FOR EVERY TOMBSTONE in the cemetery that is crumbling from erosion, there is another that has been well maintained or restored to good condition. One of them is located near the center of the graveyard, a simple gray obelisk identified on Zeng’s map as tomb No. 6 in Section 4. It measures about five feet across the base and stands nearly ten feet tall, and there are no Communist slogans or symbols engraved on it. A single black marble panel graces its eastern face, and nine large characters are inscribed in gold down the center:
Tomb
of
Mother
Huang
Peiying
To the right are three lines of writing in smaller characters:
Born September 24, 1928,
Killed August 24, 1967,
In Maoxian Gully, Chongqing
The names of the woman’s five children—four sons and a daughter—are listed on the left, along with a notation indicating they rebuilt the tombstone “with filial piety” in 1996, on Qingming Day, the traditional Chinese tomb-sweeping holiday.
Sometimes, early in the morning, a man can be seen standing near the tombstone, staring at the marble tablet and smoking a cigarette. He is a burly fellow, not especially tall or short, with a crew cut, metal-rim glasses, and a fleshy, round face. On these visits to his mother’s grave, Xi Qinsheng often wears a plain black jacket over a dark shirt and dark pants, and he gives the impression of a man who values his solitude. When the weather is nice, his wife might accompany him to the park but she will take a walk around the lake and leave him alone with his thoughts in the cemetery. He appreciates the seclusion of the place, the escape from the hubbub of the city, the chirping magpies in the trees, the distant laughter of children. It gives him a chance to think, and to remember.
Standing amid the tombs, the memories always come rushing back, transporting him to Chongqing as it was when these people were buried, the Chongqing of his adolescence. He can feel the rattle of the artillery shelling and the machine-gun fire. He can see the empty, bullet-marked buildings, and the bodies of the dead scattered on streets scarred with tank treads. He can smell the smoke and gunpowder in the air. And he can hear the cries of the men he beat and tortured as a Red Guard. When he closes his eyes, Xi can picture his mother’s face, too. He remembers the warmth of her love and the strength of her resolve to protect her children. He remembers her selling her blood to help the family make ends meet, and digging up roots and vines to feed her children during the famine of the Great Leap Forward. He thinks of that day when she showed up at his school during the Cultural Revolution and dragged him away from the Red Guard unit he had joined. And he pictures her on the ground in the vegetable field, her head in his hands, blood gushing from a bullet wound to her chest, her eyes staring up at him, then rolling backward as her life slipped away.
“I was the oldest of the children, and I was only fifteen when our mother was killed,” Xi told me on one of his visits to the tomb. “They say a mother’s love is greater than anything. I think those who lose their mothers at an early age value it most. Her death changed everything for our family, so we felt the disaster of the Cultural Revolution on a very personal level.”
Few imagined the tragedy that would unfold when Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in May 1966 with a call to “denounce capitalist representatives in the academic, education, news, arts and publishing circles.” Party leaders in Chongqing, like others across the country, assumed a movement similar to the Anti-Rightist Campaign was under way, and sent work teams into newspapers, schools, universities, and other “cultural” departments with orders to identify and purge a handful of “capitalist representatives” in the leadership of each institution. But by the end of July, Mao made clear he had more in mind than a routine witch hunt. In Beijing, his agents had quietly encouraged university students to organize themselves into Red Guard units, and when they clashed with the party’s work teams, Mao surprised his colleagues by backing the students. “To rebel is justified!” he declared. “Bombard the headquarters!” he commanded. The work teams were withdrawn, and the men who sent them in—top party leaders including the general secretary, Deng Xiaoping, and the president, Liu Shaoqi—came under attack. Egged on by Mao at Nuremberg-style rallies in Tiananmen Square, the Red Guards were given free rein to unmask “revisionists” and “capitalist roaders” hiding in positions of authority.
