Song Binbin

Song Binbin was born in 1947 in Beijing, the daughter of Song Renqiong, a senior People's Liberation Army general and CCP official whose family originated in Liuyang, Hunan. She attended the Beijing Normal University Girls' Affiliated High School from 1960 to 1966. When work teams sent by the party center arrived at the school in June 1966 as the Cultural Revolution began, Song was appointed one of four vice-chairs of the school's newly formed "Revolutionary Teachers and Students Representative Council." After Mao Zedong criticized the work-team approach nationally, the teams withdrew from the school by July 30; the following day, students who had opposed the work team declared a new group, the "Mao Zedong-ist Red Guards," while those associated with the work-team-era council, including Song, were labeled "conservatives" in the school's internal factional politics.

On August 5, 1966, students at the school beat vice principal Bian Zhongyun to death with nail-studded sticks and military belt buckles — the first educator known to have been killed by Red Guards in Beijing. She was fifty years old, a mother of four, and had worked at the school for seventeen years; the next day her husband spent his savings on a camera to photograph her injuries before the body was cremated.

Thirteen days later, on August 18, Song led a delegation of Red Guards onto the rostrum at Tiananmen Square during Mao Zedong's first mass reception of the movement, where she pinned a Red Guard armband on him. When Mao asked her name and she answered "Binbin" — meaning gentle and refined — he reportedly told her, "要武嘛" ("You should be martial"), and an account under the name Song Yaowu ("Song Wants Militancy") describing the encounter was published soon after in the People's Daily, though Song later said she had not written it herself.

On January 12, 2014, Song and fellow former student leader Liu Jin delivered a prepared statement, "My Apology and Thanks," to alumni of the school. Song said that as one of the student council's leaders during the work-team period she had failed to stop the violence against Bian Zhongyun and other school officials, and that she bore responsibility for Bian's death. The apology drew a sharp rebuttal from Bian's widower, Wang Jingyao, who on January 27 issued a public statement rejecting it as insincere, accusing Song and Liu of falsely claiming they had tried to resuscitate Bian and saying he would accept no apology until the full truth of the August 5 killing was established. The historian Wang Youqin also criticized the episode, noting that the killing had never been formally investigated or recorded even as a photograph of Song pinning the armband on Mao continued to be featured approvingly in the school's own alumni publications.

After the Cultural Revolution, Song emigrated to the United States, earning a master's degree in geochemistry from Boston University in 1983 and a doctorate from MIT in 1989, then working as an environmental analyst for the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection until 2003, when she returned to China. In 2022 she went back to the United States for cancer treatment and died in New York on September 16, 2024, at the age of seventy-seven; she had asked that no memorial gathering be held.