In her book “Ten Years of Family Matters”, writer Yang Shou begins with a diary entry dated August 23, 1966, which records the real situation of many famous writers being fought and beaten. This criticism, this beating, led to the death of the writer Lao She. Yang Shu wrote: “This day and night of August 23rd …… will also live and die with my life.” Many of us had our own “August 23rd” during the Cultural Revolution, and we all had a bloody and painful experience that we will never forget. For me, it was May 19, 1967. On this day I experienced a life and death test, personally experienced the “5.19” incident that shocked the whole Sichuan.
At that time, the combat team I joined had collapsed and disbanded, and I had become a disorganized free spirit. On May 19, the “8.26” fighting group of Sichuan University, which was in charge of the university, organized the whole university to help the poor peasants in the suburbs of Chengdu to carry out double robbery labor (harvesting and planting), in addition to propaganda work, so that the masses of the Chengdu Industrial Workers Fighting Army who had fled to the suburbs could return to their original units to grasp the revolution and promote production. The industrial army was a conservative organization at that time. The industrial army was a conservative organization at that time, and it was defeated by the rebel faction in Chengdu and evacuated to the suburbs of the city.
Several girls from the same dormitory and I were invited to participate in this activity together. We gathered in the playground with nearly 2,000 students and teachers, the majority empty-handed, with only a few boys carrying sticks for self-defense, just in case.
As we walked out of the school, with the school flag and the “August 26th” battle flag in front of us, the procession stretched for miles and miles, heading for the suburbs. It had just rained, the air was fresh, the roadside wildflowers and grass were bright and green, and the fields of ripe wheat were golden. It had been a long time since we had participated in a school-wide event like this, and we were all in high spirits, laughing and talking along the way. But little did we know that a great disaster was awaiting this student group.
After walking for more than ten miles, it started to drizzle from the sky, and our hair got wet after a while. We decided not to go any further and went to a nearby township called Zhonghechang for propaganda. The narrow streets of Zhonghe field are lined with low wooden houses, but also a few brick houses. The stores on both sides of the street closed as soon as the group entered the entrance, and some people came out and scolded us, saying that we were here to engage in martial arts and to cleanse Zhonghechang of blood. We stood in line in a disciplined manner, explained the propaganda to the residents, and then moved on.
When we were almost out of the field, a large group of poor peasants wearing red cuffs blocked our way with braziers, nail rakes, hoes and sticks. I don’t know who in the line shouted: “students line up, arm in arm, don’t mess ……” before the words were finished, only to see the air flying dense stone, immediately someone was hit and head bleeding. At once the team was in chaos, we retreated backward, to both sides.
Before I could run, I received a muffled blow to the head, and I fell headlong into unconsciousness for a while as my eyes went black. When I got up from the ground in a daze, my glasses had flown away, my head was covered with a big bag, and I felt a dizziness and pain in my head. The students around me were all gone, and someone else seemed to be chasing the students from a little distance.
I didn’t care about the pain, I just wanted to rush through the circle and find my classmates in the same dormitory. I could hear the poor peasants around me shouting that they would let us out if we handed over our weapons. I saw many male students who had sticks in their hands surrendering their weapons. At this point the peasants made a way for us to go, but before we got very far, a gong suddenly sounded and countless peasants with weapons poured out from all directions, and we were driven into the paddy fields at once, where they surrounded the paddy fields and began to catch people.
I got up from the paddy field with only one sandal left on my foot, so I simply threw the rest away. I was covered in mud, even my hair was covered with mud. Two peasants rushed up and caught me. They got so much rope from there and tied us up one by one, and strung several people together with a rope to prevent escape.
The peasants proudly escorted our group of captives along the country road. I was covered in mud, my bare feet were stung by the gravel on the trail, my glasses were gone, and everything around me was blurred. I must have looked so bad, I thought I might die here this time.
Walking to a dam, many people were gathered there. There was a man lying on a cart in the middle of the dam, covered in blood, with a large wound on his stomach and his intestines exposed, apparently dead. The peasants let us go over one by one to visit, saying that this was evidence of the guilt of the rebels in killing the poor peasants. Fortunately, I couldn’t see clearly, otherwise I would have vomited with disgust. Every captive who passed by the dead body was slapped, and the female students were no exception. All I could feel was gold in my eyes and a burning pain in my face, which was probably swollen.
