1. A paper by Andrew Walder describes what occurred in urban state factories (“The Chinese Cultural Revolution in the factories: Party-state structures and patterns of conflict,” in Perry, Elizabeth J. (ed.), Putting Class in Its Place: Worker Identities in East Asia (Berkeley: China Research Monograph 48, Institute of East Asian Studies, 1996), pp. 167–198).Google Scholar From the accounts of 24 interviewees and Cultural Revolution-era worker faction newsletters, Walder has been able to delineate a common scenario for the urban state factories even though these were spread across China. As shall be seen, this is not conceivable for the villages.

2. This series of interviews was conducted collaboratively with Anita Chan, and I am indebted to her for allowing me to utilize the transcripts for this article.

3. These nine provinces are Anhui (two interviewees), Fujian, Guangxi (three), Hebei, Hunan, Jiangsu (two), Jiangxi, Shandong and Yunnan.

4. The village studies whose information on the Cultural Revolution have been taken into account are: Endicott, Stephen, Red Earth: Revolution in a Sichuan Village (Toronto: NC Press, 1989), pp. 114–120Google Scholar; Friedman, Edward, Pickowicz, Paul G. and Selden, Mark, Revolution, Resistance and Reform in Village China (New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming), chs. 3–4Google Scholar; Hinton, William, Shenfan: The Continuing Revolution in a Chinese Village (New York: Random House, 1983), pp. 493–664Google Scholar; Huang, Philip, The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 130–31Google Scholar (additional information on the same village's Cultural Revolution experience is contained in Huang, Philip, “Rural class struggle in the Chinese Revolution,” Modern China, Vol. 21, No. 1 (01 1995), esp. pp. 130–31)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Potter, Sulamith Heins and Potter, Jack M., China's Peasants: The Anthropology of a Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 83–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ruf, Gregory A., Cadres and Kin: Power, Authority, and Corporatism in a West China Village, 1937–1991 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, forthcoming), ch. 7Google Scholar; Siu, Helen F., Agents and Victims in South China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 204–208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Also taken into account was a village study in whose authorship I played a part: Chan, Anita, Madsen, Richard and Unger, Jonathan, Chen Village Under Mao and Deng (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), chs. 2–5Google Scholar; the Cultural Revolution in this same village is also discussed in Madsen, Richard, Morality and Power in a Chinese Village (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), ch. 6.Google Scholar

5. Mobo Gao, an Australian-based academic who was active in the Cultural Revolution in the village of his birth in Jiangxi Province, has written a book manuscript, Gao Village: Rural Life in China since the Revolution (London: Hurst & Co., forthcoming), recounting the recent history of this village, which he has kindly provided to me.

6. These are Shu-min, Huang, The Spiral Road: Change in a Chinese Village Through the Eyes of a Communist Party Leader (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), pp. 89–98Google Scholar; and Seybolt, Peter J., Throwing the Emperor from His Horse: Portrait of a Village Leader in China, 1923–1995 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), pp. 65–72.Google Scholar

7. A recent study notes this important distinction: “The essential difference between these two groups was their different relationship to the state: the peasants were basically dependent for their livelihood on their own labour and on fluctuating harvests, while the holders of urban registrations were taken care of by the state in almost every aspect of their lives'… Hukou status was inherited from one's mother, and it was virtually impossible to change an agricultural hukou to an urban one.” Mallee, Hein, “Introduction to ‘Reform of the Hukou System’,” Chinese Sociology and Anthropology, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Fall 1996), p. 6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. This observation is based in part on a separate set of interviews that I conducted with several former residents of county towns and in part on the descriptions of the Cultural Revolution in such towns that have been published in a large number of county gazetteers in China over the past decade.

