At 1 A.M. on July 25, 1968, Zhou Enlai, Kang Sheng, and six other prominent central leaders held a meeting with representatives of Guangxi Province's mass-organization leaders in the People's Meeting Hall in Beijing. Speeches by the leaders heavily favored the United Headquarters (UHQ), one of two mass alliances in Guangxi, at the expense of April 22 (or Four Twenty Two [FTT]), the rival faction. Zhou and Kang also announced the existence of a vast counter-revolutionary conspiracy organization, which they called the Anti-Communist Party Patriotic Army (ACPPA). They did not cite any concrete evidence for, indeed, there was none to cite, but this supposedly anti-communist force was portrayed as widespread, extending far beyond Guangxi Province. The meeting effectively endorsed the war rhetoric used by the provincial government, now dominated by the UHQ, which had first claimed that its political opponents in the FTT were members of this anti-communist army. Collective killings had begun in Guangxi counties and soon spread to Guangdong Province.

Since 1949, the new regime had maintained a politically constructed class divide and governed using the doctrine of class struggle (see Chapter 4). The doctrine was not merely a theoretical principle; in a self-fulfilling-prophecy fashion, it also turned into “reality” by the constant campaigns against class enemies. “Sabotage acts” against the state were identified – although they were either exaggerated or fabricated – and discriminations, persecutions, and abuses were publicly featured to reconfirm the “truth” of class struggle.

Official materials such as xianzhi offer little information regarding who committed the collective killings during China's Cultural Revolution; however, there is no similar dearth in the unpublished documents I have obtained. Published reports written by exiled dissidents including Zhang Cheng and Zheng Yi contain vivid accounts of the killings and, in some cases, confessions. In my interviews, I also probed into the question of who was immediately responsible. The survivors, victims' family members, and retired cadres consistently provided the same answer: local cadres and militia members. When the decision to kill and the scope of killings was agreed on, local leaders and militias rounded up members of Four-Type families, with the killings typically following a mass rally attended by the entire village.

I previously recounted an event in Sanjiang Commune, Quanzhou County in Guangxi Province, in which seventy-six Four-Type family members were killed by being pushed off a cliff. Both the xianzhi of the county and a provincial-level document recorded this event, identifying the organizer as Huang Tianhui, the commune's militia commander. Based on a county-level internal document, Zheng Yi detailed how the killings were deliberated and planned and who were involved:

In Chapter 1, I propose two contrasting models of collective killings. The state-policy model traces the source of killings to a state's policy of elimination and expects the policy to be carried out by state organizations and military personnel. My community model, conversely, suggests that collective killings could occur absent a genocidal state policy, and local conditions could turn conflict into atrocities, perpetrated by civilian killers. In Chapter 1, I also present a series of factors based on aspects of state mobilization and state breakdown, which I argued would help promote killings at the local level.

In Chapters 2 through 7, I present extensive evidence supporting the community model and casting doubt on the state-policy model. In 1967 and 1968, there was no central Chinese policy calling for the wholesale destruction of any segment of the population. Neither were the collective killings committed by professional execution squads coordinated by a central command. There are vast variations in the collective killings across provinces, counties, townships, and villages. The state-policy model is generally concerned only with national-level atrocities and conditions, but these patterns of killings call for serious attention to local conditions to explain them. Exploring the implications of these variations is the task I take up in this chapter. I address why some communities had extensive collective killings while similar communities did not – or, to put it differently, which factors account for the cross-unit variations?

To call the Cultural Revolution a time of lawlessness is an understatement. Liu Shaoqi, China's president, died in a solitary prison cell, never having been tried for any crime. Photographs survive showing Peng Dehuai, the defense secretary deposed a few years earlier, on a stage with his hands bound behind him and a large placard hung around his neck, being “tried.” In one of the rallies, beatings by the Red Guards broke two of his ribs. Peng Zhen was “arrested” by Red Guards and paraded through the streets of Beijing – a city he had led as the mayor just months earlier – and then jailed for eight years without charge. These denials of due process for the grand and powerful were not nearly as great as for those individuals out of the public eye who were deemed outcasts, such as former landlords and rich peasants in the countryside.

Lawless though it was, China was far from without rules and was not in a state of anarchy. China under Mao was a highly regulated society; behavior and thoughts were strictly channeled and programmed. Society was worthy of the term tyranny. In such an environment, taboos and boundaries abounded, including limits on political violence – that is, including the prohibition of unsanctioned killings of any civilian groups, the so-called class enemies included. In this chapter, I discuss the depletion of three sources of social control: the legal system, the party-state bureaucracy, and the political mass campaign.

This book presents and explains a chapter in human history of extreme suffering inflicted by extreme cruelty. The specifics are very Chinese but the lessons behind them are not. This writing coincides with the world community's anguish for the events raging on in Darfur and its most significant attempt to intervene yet: the indictment of Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir for genocide. Only the future will tell whether this is an effective course of action, although some scholars and humanitarian groups have already complained that, in fact, the indictment may alienate a government whose cooperation must be sought. Since the United Nations adopted its convention on genocide in 1948, the record of intervention has not been encouraging.

One of the lessons I attempt to extract from the Chinese case is that collective killing, mass killing, or genocide is, according to Scott Straus, “a massively complex social phenomenon.” This understanding requires us to look beyond the “genocidal policy,” if there is any, of a rogue state. Short of regime change, it may be more effective to engage the government at issue than to alienate it because the government is the most capable agent of affecting other social factors that have implications on the outcome. In his groundbreaking work on the Rwanda genocide, Straus writes: “Genocide is ultimately about how ordinary people come to see fellow citizens, neighbors, friends, loved ones, and even children as ‘enemies’ who must be killed.”

