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A BOOK that describes the crimes of Mao Tse-tung's Cultural Revolution has become freely available on the internet in China after a ban of 26 years.
It contains accounts of the murders of entire families in one rural district of central China during the chaos from 1966 to Mao's death in 1976.
The book's appearance coincides with the rise to power of the new Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, 59, who was exiled to the countryside under Mao.
Now censors have allowed millions of Chinese readers to download some of the most graphic stories of the mass killings unleashed by the Communist party on its people. An informal translation of the book of 500,000 Chinese characters by The Sunday Times leaves no doubt that it is a document of historical importance for China.
Some have compared it to the work of the Soviet writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. "It shows why our young generation must be careful with the future or our society will suffer a great regression," said Mao Yushi, a highly regarded academic, in his blog. "Every sentence and every case is true," writes the author, Tan Hecheng, in his preface to Bloody Myth: An Account of the Cultural Revolution Massacre of 1967 in Daoxian, Hunan.
Among the saddest cases is that of a teacher named Zhou Junyang, a loyal party member in Hunan, Mao's province.
She lived with her husband and three children aged eight, six and four.
On the night of August 26, 1967, their door was kicked in by the local party secretary, Tang Xinghao, the most powerful man in the village.
Zhou's husband had lent 100yuan, worth about $A15 today, to Tang. He had not repaid it. Zhou's father had served the old Kuomintang regime, which the Communists defeated in 1949. That was enough to doom the family.
For months Mao's ultra- radicals had told peasant folk that "class enemies, landlords and reactionaries" were plotting a comeback.
"The enemy is sharpening its knives, we must sharpen our knives," Mao had taught.
Now the Zhou family were dragged to the village threshing floor, bound with wire and lined up with 14 other unfortunates. The party secretary announced that he had convened "a supreme court of poor and lower-middle peasants". He sentenced all 19, including the children, to death.
The victims were taken to one of the deep vertical karst caves, hollowed out by the dissolution of limestone, which are one of Hunan's tourist attractions today.
"The first to die was an old doctor, Jiang Wenhuang, who begged the party secretary for a cup of water," Zhou told the author.
"The party secretary refused. When Jiang said that even in the Qing dynasty the emperor's executioners gave three hot stuffed buns to those condemned to die, the militiamen kicked him into the pit before he could finish his words."
Zhou remembered her children crying as they watched the first seven people thrown in. "Then, as I was ordered to kneel by the cave, I told them not to cry and that Mum would come back soon. I was hit with an iron bar and passed out."
Zhou came to at the bottom of the cave. She heard the voice of her youngest daughter, Xueyan, the only other survivor, but the girl died of thirst after a few days.
On September 1 rain fell on Hunan and sluiced into the cave. Zhou drank its muddy stream. Two days later two of her students, Lu Biaofeng and Jiang Fugui, dared to rescue her by lowering a rope. They told her the 47th Corps of the People's Liberation Army had arrived to stop the massacres.
The PLA intervened against violent radicals across China to restore order after Mao's Cultural Revolution had turned into a civil war that almost destroyed his authority.
Many facts about it remain unknown. Bloody Myth, however, spares no detail in accounting for the deaths of more than 9,000 people in Daoxian County.
The heaviest toll came in eight days of killing in the Song Ba district that took the lives of 1,054 people, one in 50 of the population.
Party leaders put up roadblocks and fomented murders by the "masses" and the militia.
He Xingsheng, the director of a revolutionary committee, condemned 21 "rich farmers" to die. They were thrown into a cave called the Hulu Hole. When militiamen heard cries from its depths, He ordered them to toss in a pack of dynamite. Then there was silence.
One day later He supervised the drownings of 31 "rich farmers" and their children. They were bound, weighted down with stones, rowed out in a boat and pushed into the river. The oldest was a grandfather of 74 and the youngest an infant of 56 days. The baby's mother, Zhang Xiuhua, 37, was rescued by a militiaman, Jiang Laizi, a single man who noticed her beauty. They later married.
As Mao knew, rage and jealousy were political weapons. The militia seized a young man called He Yuanneng whose family had been rich - by the pathetic standards of rural China - before "liberation". He had a pretty girlfriend.
"F*** your mother, we sons of peasants can't find wives so why should a landlord's puppy like you get such a pretty girl?" said the village leader, named only as Zhou. He ordered the militia to truss He with a heavy stone and throw him into the Xiao Shui River.
People recovered 9,000 corpses from the Xiao Shui, so many that they choked the inlet to a power station. Sales of fish stopped after people claimed to find ears and eyes in the creatures' stomachs.
A witness, Yang Zong, who was 17 at the time, told how he was ordered to go out in a small boat and collect bodies, many naked, headless and bound together by wire. One woman had a dead infant in her arms.
The random madness engulfed a schoolboy, Yang Yuekun, as he went home for the summer holidays. Wrongly suspected of "a bad class background", he was lined up and shot with a group of landlords despite shouting "Long live Chairman Mao".
Another admirer of Mao, Jiang Xiaochu, a student, told his father and brother they had nothing to fear but then watched as they were sentenced to death by a "village supreme court".
When Jiang stood up, crying out slogans from Mao's thoughts to try to save them, he too was condemned. His head was cut off. His mother and sister were raped.
The publication of the book by the Gongshi Wang website (Common View, ¹²Ê¶Íø¡ªÔÚ´ó±ä¸ïʱ´úÑ°ÕÒ¹²Ê¶), which is run by liberals, has not so far produced any calls for justice.
In the case of Zhou, who lost her whole family, the man who gave the orders was expelled from the party in 1985. He was also ordered to repay her the 100yuan he had borrowed.