9. This article also does not examine what occurred in the rural districts occupied by China's ethnic-minority populations. The available evidence strongly suggests that during the Cultural Revolution period of 1966–68 Han officials interpreted non-conformity to the Han way of life as deviations from Chairman Mao's teachings, and efforts were often made in these rural regions by both officials and mobs to impose Han mores by destroying local religious sites and enforcing Han social practices. On the pressures exerted in the part of China that contained the largest number of ethnic-minority peoples, see Uinger, Jonathan, “Not quite Han: the ethnic minorities of China's Southwest,” The Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Autumn 1997), pp. 67–78.Google Scholar The worst reported repression of any ethnic minority during the Cultural Revolution occurred in Inner Mongolia, where Mongols were accused of conspiring to betray China in favour of Mongolia. Hundreds of thousands of Mongols were arrested in a witch hunt, many of them from the countryside, and tens of thousands reportedly died while in detention. On this see, e.g. Jankowiak, William R., “The last hurrah? Political protest in Inner Mongolia,” The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, No. 19–20 (01 – 07 1988), pp. 273–288Google Scholar; also Woody, W., The Cultural Revolution in Inner Mongolia (Stockholm: Center for Pacific Asia Studies at Stockholm University, Occasional Paper 20, 1993)Google Scholar; also Yi, Zheng, Hongce jinian bei (The Red Memorial Plinth) (Taipei: Huashi wenhua gongsi, 1993), pp. 285–292.Google Scholar

10. Baum, Richard, “The Cultural Revolution in the countryside: anatomy of a limited rebellion,” in Robinson, Thomas W. (ed.), The Cultural Revolution in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 367–476.Google Scholar

11. Yi, Zheng, The Red Memorial PlinthGoogle Scholar. A greatly abridged version of the book has been published in English as Scarlet Memorial: Tales of Cannibalism in Modern China (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996).Google Scholar

12. When I write that a third of the villages did not experience Cultural Revolution turmoil from below, I am referring only to efforts to topple village-level leaders or conflicts between different groups in these communities, as in inter-lineage struggles. I am not including persecutions mounted from above by officials, nor orchestrated movements to “struggle against” and physically abuse bad-class people. This latter form of discrimination occurred almost everywhere, and was not confined to the Cultural Revolution of 1966–68: interviews show that such persecutions were commonplace throughout most of the period of Mao's rule.

13. See Linshan, Hua, Les Années Rouges (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987), pp. 200–202.Google Scholar

14. As just one example, an interviewee from Guangdong recalls that in mid-1966, “A whole group of secondary-school students marched into our village and held a rally next to the ancestral hall. They proclaimed they were going to ‘destroy the Four Olds,’ and some of them smashed and burned the ancestral tablets in the hall, and then climbed onto the hall's roof and wrecked all the figurines that were up there. Because it was a new political campaign, the peasants who were watching were hesitant to stop them.” On the following days, this group of local students chopped off the braids of young women as “feudal” and went through peasant houses ripping down pictures of kitchen gods and of dragons and other “superstitious” artefacts. More ominously, they proceeded to smash up the homes of former rich peasants and landlords, searching for KMT flags or books, and when they could not find any they boisterously beat up a few of the old people.

15. In addition to my interviews, examples of urban Red Guards entering the countryside and, in some cases, trying to link up with such rural student Red Guards are contained in Baum, , “The Cultural Revolution in the countryside,” pp. 278–283.Google Scholar

16. This new material poses a picture of the Cultural Revolution as having been much more widespread than previously presumed by foreign scholars, whose information from documentary sources until recent years was limited largely to the urban areas and to the rural districts closest to cities. My interviews are in accord with the new documentary material, revealing that even at a considerable distance from the cities, in some of the towns that housed commune headquarters disgruntled junior commune-level cadres rose up against their superiors. In one of the commune towns in my interview sample, even the commune clerks organized their own Rebel group. In such communes, dissident groups of village youths that were too weak in their own community to cause any commotion could instead walk into the commune town to join in on one side or the other in the factional agitation.

17. Between 1956 and 1966 inclusive, some 1.2 million urban young people were sent to live in the countryside. After the Cultural Revolution fighting, between late 1968 and 1976, an additional 14 million were dispatched. Unger, Jonathan, Education Under Mao: Class and Competition in Canton Schools, 1960–1980 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 262, n. 36.Google Scholar

18. In addition to my interviews, the frustrating circumstances of sent-down youth during these months is described in Bernstein, Thomas P., Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages: The Transfer of Youth from Urban to Rural China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 264–68.Google Scholar

19. An example of this scenario is described in detail in Chan, , Madsen, and Unger, , Chen Village Under Mao and Deng, ch. 4.Google Scholar

20. See Ibid. ch. 4. A good example is described in Shu-min, Huang, The Spiral Road, pp. 91–93Google Scholar; See also brief discussions in Baum, , “The Cultural Revolution in the countryside,” pp. 376–77, 396–97.Google Scholar

