Mao: The Unknown Story

The authorities staged “model demonstrations of killing” to show people how to apply maximum cruelty, and in some cases police supervised the killings. In the general atmosphere of fostered cruelty, cannibalism broke out in many parts of the province, the best-known being the county of Wuxuan, where a post-Mao official investigation (in 1983, promptly halted and its findings suppressed) produced a list of 76 names of victims. The practice of cannibalism usually started with the Maoist staple, “denunciation rallies.” Victims were slaughtered immediately afterwards, and choice parts of their bodies — hearts, livers and sometimes penises — were excised, often before the victims were dead, and cooked on the spot to be eaten in what were called at the time “human flesh banquets.”

Guangxi is the region with perhaps the most picturesque landscape in China: exquisite hills rising and falling over crystal-clear waters in which the peaks look as real as they do above. It was against these heavenly double silhouettes, by the purest rivers, that these “human flesh banquets” were laid out.

An 86-year-old peasant who, in broad daylight, had slit open the chest of a boy whose only crime was to be the son of a former landlord, showed how people had no trouble finding justifications for their actions in Mao’s words. “Yes, I killed him,” he told an investigative writer later. “The person I killed is an enemy … Ha, ha! I make revolution, and my heart is red! Didn’t Chairman Mao say: It’s either we kill them, or they kill us? You die and I live, this is class struggle!”

STATE-SPONSORED KILLINGS reached their extreme in every province in 1968. That year was dominated by a mammoth campaign called “Sort Out Class Ranks.” The aim of this drive was to make an inventory of every single “class enemy” in the entire population, and to impose various punishments on them, including execution. So all the victims from both before and during the Cultural Revolution were dragged out and persecuted again. In addition, the regime set out to uncover new enemies by scrutinizing the history and conduct of every adult in the nation, and looking into every unsolved suspicion. The number of labels for official outcasts ran to as many as twenty-three, and the number of people persecuted amounted to many tens of millions — more than ever before.

An eyewitness described how the new boss of Anhui province, an army general, made decisions about executions. Flipping languidly through a list of “counter-revolutionaries” presented to him by the police, he paused every now and then, and raised his voice in a quintessentially official inflection (drawing on the end of a sentence in a pinched nasal tone, sounding rather bored): “Are you still keeping this one? Might as well kill him.” “What about this one? Mm — finish her off.” Then he asked how many people the provinces next to his planned to execute: “How many is Jiangsu killing this month? And how many is Zhejiang?” When told, he said: “Let’s take the average between the two.” People were executed accordingly.

One of the worst-ravaged provinces was Inner Mongolia, where Mao harbored suspicions about a plot to detach the province and link it up with Outer Mongolia and the Russians. The new boss there, General Teng Hai-qing, vigorously investigated this suspicion of Mao’s, using torture on a large scale. According to post-Mao revelations, cases included a Muslim woman having her teeth pulled out by pliers, then her nose and ears twisted off, before being hacked to death. Another woman was raped with a pole (she then committed suicide). One man had nails driven into his skull. Another had his tongue cut out and then his eyes gouged out. Another was beaten with clubs on the genitals before having gunpowder forced up his nostrils and set alight. Post-Mao official figures revealed that over 346,000 people were condemned and 16,222 died as a result in this one case. The number of people in the province who “suffered” in some way was later officially put at over 1 million — of whom 75 percent were ethnic Mongols.