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.