21. In only two of the villages discussed by interviewees did attacks to oust a local leader simply well up spontaneously in a disorganized fashion among the peasants. In the more dramatic of these two cases, the leader of a community named Jia village in Anhui province had had several fellow villagers beaten to death during the early 1960s, but since his lineage group, the Jias, dominated the village, he had not previously been called to account for his brutality. In the midst of the Cultural Revolution, a group of neighbours attempted to exact vengeance by drowning him in a large cesspool, but his kinsmen intervened to rescue him. In both of the cases discussed by interviewees, such eruptions against hated officials lasted only days and faded away in disorganized confusion.

22. In this brigade, early in the Cultural Revolution a Xu whom Party Secretary Gao had recently helped remove during the Four Clean-ups on charges of corruption from a post as production-team accountant in Xu village, joined forces with a Gao man furious that his wife had openly become Secretary Gao's mistress. Together, the two men laid an unsubstantiated charge against the Party Secretary, accusing him of having been a murderously active member of an anti-Communist militia before Liberation. Secretary Gao was quickly swept aside and his place was taken by his Xu accuser, who emerged as head of the new governing Revolutionary Committee of the brigade. This information is drawn in part from personal communications with Mobo Gao, of Gao village, and in part from the draft of a forthcoming book he has authored, to which he has kindly given me access.

23. This distinction emerges in interviews with respondents from single-lineage villages, and a similar sense pervades written sources. The Party Secretary of a village in Henan province, as just one example, confided to his biographer, Seybolt, Peter J., that “I was not severely criticized [during the Cultural Revolution] because most of us are in the same Wang family [lineage] here.”Google ScholarSeybolt, , Throwing the Emperor from his Horse, p. 68.Google Scholar

24. Baum cites only two sources, both provincial Chinese radio broadcasts, of local instances of “clan struggle.” The emphasis in the Chinese newspapers and broadcasts of the time almost wholly centred on the surface political phenomena of factional struggles.

25. “The Cultural Revolution has been under way for two thousand years,” from Feng Jici's book of oral histories, Yi baige ren de shinian, translated in the collection “China's great terror: new documentation on the Cultural Revolution,” edited by Walder, Andrew G. and Xiaoxia, Gong, Chinese Sociology and Anthropology, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Fall 1993), pp. 13–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26. Hinton, , Shenfan: The Continuing Revolution in a Chinese Village, p. 527.Google Scholar In this and the following example, also taken from a book-length village study, the authors delineate in a few sentences the fact that inter-lineage antagonisms are at work in the village's Cultural Revolution infighting, but then “bury” this insight in a mass of chronological detail about the Cultural Revolution turmoil, to the extent that this underlying factor gets erased in readers' memories.

27. Friedman, , Pickowicz, , and Selden, , Revolution, Resistance and Reform in Village China, ch. 3 of ms., pp. 18–19.Google Scholar

28. Such inter-lineage attacks on, or disputes over, structures that produced lucky or baleful fengshui were not uncommon in the countryside. One county recorded 961 inter-lineage disputes between 1961 and 1990 involving fengshui. Fazhi ribao (Law Daily), 7 08 1985, p. 1.Google Scholar

29. This information comes from Isabelle Thireau and Hua Linshan, who have co-authored a history of the first half of the 20th century of this Mai lineage village. A description of the 1940s xiedou is contained in their Enquête Sociologique sur la Chine 1911–1949 (Paris: Presses Universaires de France, 1996), ch. 8.Google Scholar Hua initially lived in the village during the 1970s as a sent-down youth, and he and Thireau have more recently conducted interviews on the years immediately preceding his stay there. They have related to me that during the Cultural Revolution, in addition to assisting those relatives in another commune, the Mais also made an unsuccessful attempt to wrest power from the leadership of their own brigade. Before Liberation, the Mai hamlet had been more prosperous than other nearby hamlets due to having relatives overseas, and they had paid the price during the period of collectivization in the 1950s when a poor lineage without Overseas Chinese connections gained control of the brigade leadership. During months of conflict in late 1966 and early 1967, a breakaway militia/Red Guard group that largely consisted of people from the Mai hamlet captured and beat the brigade Party secretary at a struggle meeting. But by the spring of 1968, when the Cleansing of Class Ranks campaign was announced, the former brigade cadres had recovered their power. About 30 Mai villagers were placed under political supervision and received formal “bad” labels, including that of counter-revolutionaries.

