5 - Mao's Ordinary Men

Summary

Official materials such as xianzhi offer little information regarding who committed the collective killings during China's Cultural Revolution; however, there is no similar dearth in the unpublished documents I have obtained. Published reports written by exiled dissidents including Zhang Cheng and Zheng Yi contain vivid accounts of the killings and, in some cases, confessions. In my interviews, I also probed into the question of who was immediately responsible. The survivors, victims' family members, and retired cadres consistently provided the same answer: local cadres and militia members. When the decision to kill and the scope of killings was agreed on, local leaders and militias rounded up members of Four-Type families, with the killings typically following a mass rally attended by the entire village.

I previously recounted an event in Sanjiang Commune, Quanzhou County in Guangxi Province, in which seventy-six Four-Type family members were killed by being pushed off a cliff. Both the xianzhi of the county and a provincial-level document recorded this event, identifying the organizer as Huang Tianhui, the commune's militia commander. Based on a county-level internal document, Zheng Yi detailed how the killings were deliberated and planned and who were involved:

In the morning and the evening of October 2 [1967], Sanjiang Commune's militia commander Huang Tianhui held two meetings to plan killings. The evening meeting was attended by mass organization activists and militia leaders above the rank of team or platoon. “The masses in Daoxian County, Hunnan [a bordering county] have killed some Four Types because the Four Types in Honghua, Daoxian, conspired to stage armed insurgencies,” said Huang. […]