Cookies must be enabled. | The Australian
It contains accounts of the murders of entire families in one rural district of central China during the chaos from 1966 to Mao's death in 1976.
The book's appearance coincides with the rise to power of the new Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, 59, who was exiled to the countryside under Mao.
Now censors have allowed millions of Chinese readers to download some of the most graphic stories of the mass killings unleashed by the Communist party on its people. An informal translation of the book of 500,000 Chinese characters by The Sunday Times leaves no doubt that it is a document of historical importance for China.
Some have compared it to the work of the Soviet writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. "It shows why our young generation must be careful with the future or our society will suffer a great regression," said Mao Yushi, a highly regarded academic, in his blog. "Every sentence and every case is true," writes the author, Tan Hecheng, in his preface to Bloody Myth: An Account of the Cultural Revolution Massacre of 1967 in Daoxian, Hunan.
Among the saddest cases is that of a teacher named Zhou Junyang, a loyal party member in Hunan, Mao's province.
She lived with her husband and three children aged eight, six and four.
On the night of August 26, 1967, their door was kicked in by the local party secretary, Tang Xinghao, the most powerful man in the village.
Zhou's husband had lent 100yuan, worth about $A15 today, to Tang. He had not repaid it. Zhou's father had served the old Kuomintang regime, which the Communists defeated in 1949. That was enough to doom the family.
For months Mao's ultra- radicals had told peasant folk that "class enemies, landlords and reactionaries" were plotting a comeback.
"The enemy is sharpening its knives, we must sharpen our knives," Mao had taught.
Now the Zhou family were dragged to the village threshing floor, bound with wire and lined up with 14 other unfortunates. The party secretary announced that he had convened "a supreme court of poor and lower-middle peasants". He sentenced all 19, including the children, to death.
The victims were taken to one of the deep vertical karst caves, hollowed out by the dissolution of limestone, which are one of Hunan's tourist attractions today.
"The first to die was an old doctor, Jiang Wenhuang, who begged the party secretary for a cup of water," Zhou told the author.
"The party secretary refused. When Jiang said that even in the Qing dynasty the emperor's executioners gave three hot stuffed buns to those condemned to die, the militiamen kicked him into the pit before he could finish his words."
Zhou remembered her children crying as they watched the first seven people thrown in. "Then, as I was ordered to kneel by the cave, I told them not to cry and that Mum would come back soon. I was hit with an iron bar and passed out."
Zhou came to at the bottom of the cave. She heard the voice of her youngest daughter, Xueyan, the only other survivor, but the girl died of thirst after a few days.
On September 1 rain fell on Hunan and sluiced into the cave. Zhou drank its muddy stream. Two days later two of her students, Lu Biaofeng and Jiang Fugui, dared to rescue her by lowering a rope. They told her the 47th Corps of the People's Liberation Army had arrived to stop the massacres.
The PLA intervened against violent radicals across China to restore order after Mao's Cultural Revolution had turned into a civil war that almost destroyed his authority.
Many facts about it remain unknown. Bloody Myth, however, spares no detail in accounting for the deaths of more than 9,000 people in Daoxian County.
The heaviest toll came in eight days of killing in the Song Ba district that took the lives of 1,054 people, one in 50 of the population.
Party leaders put up roadblocks and fomented murders by the "masses" and the militia.
He Xingsheng, the director of a revolutionary committee, condemned 21 "rich farmers" to die. They were thrown into a cave called the Hulu Hole. When militiamen heard cries from its depths, He ordered them to toss in a pack of dynamite. Then there was silence.
One day later He supervised the drownings of 31 "rich farmers" and their children. They were bound, weighted down with stones, rowed out in a boat and pushed into the river. The oldest was a grandfather of 74 and the youngest an infant of 56 days. The baby's mother, Zhang Xiuhua, 37, was rescued by a militiaman, Jiang Laizi, a single man who noticed her beauty. They later married.
As Mao knew, rage and jealousy were political weapons. The militia seized a young man called He Yuanneng whose family had been rich - by the pathetic standards of rural China - before "liberation". He had a pretty girlfriend.
"F*** your mother, we sons of peasants can't find wives so why should a landlord's puppy like you get such a pretty girl?" said the village leader, named only as Zhou. He ordered the militia to truss He with a heavy stone and throw him into the Xiao Shui River.
People recovered 9,000 corpses from the Xiao Shui, so many that they choked the inlet to a power station. Sales of fish stopped after people claimed to find ears and eyes in the creatures' stomachs.
A witness, Yang Zong, who was 17 at the time, told how he was ordered to go out in a small boat and collect bodies, many naked, headless and bound together by wire. One woman had a dead infant in her arms.
The random madness engulfed a schoolboy, Yang Yuekun, as he went home for the summer holidays. Wrongly suspected of "a bad class background", he was lined up and shot with a group of landlords despite shouting "Long live Chairman Mao".
Another admirer of Mao, Jiang Xiaochu, a student, told his father and brother they had nothing to fear but then watched as they were sentenced to death by a "village supreme court".
When Jiang stood up, crying out slogans from Mao's thoughts to try to save them, he too was condemned. His head was cut off. His mother and sister were raped.
The publication of the book by the Gongshi Wang website (Common View, ¹²Ê¶Íø¡ªÔÚ´ó±ä¸ïʱ´úÑ°ÕÒ¹²Ê¶), which is run by liberals, has not so far produced any calls for justice.
In the case of Zhou, who lost her whole family, the man who gave the orders was expelled from the party in 1985. He was also ordered to repay her the 100yuan he had borrowed.
Cookies must be enabled. | The Australian
