A popular Cultural Revolution poster depicts Red Guards and their motto: "It's no crime to revolt and there's no guilt in rebellion." Photo: IC

By Liang Ruoqiao

Wang Yiyu was a strong, quick-tempered 16-year-old boy when he killed a 19-year-old Red Guard from a rival faction.

Today he is haunted by the same recurring nightmare, Wang told Phoenix TV: "A woman in a white dress with blood stains predicts 'You will lie [on this bed of guilt] for 10, 000 years.'"

The woman in white has pursued Wang for decades: She first popped up when he was on the run for his crime.

After serving his nine-month murder sentence in 1967, Wang penned an 8,000-word confession "Weighed down by the guilt of murder" and published it in fringe history magazine Yanhuang Chunqiu in May 2010.

Wang's self-described metamorphosis "toward an animal" took "less than five minutes" after an older Red Guard convinced him that beating was in fact a form of class struggle, a way for Wang to demonstrate loyalty.

Soon young Wang would feel a surge of teen "exhilaration" beating up a boy he had protected from others only five short minutes before as he became one of the frontline "combat boys" of his group.

"Younger members were more easily provoked," he said.  

On August 5, 1967, after seeing his comrade Li Hongxin had been beaten up by a rival Red Guard faction, Wang and his gang wanted revenge.

Red Guards shave half the hair off  "gangster" Li Fanwu. Photo: 1966, Memory of Our Generation by Xu Youyu

Trap

Filled with bloodlust, Wang and his faction raced into a trap. More and more rivals arrived at the scene in trucks and Wang's group was by now outnumbered about 10 to one.

The danger fed desperation.

When a boy threw red bricks at his head from behind, Wang wheeled around and landed two heavy blows on his assailant with his baseball bat.

Wang's bat was not the sole instrument responsible for the death of Wang Hongyan. A hole in the side of Wang's neck attested to a javelin employed by one of two other comrades.

Seeing his victim lying in a pool of blood, "I started to feel that he was a human being the same as me, not our class enemy."

Wang looked directly at the camera to his right in the Phoenix TV Beijing studio.

"In those mad times, others didn't murder, but I did. I am a murderer," he told an audience of millions, eyelids twitching.

"There must be darkness inside me. There must be evil inside."

Only his false left eye looked calm. That he had lost his eye in an accident was a kind of delayed karmic retribution, Wang believed. He said other Red Guards he knew had died of liver cancer, leukemia or a gas leak.

"Even if the laws let you get away with it, your conscience will get you," he told the half-hour Secret Documentary TV show.

A Research Paper into Hunan Farming by Mao Zedong provides guidelines for Red Guards such as "we must correct the wrongs even if we may use excessive means" and "A revolution is not a dinner party. We must strike down all landowners and step on them." Photo: 1966, Memory of Our Generation by Xu Youyu

Through humiliating, public confession, Wang hoped he might at last begin to address his many sins of that era.

"Finally I have done something worthwhile," Wang said. "Later on in studies of the Cultural Revolution, I have contributed a true story."

In places like South Africa or Northern Ireland, confession might merely be considered a precursor whereas in China that's the ending - Wang's confession on Chinese mainland television was among the first of its kind and Phoenix Television is a satellite channel broadcasting to a limited, predominantly urban, Chinese mainland audience.

"It was an admirable act," said Shen Xiaoke, "considering he did kill someone."

Shen himself publicly apologized on November 4 last year in a Southern Weekend cover story headlined "After 44 years, the Red Guards finally begin to apologize publicly."

It was the first Red Guard apology article ever published on the Chinese mainland and immediately sparked a mainstream media debate.

"I didn't do anything wrong. I didn't beat or hurt anyone," Shen said. "That makes people like me most susceptible to apologizing."

Where readers might have yearned for a more cathartic, reconciliatory experience, in fact the recipients of apologies seemed nonplussed by the whole experience.

"I don't remember Shen Xiaoke hitting me," said Cheng Bi, the 86-year-old former party secretary of Beijing Foreign Languages Middle School. "He was a good kid."

Guan Qiulan, a teacher from the affiliated high school of Peking University, was "surprised" by the visit of a dozen former students.

"I don't remember," he said.

Memory

This is a very normal reaction, according to Wang Youqin, an overseas researcher into the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution and a former Red Guard.

"There's this tendency toward unconscious selective memory loss," Wang said.

