Mao: The Unknown Story

IT WAS IN these nondescript changing-rooms that Mao created the terror of “Red August,” with the aim of frightening the whole nation into an even greater degree of conformity. On 1 August he wrote to the first group of Red Guards, who had vowed in their posters to “be brutal” and to “trample” Mao’s enemies, to announce his “fiery support.” He circulated this letter, together with the bellicose Red Guard posters, to the Central Committee, telling these high officials that they must promote the Red Guards. Many of these officials were actually on Mao’s hit list, but for now he used them to spread terror — one that would soon engulf themselves. Following Mao’s instructions, these officials encouraged their children to form Red Guard groups, and these children passed the word to their friends. Red Guard groups mushroomed as a result, invariably headed by the children of high officials.

Learning from their fathers and friends that Mao was encouraging violence, the Red Guards immediately embarked on atrocities. On 5 August, in a Peking girls’ school packed with high officials’ children (which Mao’s two daughters had attended), the first known death by torture took place. The headmistress, a fifty-year-old mother of four, was kicked and trampled by the girls, and boiling water was poured over her. She was ordered to carry heavy bricks back and forth; as she stumbled past, she was thrashed with leather army belts with brass buckles, and with wooden sticks studded with nails. She soon collapsed and died. Afterwards, leading activists reported to the new authority. They were not told to stop — which meant carry on.

A more explicit incitement to violence soon came from Mao himself. On 18 August, dressed in army uniform for the first time since 1949, he stood on Tiananmen Gate to review hundreds of thousands of Red Guards. This was when the Red Guards were written about in the national press and introduced to the nation, and the world. A leading perpetrator of atrocities in the girls’ school where the headmistress had just been killed was given the signal honor of putting a Red Guard armband on Mao. The dialogue that followed was made public: “Chairman Mao asked her: ‘What’s your name?’ She said ‘Song Bin-bin.’ Chairman Mao asked: ‘Is it the “Bin” as in “Educated and Gentle?” ’ She said: ‘Yes.’ Chairman Mao said: ‘Be violent!’ ”

Song Bin-bin changed her name to “Be Violent,” and her school changed its name to “The Red Violent School.” Atrocities now multiplied in schools and universities. They started in Peking, then spread across the country, as Peking Red Guards were sent all over China to demonstrate how to do things like thrash victims and make them lick their own blood off the ground. Provincial youngsters were encouraged to visit Peking to learn that Mao had given them enormous destructive license. To facilitate this process, Mao ordered that travel be made free, together with food and accommodation while traveling. Over the next four months, 11 million young people came to Peking and Mao made seven more appearances at Tiananmen Square, where they gathered in massive, frenzied, yet well-drilled crowds.

There was not one school in the whole of China where atrocities did not occur. And teachers were not the only victims. In his letter to the Red Guards on 1 August 1966, Mao singled out for praise some militant teenagers who had been dividing pupils by family background and abusing those from undesirable families, whom they labeled “Blacks.” Mao announced specifically that these militants had his “fiery support,” which was unequivocal endorsement for what they were doing. In the girls’ school where the headmistress was tortured to death, “Blacks” had ropes tied around their necks, were beaten up, and forced to say: “I’m the bastard of a bitch. I deserve to die.”

With models set up by Mao, this practice then spread to all schools, accompanied by a “theory of the bloodline,” summed up in a couplet as ridiculous as it was brutal: “The son of a hero father is always a great man; a reactionary father produces nothing but a bastard!” This was chanted by many children of officials’ families, who dominated the early Red Guards, little knowing that their “hero fathers” were Mao’s real targets. At this initial stage, Mao simply used these children as his tools, setting them upon other children. When the Sichuan boss returned from Peking, he told his son, who was organizing a Red Guard group: “The Cultural Revolution is the continuation of the Communists against the Nationalists … Now our sons and daughters must fight their [Nationalists’] sons and daughters.” This man could not possibly have given such an order unless it had come from Mao.