That night we were put into a granary, no windows, dark inside (this was the first time I saw a granary built of wooden boards, later by school graduation, I worked for a while in the grassroots units of the grain sector, I saw all kinds of granaries). Dozens of us were locked together, and we had to lie down on the floor in a crowd. The wet clothes on our bodies were also dried by body temperature over time, and the thin mud on our clothes became dry mud shells.
In mid-May in the plains of western Sichuan, the night was still very cold. Cold and hungry, I could not sleep for a long time. I didn’t know how things would go. How would I be tortured tomorrow? I didn’t see any of my classmates in the same dormitory, so I didn’t know how they were doing. I used to read the words “bloodbath” in books, but now I finally got to experience it. I couldn’t understand why the two groups of people had such a deep hatred for each other, just like they did for their class enemies, but even more so.
The next day there was a buzzing sound of an airplane in the sky, a biplane flying at low altitude, then scattered leaflets, flying in the air like snow flakes, fluttering down on the fields. It turned out to be a plane sent by the Chengdu Military Region to rescue the students. The leaflets warned the two mass organizations, the Industrial Workers’ Combat Army and the Poor Peasants’ Combat Army, not to harm the students and to release the captured students immediately. After this we were treated better, washed and fed.
Then the students who had defected to the industrial army were asked to identify those who had joined the “August 26th” fighting group and those who had not. It was like in the movie when the enemy separated those who joined the 8th Route Army from the masses. I was put on the side of those who did not join any organization and released in groups. I was released on the third day, and luckily I still had money in my pocket, so I bought a pair of straw sandals and walked back to school on them, otherwise it would have been too hard to walk barefoot on the gravel road for more than ten miles.
Many students who participated in the August 26th Movement were not as lucky as I was. They were transferred to the rural areas of Shuangliu, Meishan and Xinjin counties near Chengdu, where they were scattered among the peasants’ homes, supervised by the peasants during the farming season, and were re-educated by the poor peasants. They were not released one after another until more than a month later. When they came back, they were all tanned, like black Africans.
I heard a boy in my class tell me that when they were crammed into a truck and transferred to various rural areas, the truck overturned due to slippery roads, and all the people in the truck fell into the paddy fields by the roadside. Because their hands were tied, they were stuck in the paddy and could not move. Later, the farmer pulled them out of the paddy field like a carrot, when his body and head were covered with mud, only two eyes could still turn, and his condition was quite miserable.
A student of my department surnamed Ma was killed in this incident. He was buried in the mud by a small river in Zhonghechang, and his body was not found until several months later.
The incident in Zhonghechang made me, who was not very radical but rather moderate, become revolutionary. I wrote in my diary, “After this incident, I realized more deeply the significance of defending Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line with my life and blood. When I am asked to defend Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line with my life and blood, I will not hesitate.” I also copied a few lines of poetry to encourage myself.
Let those who die die.
Their blood was not shed in vain.
They have done their duty.
We have to shake!
Several students who died in the armed struggle in our school were buried in a tree-lined meadow in the school, and a monument was erected in front of each of their graves with their headshots and biographies, which was called the Red Guard Martyrs’ Cemetery.
In the late stage of the movement, the labor propaganda team entered the school to carry out “fighting and criticism”, clean up the class ranks, and conduct political studies and study classes every day. In the midst of boredom, everyone wanted to “fight and criticize away”, and quickly leave the school to assign work, especially the senior students who had not been assigned after the graduation year. So some good people added beards to the headshots on the tombstones in the martyrs’ cemetery. Everyone who saw it couldn’t help but feel: the martyrs are old, and we are still not assigned work. What a waste of time and youth!
Years later, I told my daughter in elementary school about the frightening scene in the “May 19” neutral field. She immediately became frightened: “How dangerous it was! If I was killed with a stick, I wouldn’t have a mother!” This silly child had not yet figured out the cause-and-effect relationship between her daughter and her mother. Then she immediately opened her little brain and made up a story: Mommy was locked up by the bad guys, and Daddy led the people to drive away the bad guys and save Mommy.