In Chongqing, students quickly turned against local party officials and their work teams. One source of resentment was the treatment of the popular president of Chongqing University, Zheng Siqun, who had slit his throat after the party denounced him as one of the “capitalist representatives.” Local leaders responded to his suicide by expelling him from the party posthumously. Eleven days later, thousands of angry students and teachers from the university surrounded and berated party officials on the campus of a neighboring college. The date of the confrontation, August 15, soon became a rallying cry. Trying to stay in control of the movement, city officials were organizing high school and university students into Red Guard units and directing them to search and loot the homes of landlords, Rightists, and other bourgeoisie elements. But the students at Chongqing University formed their own squad of “August 15” Red Guards and focused their criticism on the local party apparatus. Confusion reigned as Red Guard units proliferated across the city, each pursuing its own agenda in the name of the Revolution.
Xi was fourteen at the time, a spirited, sometimes unruly boy in a school where students spent alternate weeks in classes and on a factory assembly line making shoes. The political turmoil was a welcome interruption from the tedium, and he eagerly enlisted as a Red Guard. After all the stories he had heard about the heroics of the Communists—in textbooks, in movies, in songs—here was a chance to take part in the glorious revolution himself, to do battle with hidden enemies threatening the nation. The young teenager strutted around the neighborhood with his classmates, shouting slogans and waving little books of Mao sayings, a red armband tied over his shirtsleeve. Older students guided the younger ones, distributing handbills, covering buildings with posters, raiding the homes of neighbors with questionable class backgrounds, destroying anything connected to the “old society”—art, antiques, books, even clothing deemed too bourgeois. Street names were changed, and there was a call to rename the city after the title of a socialist novel. Xi watched as students tormented teachers whom they held grudges against and paraded suspected enemies through the city with dunce caps on their heads and blackboards hanging from their necks.
“It was exhilarating. The masses were fully mobilized, marching and protesting and staging sit-ins. Every street in the city was plastered with big-character posters,” Xi recalled. “As middle school students, we were so excited about everything, blindly following others and joining organizations. But actually, we didn’t understand what was going on. We were just being loyal to Chairman Mao.” Mao’s cult of personality had reached a fever pitch, approaching religious worship. Students read his words aloud as if they were reciting prayers, sometimes directly addressing his portrait, which was everywhere. Billions of badges and buttons with his image were manufactured, and people collected them like spiritual amulets. Not everyone bought into the cult. But in that charged environment, dropping a Mao badge on the floor, or making a careless remark about the Chairman, could be a serious offense, enough to be labeled an opponent of the Revolution. So those with doubts kept them hidden.
If the Red Guards in Chongqing were united in their loyalty to Mao, they were nonetheless divided in their opinion of the local party authorities. One camp defended the city’s party committee and followed its lead. Established and supported by local officials, these “royalist” Red Guard units dominated the movement at first. But as the weeks passed, the rebel camp critical of the local party establishment began to win support. Members of this “August 15” faction included students and teachers from Chongqing University and other colleges, as well as factory workers, intellectuals, and others alienated and
victimized by the party’s past policies. As the royalist and rebel Red Guards accused one another of betraying socialism, arguments escalated into scuffles across the city. Young people in China had been raised by the party to believe in ideological absolutes. Compromise was a sin, and if you stood with Mao and socialism, then those who opposed you must certainly be enemies of socialism.
Xi and his classmates were in the August 15 camp, if only because older students from the universities told them they were. He participated in a mass rally and a hunger strike in front of city hall, and he joined a group that said it would march to Beijing to expose the local officials, though he turned back after twenty-five miles. “I was quite muddleheaded, mindlessly following others and just having fun,” he said. “But I knew the Chongqing government wanted to maintain the status quo and suppress the students, who were accusing the government of taking a capitalist, reactionary road. The government told us to go back to school, but Chairman Mao said to rebel is justified. We had memorized that, and so we rebelled.”
