The Guangxi Massacres of the Cultural Revolution (1967–1968)

Background: the “Allied Command” and “4.22”

According to Yan Lebin, a Ministry of Public Security official who served on the 1981 central investigation team in Guangxi and the 1983–84 working group on handling the Cultural Revolution’s legacy there, and who published his recollections in Yanhuang Chunqiu in 2012, Guangxi had no clear factions at first. From March 1967, mass organisations split over whether to support the regional leader Wei Guoqing in “stepping forward” to lead the movement: his supporters formed the “Proletarian Revolutionary Rebels’ Allied Command” (Lianzhi), his opponents “4.22.” The Guangxi Military District initially backed the Allied Command; when Zhou Enlai met both factions in August 1967 and expressed support for 4.22, the district made a self-criticism but, Yan says, continued to back the Allied Command in secret. In February 1968 troops sympathetic to 4.22 were transferred out, and in April the Guangzhou Military Region commander Huang Yongsheng privately designated 4.22 a reactionary organisation.

Yan identifies three waves of killing. In the first, in winter 1967–68, a “red storm” swept the countryside on the claim that “four-category” elements were rising to kill cadres and peasants; “poor and lower-middle peasants’ supreme courts” were set up and large numbers of landlords, rich peasants and others and their children were killed, along with some 4.22 supporters — 2,900 in Lingshan county alone. In the second, around the founding of county revolutionary committees in spring and summer 1968, 4.22 members, cadres and others were executed in the name of “defending red political power” and rooting out an alleged “Anti-Communist National Salvation Corps”: 1,639 were killed in Shangsi county, and more than 3,000 in Rong’an county in six weeks. Yan writes that the killing “was organised and planned, and most of it took place under leadership after the revolutionary committees were set up.”

The July 3 Proclamation, Nanning and Guilin

On 3 July 1968, with Mao Zedong’s instruction “Act accordingly,” the Party Central Committee, State Council, Central Military Commission and Central Cultural Revolution Group issued the “July 3 Proclamation,” which said “class enemies” in Liuzhou, Guilin and Nanning had created a series of counter-revolutionary incidents — sabotaging railways, seizing aid bound for Vietnam, attacking PLA units and seizing weapons — and ordered an end to armed fighting, the dismantling of fortifications, the return of weapons and punishment of counter-revolutionaries for whom there was firm evidence of murder, arson and similar crimes. Yan says the 1983 investigation established that the charges listed had been pinned on 4.22 on the basis of reports from the Guangxi Military District and provincial preparatory group.

After the proclamation, militia from 14 counties and several army units besieged 4.22 strongholds in Nanning with mortars and recoilless guns from 31 July, taking them by 8 August. Material quoted by Yan puts the death toll of the operation at more than 10,000, with 33 streets around Jiefang Road burned; according to the Guangxi Cultural Revolution Chronology (Guangxi People’s Press, 1990) he cites, 1,470 were killed in the assault on Jiefang Road and the exhibition hall alone and 9,845 captured, of whom 2,324 of the 7,012 handed to county militia were killed on the way home or after. On 20 August, citing the proclamation, Guilin authorities and the garrison launched mass arrests — the “20 August incident”; Yan says more than 10,000 people in Guilin city and its 12 counties were shot, beaten or hounded to death in it and its aftermath.

Cannibalism in Wuxuan and elsewhere

Yan writes that in 1968 in Wuxuan county 38 people were dismembered and their flesh, hearts and livers eaten, that 113 state cadres and workers in the county ate human flesh or organs, and that similar atrocities occurred in Wuming, Shangsi, Guixian, Qinzhou, Guiping, Lingyun and other counties. The American historian Donald Sutton, in a 1995 study of the Wuxuan cannibalism drawing on the writer Zheng Yi’s investigation, notes that after an investigation team entered the county in 1981–83, 15 people were jailed and 130 Party members and cadres disciplined, and that the region’s announcement expelling all who had eaten human flesh from the Party was quickly withdrawn for fear it would leak to Hong Kong. Sutton treats the killings as ritualised cannibalism and asks why it arose in poor, remote places such as Wuxuan.

The death toll and the 1980s reckoning

Estimates of the death toll vary widely. According to Yan, in January 1979 the regional Party committee reported 44,000 “abnormal deaths” in 1967–68; in 1981 the regional first secretary Qiao Xiaoguang put the figure at 70,400 for the whole Cultural Revolution; the 1981 investigation team estimated at least 100,000 from partial reports; others spoke of 200,000 or even 500,000. In January 1984 the regional legacy office compiled reports from all levels showing 89,700 dead with names and addresses — 3,700 killed in armed fighting, 7,000 hounded to death and more than 79,000 “beaten to death or shot in an organised, planned and led manner” — plus more than 20,000 missing and over 30,000 unidentified dead. Of the 11,027 deaths in Guilin prefecture in 1967–68, Yan says, only 458 occurred in armed fighting.

Yan recalls that the 1981 investigators were closely watched by people sent by the regional Party committee, and that on their return the committee’s staff and Wei Guoqing complained about them to the centre. In March 1983 the centre reshuffled Guangxi’s leadership and sent a 40-member working group under Song Renqiong and Xi Zhongxun; some perpetrators were then prosecuted — Huang Tianhui, who organised the burial alive of 76 people in Quanzhou county, was executed in January 1985. Until 1974 victims had been recorded only as “abnormal death, a contradiction among the people.” Using the 1980s investigation materials, the sociologist Andrew Walder argues that Guangxi’s death toll was produced mainly not by community killings of “class enemies” but by a province-wide counterinsurgency campaign carried out by village militia (see the narrative comparison).