30. Bianco, Lucien, “Rural areas: vendettas are back,” China Perspectives, Vol. 1, No. 1 (09 1995), p. 27.Google Scholar See also Richard Madsen's analysis of the Cultural Revolution violence that had erupted in William Hinton's Long Bow village. Madsen observes how the factional loyalties there were “rooted to a commitment to the past… As the balance of power between the rival factions teetered back and forth, each faction accumulated injuries that demanded vengeful redress, deepening the spiral of violence.” Madsen, Richard, “The politics of revenge in rural China during the Cultural Revolution,” in Lipman, Jonathan N. and Harrell, Stevan (eds.), Violence in China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), p. 187.Google Scholar

31. A good description of this for a village in Fujian province is contained in Shu-min, Huang, The Spiral RoadGoogle Scholar. There, members of the two village factions fought on opposite sides in the pitched battles of higher-level factions in and around the city of Xiamen (pp. 93–94).

32. Zedong, Mao, “Carry the Revolution through to the end,” in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. IV (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1961), p. 304.Google Scholar In that same essay, Mao famously declared that “the Chinese people will never take pity on these snake-like scoundrels.” One of the most popular children's books of the 1960s, an allegory shaped from the Monkey King saga, carried precisely this message, even to the point of having the hero ruthlessly kill a snake demon who was artfully disguised as an innocent maiden. On this story and its violent “class struggle” message, see Unger, , Education Under Mao, p. 88.Google Scholar

33. This caste-like system, in which the bad-class households became the equivalent of untouchables, is described more fully in Unger, Jonathan, “The class system in rural China,” in Watson, James L. (ed.), Class and Social Stratification in Post-Revolution China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 121–141.Google Scholar

34. In 1956, in recognition of the fact that the former rural elites no longer controlled any properties and had been excluded from the networks of political power that the Party had erected, the Party leadership had declared that the period of “class struggle” was drawing to an end (see the “Political Report of the Party Central Committee” at the Party's Eighth National Congress). Yet such a notion was reversed in 1962, as China painfully began to climb out of the terrible economic depression and starvation caused by the collapse of the Great Leap Forward. In these circumstances, Mao and Party officials strenuously began propagating the directive “Never forget class struggle.” The farmers were not to judge the government in terms of the present difficulties; through “class education” they were to bear in mind that the great divide in China was not between themselves and the leadership but between the masses and these “class enemies” who wanted to destroy the new society.

35. This interview was conducted by Anita Chan. This may or may not have been the same incident that was discussed in 1968 by Xie Fuzhi (the head of China's public security forces, who was placed in charge of Beijing's municipal government during the latter part of the Cultural Revolution fighting). Xie noted that in a district of Daxing county “two men seized power and called a meeting of more than ten brigade Party secretaries and ordered the total slaughter of landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, and Rightists. In ten brigades, they and their children, including babies, were killed in one day …” See Selections from the Chinese Mainland Press, No. 4225 (24 07 1968), pp. 12–13.Google Scholar Also see Gao, Gao and Jiaqi, Yan, Zhongguo Wenge shinianshi (History of the Ten Years of the Chinese Cultural Revolution), Vol. 1 (Hong Kong: Dagongbao she, 1986), pp. 74–75.Google Scholar See also Yi, Zheng, The Red Memorial PlinthGoogle Scholar for examples of mass slaughter (and cannibalism) in rural Guangxi province. Xiaoxia, Gong, “Perpetual victims: persecution of the ‘bad classes’ during the Cultural Revolution,” China Information, Vol. 11, Nos. 2–3 (Autumn 1996), pp. 35–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar, finds that the massacres of bad-class people occurred largely in areas where the local authorities had been under heavy attack by a Rebel faction in the county but had managed to hold on to power.