In the fall, public opinion shifted toward the August 15 faction as it became clear Mao was siding with rebel Red Guards against local party committees in other cities. With their support dwindling, the royalists decided to turn against their patrons in the city’s party leadership, too. But rather than welcome the reversal, the August 15 faction accused the royalists of hiding their true colors and trying to hijack the Revolution. The rivalry came to a boil on December 4, when the royalists held a mass rally in Chongqing’s main sports stadium to denounce city and provincial party leaders. More than one hundred thousand people filled the stadium, including Xi’s eleven-year-old brother, Qingchuan, who had also joined a Red Guard unit. The rally had just begun when fighting broke out between the two factions and a riot erupted. “First there was some commotion, and then it was chaos,” Qingchuan recalled. “Once the fighting started, it quickly got out of control. They were beating each other with wooden clubs and steel rods, and everyone was trying to get out.” Qingchuan escaped unharmed, but hundreds were injured. The clash at the stadium was the first major outburst of violence of the Cultural Revolution in Chongqing. It wouldn’t be the last.
Early on, Mao and those closest to him made clear that violence would be permitted, if not encouraged, to achieve the goals of the Cultural Revolution. In disbanding the work teams that other party leaders had sent to the schools to lead the Cultural Revolution, Mao also rejected their efforts to suppress violence. His wife, Jiang Qing, who emerged as a leading voice of the Cultural Revolution, passed on his thoughts to a rally in Beijing: “When good men beat bad men, the bad men get what they deserve.” As the violence spread in Beijing and people such as the girls’ school vice principal Bian Zhongyun were beaten to death, a few students wrote an appeal urging the party to intervene. Mao responded by complaining that Beijing was still “too civilized.” At the first Red Guard rally in Tiananmen, he invited one student to the podium who had publicly assaulted a party official, and he suggested another student change her name from “gentle and refined” to “be martial.” But it was his decision to prohibit police from arresting students who were “making revolution” that had the widest impact. Police were encouraged to befriend Red Guards instead. “Don’t say it is wrong of them to beat up bad people,” the minister of public security advised. “If in anger, they beat someone to death, then so be it. If we say it’s wrong, then we’ll be supporting bad people. After all, bad people are bad, so if they’re beaten to death, it’s no big deal.”
On his seventy-third birthday, in December 1966, Mao delivered a toast to “the unfolding of nationwide all-round civil war.” Within weeks, Red Guards led by his lieutenants seized power from the party committee in Shanghai, and denounced the city’s leaders in a mass rally broadcast live on television. Similar power transfers followed elsewhere in China as Mao ordered military authorities in each region to support the rebels. In Chongqing, with the royalists defeated, the August 15 faction took control of the government at the end of January with the blessing of the 54th Army. The city’s party leaders surrendered, and were denounced at a rally attended by as many as three hundred thousand people. Like other officials across the country, they were publicly humiliated, forced to wear dunce caps and stand bent over with their heads bowed and their arms raised backward—the notorious “airplane” position. The rebels roughed them up and splashed black ink on their faces, marking them as members of “black gangs.” The ranking official in the city, a ruthless Politburo strongman named Li Jingquan, endured several of these public “struggle sessions.” His wife was said to have hanged herself. As in other cities, some deposed Chongqing officials—tough men who had no doubt inflicted their share of misery while in power—also chose suicide to escape the torment. Mao and his allies showed little sympathy. After the Yunnan provincial chief took his own life, Premier Zhou Enlai labeled him a “shameless renegade.” One senior army general, crippled in a failed attempt to kill himself by jumping from a building, was carried to rallies in a crude basket for further denunciation.
The victory of the Red Guards over local party authorities didn’t end the violence. In Chongqing, they began fighting among themselves almost as soon as they took power. Some were upset after being left out of the ruling committee established by the military, while others criticized the August 15 leaders for working with the 54th Army, which they considered part of the old “capitalist” establishment. The military-backed government moved to silence the opposition, arresting hundreds if not thousands of Red Guards in the following months. But at the end of March 1967, Mao concluded that the army was stifling his revolution, not just in Chongqing but in cities across the country. His new deputy, the defense minister Lin Biao, ordered the military to back off and release those who had been detained. As the 54th Army complied, a new Red Guard camp emerged in Chongqing and came to be known as the “Rebel to the End” faction.
