BOOK REVIEWS

Zheng Yi: Stèles rouges

In May 1986 the well-known novelist and investigative journalist, Zheng Yi (1), returned to the southern province of Guangxi on the border with Vietnam, in order to further investigate the rumours of cannibalism perpetrated during the Cultural Revolution. He had first encountered vague reports of this as a young red guard in the province in 1968, when the factional power struggle (2) had reached its height during the summer months. With the support of two letters of introduction from the Chinese Writers Association and the China Law Journal (3), he was able to gain access to the local Communist Party archives in the provincial capital, Nanning and, especially important, to the material gathered in 1983 at the time of the ideological campaign “to resolve the issues left over from the Cultural Revolution”. This euphemism refers to the huge massacres that had occured during that period. What he discovered was so stunning that, in order to confirm the contents of the documents, he undertook the task of seeking out witnesses to the events, the children of the victims and even some of the perpetrators—at least those willing to talk—and of looking for immediate material evidence.

The early victims of the “violent actions of the masses” were killed with forks or shovels, or else they were strangled, drowned or beheaded with their head left stuck on a tree. Others were tied up and thrown alive into ditches to be finished off by stoning. Some women victims even had firecrackers exploded in their vaginas. They were eaten. Yes, eaten! Zheng Yi writes: “When there was a parade following a ‘struggle session’, the old women hurried to it carrying their provisions baskets, and awaited the outcome. Hardly had the victim stopped breathing that people would rush forward. The first to get there would cut off the good bits, while the latecomers shared out the bones”. Sometimes, he reports, the victims were disembowelled and cut up while still alive: “While the condemned person was still alive, his flesh was cut up bit by bit, to be fried and eaten before his eyes”. The favourite parts were those internal organs believed locally to be cures for various ailments: the brain, the heart, the womb, and above all the liver, which had a reputation for giving courage as well as for being a powerful tonic. But this organ had to be consumed under certain conditions, as the following anecdote shows: “A man was walking along with a human liver in his hand, and he came across an old friend who asked him whether the victim had agreed to letting him eat his liver. The first man was astonished: ‘How could he have agreed?’. His friend retorted: ‘If the owner of the liver does not give his consent, it loses all its powers’. So the man went off in search of another victim. After torturing him into giving his consent, he tore the liver out of his living victim, and went to show it to the victim’s mother, saying, ‘Look, this is your son’s liver!’ She fainted from the shock”. Eating the brain was also highly prized by old men hoping thereby to recover their youth: “Each one had a steel tube of suitable size, sharpened at one end on a grindstone like a dagger. They thrust this into the skull, and the knelt down to suck out the brain, like a gathering of old friends drinking a large tub of yoghurt through straws!” Such violence, which in Guangxi alone claimed many thousands of victims, was not the spontaneous result of a loss of control over “evil instincts”. It originated in the “hurricane-force wind of class struggle”, whipped up by the local political and military authorities under the control of the Communist Party. According to the terms of the joint directive issued on July 3rd by the Communist Party Central Committee, the State Council, the Central Military Commission and the subsection of the Central Committee in charge of the Cultural Revolution—at that time under the control of Mao Zedong—it was necessary to carry out intensified repression against “the class enemies”. This meant giving free reign to “the indignation of the masses”, which amounted to permitting bloodshed in the struggle against the “four categories”—landowners, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, and bad elements—as well as the 23 other undesirables—rightists, spies, former activists of the Kuomintang, former prisoners, etc. This wide-open field covered both the beneficiaries of the old regime and anyone in trouble with the new order, and it permitted absolute arbitrariness, since no specific charge had to be laid against the victims; “class membership” was enough. The definition of class origin as ineradicable and hereditary (4) led to whole families being wiped out. The resultant “struggle sessions” were automatic death sentences. The sessions were followed by immediate execution and dismemberment. We are told that the instigators of these acts of violence were “the red guards, school children and impoverished adults, coolies and carriers, workers from the lower ranks dissatisfied with the existing order of things, and expressing through this spilling of blood their opposition to social injustice”.

Concluding his investigation, Zheng Yi sets out three stages in the development of this collective cannibalism:

1. An initial phase, consisting of furtive measures carried out in a climate of horror—executions under cover of night and the random cutting off of human flesh;

2. A festive phase, during which cannibalism became widespread and was practiced enthusiastically by the participants, who became skilled in cutting out the heart and liver by following the advice of former guerrilla fighters (5). These communal meals were veritable “banquets of human flesh” held more or less everywhere, even in school and hospital canteens or the refectories of government offices (6). Human flesh and pork in pieces of equal size were cooked in a large cauldron. This was then set up high enough to hide the contents from the invited guests, who queued up to take a piece each out of it. This “ingenious” arrangement allowed a person to be eliminated through cannibalism, while at the same time avoiding the feeling, as far as possible, that the individual participant was eating human flesh. The taboo could be broken without the act being committed, at least openly. Each participant could lie to himself. Thus “collective hysteria and individual conscience could co-exist, without any difficulty”;

3. The final phase of “collective madness”, during which cannibalism was raised to the level of a “mass movement”; a question of putting into practice the Marxist-Leninist theory of the “elimination of classes”, in the most radical sense of the term.

We are confronted here with a form of organised violence, for which Mao Zedong and the Communist Party were responsible. As far as the author is concerned, “the cannibalism in Guangxi province during the Cultural Revolution was the counterpart of the bloody despotism of the Communist Party”. What it shows is not “some particular innate flaw in the Chinese or some buried depths of the human soul” but the structure of totalitarian power. For this reason, he writes, “a memorial column should be raised in Guangxi, coloured red ... and deeply engraved with the childish handwriting of children from all over the world, saying ‘Never again!’”.

Translated from French original by Jonathan Hall