, but did not gather real momentum until late summer, when a female vice-principal in Beijing was killed by her own students. The weeks that followed became known as “Red August”. Encouraged by Mao, thousands of fevered Red Guards ran amok in the capital. They stormed private homes and dragged innocent people into the streets, where many were tortured to death. According to official figures released later, 1,772 Beijing residents were killed from 18 August through the end of September. The true number may have been higher.
On 27 August, the violence reached Daxing. The district consisted of several villages where most people toiled on collectively owned land. None of them were landlords or private businessmen. But that hardly mattered, because some had once been. And did they not have descendants who might one day launch a counter-revolution?
“We must cut the weeds and pull them up by the roots!”
Mao had never explicitly said that killing was permitted. But the government’s Minister of Public Security, Xie Fuzhi, had said that if the “hatred of the masses” ran so deep that they could not be restrained, the police should refrain from intervening. Xie’s statement was passed on to Party officials in Daxing, who had little desire to be accused of revolutionary lethargy.
At the same time, rumours began circulating in Daxing that the “class enemy” really was plotting revenge. Former landlords and rich peasants, it was said, intended to kill poor peasants as soon as the opportunity arose. No such plan existed, but in the prevailing atmosphere it was enough for someone to claim that the danger was real.
The killings began on 27 August. Red Guards helped set the wave of violence in motion, but the most systematic killings were organised by local Party cadres and the militia. The Party knew the background of every resident, because everything was recorded in personal files. Suddenly, old, yellowing papers were transformed into death sentences.
Things now moved quickly. At a mobilisation meeting in one of the villages, it was decided that the killings would begin the following night. The message was clear: anyone who refused to obey orders would themselves be treated as a class enemy. No one protested. That night, 106 people were killed in four different villages.
The method was largely the same everywhere. Those marked for death were first rounded up and locked away. Then they were called out one by one and killed. Those still waiting inside therefore had no idea what was happening. The victims were beaten to death with clubs, strangled with rope or wire, or killed with sharp cutting tools. In some villages, the killings were kept so secret that only the most active participants knew about them. When the peasants turned up for work the next morning, they discovered that many people had suddenly disappeared.
One “class enemy”, a man in his thirties, was forced to reveal where he had hidden his weapons. The man had no weapons, but claimed he had hidden them in the roof of his house. Two men accompanied him there, but found nothing. He then said the weapons were concealed in a wall or in the courtyard wall, but again they found nothing. Finally, he claimed they were hidden in the family burial ground. On the way there, he threw himself into a well, but militiamen hauled him out with a metal implement. Covered in wounds, he was subjected to another beating before collapsing and dying.
In the village of Xinli, a cart driver assigned to transport corpses discovered that a three-year-old girl was still alive. He tried to conceal her as best he could, but the militia kept a close watch and made sure she was killed. The driver then refused to continue transporting the bodies.
In Ma village, the Party committee established four prisons, one in each direction: one for old men, one for younger men, one for women and one for children. Those arrested were interrogated, killed and buried as the process continued. A grandmother and her young grandson were buried alive together. The last words the boy managed to utter were: “Grandmother, I’m getting dirt in my eyes!” A senior local official, Zhang Lianhe, travelled repeatedly to the village in an attempt to stop the atrocities. He later wrote an account entitled Five Visits to Ma Village to Stop the Killings. Zhang’s intervention shows that the crimes were not supported by every Party official.
Of his visit on 1 September, he wrote:
“The execution ground was in a courtyard on the north side of the road, at the western end of the main street. There were five rooms in the main building and three rooms in the east wing. As we entered in single file, we saw living people who had been tied up and forced to kneel. Dead bodies lay scattered around. The ground was stained with blood. The sight was unbearable.”
The killings in Daxing eventually attracted the attention of the Party leadership in Beijing, and on 1 September local leaders were ordered to stop them. “Conduct the struggle with words, not violence!” ran the new instruction. The Party secretary in Daxing understood the message and tried to intervene, but negotiations proved difficult. Several villages had erected barricades so that the militia would have time to “finish the job” and kill everyone on the lists. What if some of the “class enemies” survived and took revenge ten, twenty or thirty years later?
The bloodbath in Daxing was not an isolated case. Horrific massacres took place across the country. In Dao County in Hunan Province, no fewer than 4,519 people were killed or driven to suicide the following year. When the violence spread to neighbouring counties, the death toll rose to 9,093. The youngest victim was a ten-day-old baby, for here, as in Daxing, the aim was to weed out even the smallest shoots of the “class enemy”. The wave of killing was intensified by the growing fragmentation of the Red Guard movement. Several provinces were engulfed by armed fighting between rival Red factions, not least Guangxi, where between 84,000 and 100,000 people were killed in July and August 1968.
There is no reliable overall death toll for Mao’s horrific Cultural Revolution. One of the most thorough statistical studies was carried out by Stanford historian Andrew Walder. Drawing on local histories from more than 2,200 Chinese counties and cities, he estimates that between 1.1 and 1.6 million people died in the period from 1966 to 1971 alone, when the violence was at its most deadly.
The next five years were less dramatic, but much blood was shed in this phase as well. In July and August 1975, Shadian, a Muslim village in Yunnan Province, was attacked by soldiers and militia. The entire village was devastated, and more than 1,600 residents, including 300 children, were killed as they tried to flee. The assault had been approved by the Party leadership in Beijing.
Now you know a little more before you land at Daxing Airport near Beijing. And if you feel tempted to visit Chairman Mao’s Memorial Hall in Tiananmen Square, stop and think twice – and head in the other direction.