Former Red Guards remember a time when killing was normal
Scars of Cultural Revolution run deep for some survivors
Zheng Zhisheng, a 25-year-old Chongqing University student, turned and waved to two fellow Red Guards sitting in the back of the van.
As had been agreed, they slammed their rifle stocks into the heads of their two captives, members of a rival Red Guard faction, time and again. There were no screams: the captives were already badly injured and unconscious after successive beatings by Zheng’s faction on August 18, 1967, at the height of the armed conflicts early in the Cultural Revolution.
Anarchy was what we all longed for. It felt too repressed before the Cultural Revolution
Zheng told the driver to take a longer route to the hospital, so they could take their time.
“I don’t have the guts to kill, I thought, but I could have them killed at the hands of others,” Zheng said in a recent interview.
The captives were dead when they arrived at the hospital.
May 16 marked the 50th anniversary of the outbreak the Cultural Revolution, a decade of political and social turmoil that lasted until 1976. It was a time when killing became normal, as universities, factories and cities around China turned into battlefields in what Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong (毛澤東) called an “all-out civil war”, with all the factions involved vowing to protect Mao’s revolutionary line.
A series of editorials in People’s Daily in early June, inflaming and applauding student rebellion, turned the Red Guards into a nationwide phenomenon.