In fact, that year her father was also a Sichuan university student and did go to rescue us. He did not go to Zhonghe field with the brigade because of the matter, and when he learned that something had happened, he found a hoe handle in his dorm room in a hurry and ran to the front line with his classmates who stayed behind at school.
When they arrived at Zhonghechang, they faced off with the poor peasants across the river ditch, and both sides threw stones at each other. But the peasants, who were familiar with the terrain, quickly circled back and attacked from the rear, causing them to lose their positions and soon fleeing like a mountain.
He fled along the field, a few farmers with steel brazier in pursuit, farmers in the field can run fast, see to catch up, he was in a hurry, jumped into the paddy, stepped through the paddy, and then leaped onto the highway. Once on the highway, with his feet on solid ground, he immediately ran at the speed of a 100-meter sprint (he was a sprinter on the school track team), leaving several pursuing farmers far behind. On the way he encountered a propaganda truck of the capital’s Red Guards who came to show solidarity, and he was rescued back to the school by the propaganda truck, exhausted. The rescue operation failed due to the lack of a unified command and the fact that each person was fighting on his own.
Rumors spread: there were rumors that 36 bodies of Sichuan students were floating in the river in Zhonghechang, and there were rumors that the industrial army was going to attack Chengdu soon. The slogan “Defend Chengdu” was raised, and all units prepared weapons, and fortifications were built around Jiuyanqiao and Shahebao.
The events and people that happened forty years ago have faded into oblivion and memory is fuzzy. But what happened on May 19, 1967 is still fresh in my mind and unforgettable. On that day, I experienced a bloody martial arts battle and saw familiar classmates and teachers being wounded and killed with my own eyes. My hair fell out from where I was beaten on my head, and it took a long time for it to grow back.
This day was a nightmare for me.
My grandfather was born during the Qing Dynasty and lived through several eras of the Qing Dynasty, the Republic of China, and New China. He looked at the revolutionary movement from his decades of experience and was baffled. In his letter to me, he said, “If you put the character of loyalty and the leader’s elephant on the door of every house, it will not be a door god, will it?” Chen Tao, a Tang dynasty man, said in a poem, “Vowing to sweep away the Xiongnu, 5,000 sable brocades were lost to the dust of the Hu. Pity the bones by the river Wuding, still in the dream of the spring boudoir!” Grandfather changed the last two lines to read, “Pity those who died in the war, but are still in the dreams of their parents!” I feel sad and sorry for the young people who lost their lives in the movement for nothing.
This revolutionary movement has delayed the youth of a whole generation. We participated fervently in this unprecedented movement, but we were the ones who suffered the most. The poorest of all are the students who died in the armed struggle. Maybe they still have childhood dreams in their hearts, maybe they still miss the shiny golden “Mao’s Selection” on their bookshelves, maybe they still long to march in the streets with their classmates to cheer Chairman Mao’s exciting “latest instructions “. They think they died to defend Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line, and died with honor, as heavy as Mount Tai. But they were fooled by history, the Red Guard movement was merely a tool to launch the movement, and those who died in armed combat served as “sacrifices” for history and died in a “muddled and confused” manner.
The Red Guard ideology that emerged from the movement also reflected the shortcomings of the previous ideological and educational work, reflecting the contradictions of China’s social structure. The movement led us to reflect on the fact that once revolutionary idealism developed into irrational fervor, democracy was bound to be replaced by dictatorship, and violence ensued to defend the revolutionary ideal as the highest value. It is no coincidence that in a large Eastern country with a strong authoritarian influence, a “decade of turmoil” arose.
During the 100th anniversary of Sichuan University, my husband and I went back to our alma mater for the celebration to meet with old classmates. The face of the alma mater has undergone a radical change, we do not recognize a little.
The former Red Guard Martyrs’ Cemetery has disappeared without a trace, and the bones of the dead have been moved to who knows where. But the 12.26-meter tall statue of Chairman Mao built in front of the science building during the movement still stands there, with one of his giant hands raised high, as if he is still guiding the way to continue the revolution. It was as if I could hear the earth-shaking slogans again: “Chairman Mao waves his hand and I march! We will defend Chairman Mao to the death!”
When I think of the past now, it is really “something else in my heart”. It’s a good thing that the frenzied times have finally passed, but hopefully it will only remain in the historical record, only in the minds of our generation.
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