In this appendix, I provide greater detail regarding the quantitative analyses of collective killings across counties in Guangxi and Guangdong Provinces, as analyzed in Chapter 8. I use two dependent variables: that is, whether the county had collective killings (used in the bivariate analysis in Tables 8.3 and 8.4) and the number of deaths caused by collective killings (used in the Poisson regression models in Table 8.5 and Table A3 herein). The source for the first variable is described in Chapter 2. I read the narratives in the xianzhi (i.e., county gazetteers) and decided whether there were collective-killing events in a county based on the number of deaths (i.e., ten or more in a given event) and the manner of killings. To compute the number of collective-killing deaths, I first obtained the total number of deaths during the entire Cultural Revolution. I then subtracted the deaths caused by the earlier persecutions and those caused by armed battles.

My analyses are based on data from the 65 counties in Guangxi Province and 57 counties in Guangdong Province whose xianzhi are available (of 162 rural counties in 1965). My dataset thus includes more than three quarters of the counties, and there is no reason to believe that the missing counties are biased in any particular direction regarding killings or their covariates. Because some of the covariates have missing values, the total number of counties may be less than 122 in some of the analyses.

The twin tasks of this book are to make historical and theoretical cases about collective killings in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. I want to explain what happened and why. For the historical case, I establish the facts and patterns of collective killings in 1967 and 1968 in two provinces during the Cultural Revolution. I also document key aspects of Maoism between the 1949 revolution and the eve of the extreme atrocities. These aspects – the formation and transformation of a rural culture, the creation and maintenance of a class divide, the social mobility of the rural population, and the demobilization of legal institutions – provide a historical narrative and backdrop for understanding the collective killings. A central theme in this narrative is “actually existing Maoism”: a set of practices that were not only inspired by the communist ideology but also shaped by real-life challenges and contradictions. The leaders, their cadres, and ordinary citizens did not follow a master plan in the revolutionary transformations but rather reacted to reality – in specific times and places – in a pragmatic and often ad hoc fashion, improvising as they went along. In this context, collective killings, like many other actions, were emergent actions rather than part of routine politics. The overall nature of the regime and its explicit policies are insufficient to account for these emergent outcomes.

Around the time of the traditional moon festival in the autumn of 1967, Sha Kaichu was rounded up by militiamen from his village, his own neighbors. He was denounced and roughed up in a “struggle” rally in the town square in Xiaojiang Village in Hunan. The next morning, he and five others were escorted to the commune's headquarters. Sha implored them to allow higher officials to hear his case: “I fought the war for our country. Please consider the efforts I have made.…”

Sha, thirty-seven and a father of three, had been the head of his family since his early twenties. His father, a landlord, was killed during the Land Reform movement of 1952. Sha joined the Chinese Voluntary Army to fight in the Korean War. After his discharge he worked in his village as a tractor driver. Sha had committed no crime but now was being singled out as the son of a landlord. A few days before his apprehension, his loved ones pleaded with him to hide; rumors of killings had come from other villages. He was too proud and confident to do so, citing his contribution to the country.

Sha considered himself to be safer than the other five male descendants of landlords being marched to the headquarters, but he was wrong. The village leader and the militia had decided to kill all of them at the roadside, 4 li (1 li equals 0.5 kilometers) shy of their destination.

This chapter describes traditional social divisions in the rural communities – traditional because they were shaped by a history of human interactions long before the 1949 communist revolution. As in communities elsewhere, repeated patterns of human conflict generated primary-group boundaries that underpinned the conception of “us versus them,” or in-group and out-group identities. The human imagination must take a “quantum leap” to perceive other people as killable; antagonism toward out-groups is the starting point. These divisions were not sufficient to cause collective killings, but they provided a local impetus for embracing violence when other conditions were in place.

The main unit of organization in the villages of South China was surname lineage. Despite the fact that the 1967–1968 victims were killed under the label “class enemies,” clan identities seemed to be at work. In his report on the 1967 Daoxian massacre, Zhang Cheng describes a scene that implicates clan affiliation in collective killings. Before a killing event, village leaders held a meeting to compile a list of targets. Without exception, villagers nominated and then voted for landlords or rich peasants from their rival clans. My own interviews encountered a similar pattern. In one event, militia members from three main surname lineages called one another's clan members to the stage, where hardwood hoe handles were ready in hand for killing.

In recounting a violent scene, a xianzhi compiler in Xingning County, Guangdong Province, focused on an encounter between a victim of the Cultural Revolution and a group of middle-school students. This moment combined innocence, hatred, and brutality and it raises questions about the concept of class enemies in Mao's China and the impetus behind ordinary people's contempt, hatred, and disregard of them. It was the summer of 1968; the place was dabali, or the Great Beach, an open space adjacent to a bank of the Ningjiang River, which runs through the county seat. A struggle rally had been attended by more than ten thousand people, including not only residents from the town but also peasants from nearby communes. Each commune had brought its own Four Types as struggle targets. A joint session like this one was rare; in less fanatical times, each commune would have its own rally. However, the Party Center had recently issued two new directives. The rally ended, the crowds receded, and militiamen began escorting struggle targets back to their respective townships. In at least four instances, however, the formations quickly degenerated into beatings and killings of the captives.

Among the dead and injured lay Mr. Lan, a man in his early forties. The road was deserted and daylight was waning when a group of middle-school students passed and noticed the bloody and broken body. Mr. Lan moved his lips, possibly asking for a sip of water or pleading for help.