May 16, 2016
Chen Shuxiang with images of his grandfather and a certificate showing that he had worked at a university. Mr. Chen treasures the images because he has none of his father, who was killed in the Cultural Revolution.
Sim Chi Yin for The New York Times
Fifty years after his father was killed, Chen Shuxiang still wonders what happened to his bloodied corpse. He keeps a frayed note from back then that let him make his way through the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution and pay the student zealots who beat his father to death to have him cremated.
He never found his father’s body. Ever since, he has hoped for answers, and waited for the students who killed his father to turn up, older and contrite, and say they were sorry. No one has.
Mr. Chen is still waiting for a frank reckoning with the legacy of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and so is China.
“Just before he died, my father wasn’t even allowed a mouthful of water,” said Mr. Chen, 72, a retired teacher who lives in northwest Beijing, a few minutes’ walk from where his father lived. “It’s something I don’t like to think about even now, but also I want to hear from those who did this.
“Why did they pick him out? Where did his ashes end up?”
Half a century after Mao Zedong started the Cultural Revolution, his tumultuous drive to enlist ordinary Chinese to purge the country of ideological foes, many who lived through that time believe its legacy still haunts their country.
From its official beginning on May 16, 1966, until it fizzled out with Mao’s death in 1976, perhaps a million or more people were killed, tens of millions were persecuted, the economy stagnated, and thousands of historical and cultural monuments were destroyed.
The Communist Party officially condemned the movement in 1981, declaring it “responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses” suffered by the People’s Republic since its founding in 1949.
But China has yet to squarely face up to the era. The party has lately become even more hostile to scrutiny of Mao, unwilling to confront touchy questions about his and the party’s unbridled power, or to dredge up contested memories of a time when perpetrators often became victims themselves.
The suppression of memory has blocked the kind of airing out of the episode — much less the assigning of legal culpability — that many who endured it believe could help the country move forward.
Historians in China often cannot publish research about the Cultural Revolution. Textbooks scurry past that time. Many young people have no idea that their schools were once battlegrounds for the student militants, known as Red Guards. This year, the government has not held any memorials for the anniversary and has discouraged public mourning.
“The Communist Party holds power, and this is a dark mark against it,” said Chen Bing, a student at the time at the school where Mr. Chen’s father was killed. “If it publicizes this too much, that’s like staining its own reputation.”
Many survivors, former Red Guards and historians said the official reticence had permitted a dangerous nostalgia for Mao’s time.
They see no risk of a full-scale repeat of the Cultural Revolution. President Xi Jinping has none of Mao’s appetite for upheaval, and Chinese society is far less rigid and isolated now. But many said they worried about a return of the harsh political tactics, ideological zealotry and absolutist pronouncements that fed the fury of the Red Guards, Mao’s teenage political shock troops.
Their fears have grown under Mr. Xi. The president’s family suffered grievously during the Cultural Revolution. His father was purged by Mao and persecuted by Red Guards, his sister is believed to have been driven to suicide by Red Guards, and Mr. Xi himself drifted around Beijing as strife consumed the city.
But in a turn that historians still puzzle over, as an adult politician Mr. Xi has publicly revered Mao. And since he took power in 2012, critics have detected traces of Mao as he has clamped down on dissent and amassed formidable power.
“If the ghosts of the Cultural Revolution are not dispersed and are allowed to grow, we’ll slide in the direction of another Cultural Revolution,” said Bu Weihua, a former Red Guard who attended the high school where Mr. Chen was a student and then teacher. Mr. Bu became one of China’s most respected historians of the era. “More dregs of Cultural Revolution rhetoric, methods and doctrines will float up.”
To many, the recent Communist Party-backed denunciations of a retired real estate developer who chided Mr. Xi were reminiscent of Cultural Revolution-style purges. Others have criticized a recent performance eulogizing Mao in the Great Hall of the People as a disturbing sign.
“People who didn’t experience the Cultural Revolution know only that many officials were persecuted, but they don’t know that the numbers of ordinary people who suffered were 10 times, a hundred times, more,” Yang Jisheng, a Chinese historian who has come under official pressure over his critical studies of the Maoist era, said in a recent speech in Beijing. “Unfortunately, nowadays there are some people doing everything in their power to cover up the mistakes of history.”
