China's former red guards turn their backs on Maoism

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/05/mao-cultural-revolution-china-red-guard

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For the past 10 years Liu Jin, Song Bin Bin, Luo Zhi and several of their fellow pupils at the experimental high school attached to Beijing Normal University have been trying to make sense of three months in 1966 when they were actors in a tragedy that engulfed the whole of China. Now in their 60s, looking back on fulfilled careers and family lives, these women have travelled a path as yet little explored in China, indeed almost taboo, leading to repentance for atrocities committed by the red guards during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76).

In January they went public, at a meeting at their old school, presenting their apologies to their teachers who are still alive. "Most of us said they had been waiting to make this gesture and that we should have done so long before," says Liu, 67, a retired publisher. In the first weeks of the Cultural Revolution, in June 1966, she was appointed as the official leader of the pupils at her school.

Initially, the red guard movement launched by Chairman Mao Zedong seemed harmless. It was supervised by adult Communist party work teams. In fact, Mao, who had been sidelined and no longer had a role in everyday government, wanted to use his high standing with young people to oust the whole party leadership in a struggle that ultimately claimed millions of lives.

To understand what happened, we need to go back to one day in the summer of 1966. On 5 August a horrific event occurred in a Beijing high school reserved for the children of the party elite. Mao had just disbanded the work teams, on the grounds that they were extinguishing the revolutionary fire. At the school, Liu and her deputy Song were the only remaining representatives of a somewhat ambiguous authority. In mid-June, red guards had started stigmatising some teachers and cadres as class enemies and subjecting them to criticism sessions. On the advice of Deng Xiaoping, then deputy prime minister, to whom they had reported progress on the Cultural Revolution in the school, Liu and Song dismissed teachers with a doubtful record. The first vice-principal (acting head and party secretary at the school), Bian Zhongyun, 50, was held prisoner, so serious was her case.

She was guilty of several "crimes". She had failed to answer a question by a pupil regarding the proper way of dealing with the portrait of Mao hanging on the wall in the event of an earthquake. She had refused to give the daughter of the Chinese president, Liu Shaoqi, a second chance, after she narrowly failed the entrance exam. Lastly, during a criticism session two months earlier, a woman had complained that her husband, a teacher at the school, was having an affair with Bian (unfounded). In fact the woman wanted the school head to pay her husband's wages directly to her, as they were divorced. Bian refused. All in all this convinced the red guards that their teacher was a bad element.

On 5 August a group of pupils forced her to bang a dustbin lid and shout: "I am an advocate of the capitalist way. I am a counter-revolutionary revisionist. I deserve to be beaten." The punishment was organised by first-year girls, eager to demonstrate their revolutionary fervour. The teacher was struck from all sides with sticks and chair legs. Others kicked her.

Liu and Song intervened three times. "The first time the crowd dispersed," Liu recalls. But as soon as they went upstairs to their office the attacks started again. "I was afraid of being criticised for preventing the violence. It's true that's why I didn't try any harder," Song admitted in her speech in January. "Human life was not worth much. Mao was a god, his words were sacred. Everyone was ready to sacrifice themselves," says Gao Ning, a student at the time.

Their apology was prompted by a similar move by a handful of former red guards at another Beijing school. One day the current head of the alumni association at Middle School Number Eight, Chen Xiaolu, 67, received some photographs of events in 1966 showing school officers being forced to carry out degrading tasks and facing criticism sessions. The harassment by red guards was so bad that the party secretary at the school, Hua Jin, took his own life. "The fellow pupil who sent me the photos by mail asked if we should apologise. It was quite a shock," says Chen (who was a leader of the "rebel" students, who, in Mao's name, were primed to overthrow party members who had usurped power). "We apologised informally, but we never had a specific event," he adds. The gathering had to be held at a private venue, because the school thought it was too sensitive to be organised there.

Liu and her classmates paid their respects to a bronze bust of Bian. This gesture marked the end of a detailed investigation, which they reported in three special issues of Ji Yi (Remembrance), an email-only journal. This meant their action was not widely reported.

"The conditions are now relatively ripe for people like them to make this sort of gesture," says philosophy professor Xu Youyu, also a former red guard and one of the first to start compiling eye-witness accounts from his contemporaries in the 1990s. "It's a positive move, because by relating what happened to them, they encourage a greater awareness of history among others, seeing things in a more realistic light. But I don't think it will trigger a major reappraisal in society or the country as a whole, with genuine self-criticism regarding the Cultural Revolution. Nor will it make much difference to the regime's attitude to that particular revolution."

The Chinese Communist party condemned the Cultural Revolution as a disaster in its 1981 resolution on party history. And although it rehabilitated many of the victims, including Bian, there has never been any attempt to discuss events openly or to get the apprentice executioners to talk about their actions. The apology by Liu and Song has, nevertheless, left its mark. Song, a general's daughter who was 18 at the time, is famous all over China for pinning a red-guard armband on Mao on Tiananmen Square on 18 August 1966, 13 days after Bian's death. Noting that her first name meant "elegant and refined", Mao encouraged her to be more martial in the future, a quip immediately seized on by the propaganda machine, unleashing widespread violence. Song soon came to regret it.

At her old school, the bust of Bian is hidden away at the back of a meeting room, where it was placed in 2011. An inscription indicates the teacher's date of birth and death. Achieving that much was a victory in itself for the repentant guards. "Pupils see it and wonder why it's there. It's a step forward," says Luo Zhi, 65, another former pupil. When the idea was first raised in 2007 there was little enthusiasm. "Some people were reluctant to stir up the past, others on the contrary wanted [the inscription] to say why she died. But society was not ready for such a strong gesture. We wanted to involve as many people as possible and almost 500 former pupils contributed."

Returning to 5 August 1966, at about 7pm a pupil came to tell Liu that Bian had stopped moving. "Her face was covered in bruises, she had soiled herself and her clothes were soaked in blood," Liu recalls. The pupils put her body on a cart, and Liu and Song pushed it to the nearest hospital. The doctors were wary and initially refused to treat an "enemy of the people". Finally a teacher plucked up courage and signed a waiver. But it was too late. Shortly afterwards, Bian's husband, Wang Jingyao, an eminent professor at the Academy of Sciences, arrived with their children.

Grief-stricken he took photographs of his wife's battered body. He also managed to claim her clothes and possessions, which he then hid. In 2006 an independent film-maker, Hu Jie, produced a powerful documentary, Wo Sui Si Qu (Though I Am No More), which has not received an official licence but can be found on the internet. In the film Wang explained that he was keeping his wife's personal effects "for the day when there is a museum of the Cultural Revolution". In January he dismissed Liu and Song's "hypocritical apologies" and accusing them of trying "to unburden their guilt".

Now aged 96, Wang confirmed his position on the phone. Liu is not really surprised. On two occasions she personally apologised to Wang, encouraging him, when she visited his home in 2006, to raise any questions about his wife's death. But Wang refused to see her again. In 2012 two other former pupils went to see him to explain their plans for a bust. They gave him a video showing its manufacture. At the time he seemed pleased and at peace. But a fortnight later he sent the DVD back, with a note saying they would know why. Liu refuses to pass judgment on Wang. "It is a heartless tragedy and I can only attempt to understand the reaction of a man who suffered great pain," she says. "But I hope that with time our work will have some effect."

This article appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from Le Monde