36. A detailed description of how the Cleansing of Class Ranks campaign was carried out in one village is contained in Chan, , Madsen, and Unger, , Chen Village Under Mao and Deng, ch. 5 and 6.Google Scholar The numbers of people persecuted during this campaign can be gauged by reference to Guangdong province as a whole. In 1974, the recently restored provincial Party secretary, Zhao Ziyang, established a group to collect figures on the scale of repression in Guangdong during the Cleansing of Class Ranks period of 1968–69. The research group's findings were that in Guangdong province alone, close to 40,000 people were killed during the campaign and about a million had been struggled against and put under “surveillance” or thrown into local jails. See Chan, Anita, Rosen, Stanley and Unger, Jonathan (eds.), On Socialist Democracy and the Chinese Legal System (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1985), pp. 7, 41.Google Scholar

37. A substantial number of such incidents are described in the first section (pp. 2–116) of Yi, Zheng, The Red Memorial Plinth. One particularly chilling example is on p. 25.Google Scholar

38. Ibid. p. 14.

39. This occurred in at least two interviewees' villages (during most of my other interviews, it did not occur to me to ask). My presumption is that this same mechanism was at work in two counties in Shaanxi province, as recorded in county gazetteers. In Qianyang county, during the Cleansing of Class Ranks campaign of 1968–69 that put an end to the Cultural Revolution fighting, 152 households were newly labelled as landlord and 130 as rich peasant, while in Shanyang County over a thousand households were re-labelled as landlords or rich peasants. Qianyang xianzhi (Qianyang County Gazetteer) (Xi'an: Shaanxi renmin jiaoyu chubanshe, 1991), pp. 277–286;Google Scholar and Shanyang xianzhi (Shanyang County Gazetteer) (Xi'an: Shaanxi renmin chubanshe, 1991), pp. 215–19.Google Scholar These documented examples were brought to my attention by Gong Xiaoxia.

40. In a large number of counties, the power of the county and commune level militia commanders had been greatly strengthened. As provincial Party organs collapsed in early 1967, Party leaders at the county level sometimes strategically withdrew from their posts and let the militia commanders, who were protected by their military connections to the regional army command, pretend to assume authority while the county and commune Party leaders continued to control events from behind the scenes. In other cases, where the militia commanders were politically ambitious, they used the opportunity to make a play for real power at the county capital or commune. (This information derives from several interviewees. The assumption of authority by the militia heads can also be observed in the county gazetteers and Zheng Yi's volume: again and again in these sources, the leaders in the county Revolutionary Committees and at commune level who were in a position to instruct villages to carry out massacres in 1968 are identified as militia commanders.)

41. The militiamen often received remuneration for doing so. As a Jiangsu provincial radio broadcast of 8 August 1967, complained: “In some regions they practise counter-revolutionary economism and give supplementary workpoints, money and grain to commune members to take part in fighting … all to incite the peasants to enter the cities to fight the revolutionary mass organizations in factories, mines, administrative bureaus and schools” (quoted in China News Analysis, No. 679 (29 09 1967), p. 2).Google Scholar In two of the villages in my interview sample, ordinary villagers were paid in workpoints even for attending, in massed groups, vast struggle meetings that the commune authorities organized at the commune market town.

42. Guokai, Liu, “A brief analysis of the Cultural Revolution,” translated in Chinese Sociology and Anthropology, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Winter 1986–1987), pp. 96–97.Google Scholar

43. The following description is based on two interviews conducted in Hong Kong in 1978, supplemented by an article that the interviewee wrote about his village, including material on the Cultural Revolution, for a magazine that was published in Hong Kong during the late 1970s by a group of former Red Guards (Huang He (Yellow River), No. 5 (03 1978).Google Scholar

44. This was not an isolated case. As just one example, on the other side of China a parallel occurrence is recorded in the gazetteer published by Ziyang county in Shaanxi province (Xi'an: chubanshe, Sanqin, pp. 521–26)Google Scholar. During the nation-wide wave of “power seizures” in early 1967, two antagonistic factions had emerged in the county capital – “Eryipai,” to which the preponderance of teachers and secondary-school students belonged, and “Erliupai,” based more heavily on cadres, peasants and workers. In 1968 the factional fighting in the county escalated, and in April military and police ammunition was seized by the two factions. Members of the weaker Eryipai soon fled the county and joined their allies in neighbouring counties. Amidst rear-guard armed fighting, many of the adherents of Eryipai who remained behind were rounded up, along with their families and members of the “bad classes.” Over 400 were tortured and then murdered, including 211 labelled as “bad class.” By the end of 1968 a PLA unit entered the county to end the bloodshed. (I am indebted to Gong Xiaoxia for bringing this material to my attention.)