An example, Wang said, is victims cannot remember the lyrics to popular Cultural Revolution songs while Red Guards can often recall every word.

"Almost all the victims chose to forget rather than taking in the persecution they had been through."

This type of unconscious selective memory loss might also explain why victims rarely demand an apology from their tormentors, she believed.

There's also another kind of "selective forgetfulness," Wang said.

"For those agitators who actively participated in the violence and persecution, they tend to omit their own violence from their memories, not even mentioning the names of the dead," she said.

Shen's letter of apology moved his classmate Zhang Yongbing. He called Shen from his car at noon a few days after the letter first circulated on an alumni website.

He ended up crying and confessed his role in the death of Yao Shuxi, his study program director. He told the Global Times he dearly wanted to apologize to Yao, but knew he never could.

Red Guards amass in Tiananmen Square in 1966. Photo: www.zrcx.com

One winter evening when he was barely 16, Zhang participated in a denunciation meeting.

"There were 30 of us in the classroom and seven or eight participated in the beating," Zhang said.

"They made her wear paper hats, kneel down. She was punched and kicked. When she was half unconscious after almost an hour of torture, she was ordered to crawl out of the classroom.

"When she passed me, I … kicked her on the side of her body so hard … that she fell out into the sidewalk, outside of the classroom," Zhang's voice cracked on the phone.

"I didn't feel anything at that time, nothing still after hearing the news she hanged herself opposite my dorm the next day.

"I even checked her body with other curious students."

The guilt came later.

"Gradually I felt regret," Zhang said. "It was the most unforgivable thing I have ever done in my life and I will never forgive myself.

"I am responsible for her death."

As a chief legal consultant responsible for a 4,000-employee wheel plant in Yinchuan, capital of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Zhang knows China's Criminal Law did not pass until 1979, three years after the end of the Cultural Revolution and that murder has a 20-year statute of limitations.

"I cannot bring myself to confess this to my wife and my son," he said. "They will forgive me, I know, but I fear they might look at me differently."

As for the victim, Zhang said he did not dare contact her family. Yao lived alone toward the sad end to her life and he didn't want to search for her family and reopen old wounds.

Taboo

Psycho babble about selective memory loss does not impress Shen. Most of his fellow Red Guards know exactly what they did, he believes.

"Nor would the tortured victims forget," he said. "But neither side will talk about it in our get-togethers."

To understand the decades of deafening silence from Red Guards, it boils down to Mao Zedong, Shen believes.

"The older generation tends to forgive Mao," he said. "To deny him is equal to denying their whole life."

Domestically, it's something of a taboo to blame the Great Helmsman. Internationally, it has commonplace academic backing as shown in Remembrance, an Chinese-language online monthly magazine devoted to research into the Cultural Revolution.

For most who remain inside the Chinese mainland, the definitive judgment on Mao rests with his successor Deng Xiaoping, co-author of "The Resolution on Several Historic Issues Since the Founding of PRC," issued in 1981.

"We cannot blame it all on Mao," Deng said, according to Chen Donglin of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, "the system is a more important factor."

Deng's study group included more than 4,000 senior Communist Party members who would later go on to introduce reform and opening to China and usher in a new era of capitalism with Chinese socialist characteristics.

The nation has moved on from Mao fast, very fast in most cases.

"Despite his serious mistake during the Cultural Revolution, his contribution toward the Chinese revolution far outweighs his mistakes," the Resolution states. "His contribution comes first and his mistakes second."

Red Guard movement: A timeline

May 29, 1966

First Red Guard group established at the Affiliated middle school of Tsinghua University.

August 1, 1966

Mao Zedong writes "A letter to the Red Guards of the Affiliated middle school of Tsinghua University."

August 18, 1966

Mao greets Red Guards in Tiananmen Square. The Red Guard movement spreads from Beijing to other cities, its group members expanding from the descendants of revolutionaries to include more ordinary people. The movement starts to split.

December 1966

Split intensifies as older Red Guard groups are now declared counter-revolutionary.

January 1967

Newer groups start to gain the upper hand fighting older groups backed by the People's Liberation Army.

December 1968

Mao announces all Red Guards should go to the countryside and learn from the peasants.

A Research Paper into Hunan Farming by Mao Zedong provides guidelines for Red Guards such as "we must correct the wrongs even if we may use excessive means" and "A revolution is not a dinner party. We must strike down all landowners and step on them." Photo: 1966, Memory of Our Generation by Xu Youyu