Xi said he and his young comrades favored these Rebels, but his parents supported the August 15 faction. His father was a truck driver for a state bookstore; his mother worked in the bookstore’s warehouse. Solid members of the proletariat, they had both been active in the Cultural Revolution, but they seemed to sense the chaos that was coming. One afternoon, as Xi was boasting at school about his performance in a debate with other Red Guards, he turned around and saw his mother standing in the doorway. She grabbed him by his belt and dragged him outside, where his father was waiting with a car. From that day on, he was grounded. His mother stayed home to stop him from going out.
It was a bit of parenting that might have saved his life. The arguments between the two factions in Chongqing quickly escalated into some of the worst violence of the Cultural Revolution anywhere in the nation. The fighting began with scattered clashes in the spring, but on June 5, thousands engaged in a pitched battle in front of the library of a teachers’ college that lasted three days. Other major confrontations followed. The Red Guards attacked one another with stones, clubs, and metal rods, then knives, swords, and spears. Soon the focus of the battles turned from schools and colleges to the city’s arms factories. Chongqing was a base of weapons production because of its inland location far from the nation’s borders, and its factories produced all manner of lethal munitions: semiautomatic weapons, hand grenades, light and heavy machine guns, flamethrowers, howitzers, antiaircraft guns, artillery cannons, tanks, warships—almost everything but fighter jets. Now the rival factions fought to control these factories and distribute the materiel. The Red Guards on both sides established combat bases, fortifying factories, schools, and bridges as well as radio stations, key assets for spreading propaganda.
On July 7, the first shooting deaths occurred, and over the following weeks the city descended into civil war. By late July, the two camps were using grenades, machine guns, and flamethrowers. Tanks and artillery cannons were deployed by early August. And then the fighting spread to the rivers, where Red Guards were raiding ships for food and supplies. On August 8, in per
haps the only naval battle of the Cultural Revolution, three aging gunboats that the Rebels had fitted with artillery cannons clashed with a small fleet of ships manned by August 15 fighters with machine guns. Afterward, at a memorial service for one of the dozens of sailors killed in the battle, a Rebel leader ordered two prisoners executed with the sailor’s gun and their bodies dumped in the river as a sacrifice in his honor. A few days later, an August 15 commander ordered five prisoners executed, including a couple expecting a child. The husband begged his captors to spare his wife, or at least delay her execution until after she had given birth. His pleas were ignored.
The numbers of dead and wounded climbed with each battle, some of which involved more than ten thousand combatants and resulted in as many as a thousand casualties. Newspapers published gruesome reports describing how “martyrs” were stabbed, shot, maimed, electrocuted, or found dead in the water, their faces mutilated. Crowds cheered as armored trucks transported fresh-faced Red Guards to battle zones, then looked on with dread as the same vehicles returned carrying the wounded and dead. The city was laid to ruin, with windows shattered everywhere, buildings burned to the ground, and the main harbor destroyed. More than 180,000 people fled the city, seeking refuge in the provincial capital, Chengdu.
At first, Xi was excited by the combat. “Every night, you could hear the gunfire and the artillery explosions. It was amazing! Tanks were moving in the streets! I really wanted to go. I was very interested. I thought participating in the armed fighting was glorious and would be a lot of fun,” he recalled. But his parents wouldn’t let him leave the house. Later, they took him to see what a neighborhood looked like after a battle, and his enthusiasm was replaced by fear. “It was horrible, a big mess of corpses scattered around…. All the buildings were empty shells, and there were burned cars and dead bodies everywhere. I was terrified, and whenever I heard a gunshot, I would hit the deck.”
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