The Cultural Revolution was Mao’s campaign to root out internal enemies who, he said, had been seduced by capitalism and the “revisionist” compromises of the Soviet Union. Students formed Red Guard groups to enforce Mao’s will, he gave them his blessing, and the tumult escalated, especially in schools, where students condemned teachers and officials.
Before retiring, Mr. Chen was an instructor at the prestigious Tsinghua University High School, the birthplace of the first Red Guard group. But even as students there moved from tirades against teachers to physical humiliation, with witch hats and parades, to beatings, Mr. Chen thought that his family was safe.
His father was solidly working class, a barely educated boiler operator whose own father had done the same humble job. His mother washed clothes for extra cash. Mr. Chen, the eldest of seven children, had given up hopes of entering a university so that he could help support his siblings. He found a job as an instructor at the same high school where he had studied.
But on the evening of Aug. 27, 1966, as he turned the corner to his family’s home, he saw more than a dozen youths in green uniforms with red armbands, the favored uniform of Red Guards, Mr. Chen said. A neighbor spotted Mr. Chen and waved him away.
When he crept back that night, the home was a shambles. His brothers and sisters were bawling; the dumplings his mother had been preparing for dinner were squashed on the walls and floor; his parents were missing.
The next morning, his mother, Liu Wancai, stumbled home, barely able to talk, her clothes torn, her face covered in blood.
“What about Dad?” Mr. Chen asked, according to his privately published memoir.
“He was killed,” his mother said. “It’s true. He died beside me.”
Ms. Liu and her husband had been taken by Red Guards, and he was accused of being a “class enemy,” she told Mr. Chen. The family of Mr. Chen’s father had once owned about three acres of land, enough to label the father a landlord, anathema to the revolution.
The teenage mob threw the couple into the back of a truck and took them to a school where they were beaten with military-style leather belts, the favorite punishment tool of Red Guards; a jump-rope twisted into a whip; and shoes with nails jutting out, Ms. Liu later said. The mob then drove the couple to another school where the beating continued, including with iron rods.
The father, Chen Yanrong, 37, insisted that the landlord label was wrong; his family had long given up the property. But back then, the younger Mr. Chen said, “the more you denied something, the more you were beaten.”
As he lay in his own blood, Chen Yanrong begged for water. The students said no, and he stopped breathing soon after.
“There was some randomness to who was seized upon,” said Guobin Yang, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of a new study, “The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China.” “The most important thing was really to show that we — the organization — we’re the real revolutionaries.”
By later official accounts, 1,772 people were killed in the tumult across Beijing in August and September 1966. There were probably more, including suicides and people killed after being expelled from the city.
The Red Guards who took Mr. Chen’s parents came from one of the city’s top schools, Peking University High School, according to his mother as well as later official documents.
They were among the first wave of Red Guards, who were usually the offspring of party officials. Later Mao turned on his own political elite, and the first wave fell from grace, giving way to new “rebel” Red Guard factions that then waged bloody battles against other Red Guard factions.
The day after his father was seized, Mr. Chen asked Red Guards from his school to write a note allowing him to go to Peking University High School to pay the Red Guards there for the cremation. But at the school gate, he heard people say that there had been ruthless beatings there overnight and that two corpses had been taken away.
Afraid, Mr. Chen left without entering or seeing his father’s body. He still has the note, tucked away in the back of a picture frame.
His mother died in 2011, and was never able to identify her attackers. The family left space at her grave for her husband’s remains, should they ever be found.
After Mao died in 1976, the family received 2,500 renminbi, equal to about $380 at current exchange rates but a more generous sum back then, in compensation for the father’s death. Peking University High School also gave the family a statement acknowledging that the school’s Red Guards, who called themselves the Red Flag Struggle Group, had killed him.
But no one has ever come forward to take responsibility for the death, Mr. Chen said.
Peng Xiaomeng, a former leader of the Red Flag group who is now in her late 60s, has worked under a different name as an editor for an economic policy journal in Beijing. Reached by telephone, she seemed startled to be asked about events 50 years ago but said she did not recall the episode.
“I really don’t know whether it was the Red Flag group,” she said. “I have nothing else to say.”
Mr. Chen stood by his mother’s recollections, which were corroborated by official documents.
“Even now, these people are all like this, all evading responsibility,” he said, his voice choking. “They say: ‘I wasn’t at the school. I wasn’t at the meeting. I didn’t know.’ ”
“After 50 years,” he said, “they still haven’t gained any understanding.”
Vanessa Piao and Adam Wu contributed research.
