On August 5, 1966, Bian Zhonghua, the principal of the Girls’ High School affiliated with Beijing Normal University, was beaten to death alive by Red Guard students in the school. This was the first educator in Beijing to be killed by the Red Guards on campus.
From the beginning of June, a group of principals and teachers were accused of being “counter-revolutionary gangsters” and “reactionary academic authorities” and were “denounced” and “struggled “. They were verbally attacked, physically attacked and killed in a period of two months.
In my article on the death of Principal Bian Zhongwei, I wrote that after Principal Bian was killed, a waitress from the Yuhuatai restaurant near the school was arrested and killed by the Red Guards in late August. The Red Guards called her a “hooligan. I was not able to write a separate article for this 18-year-old waitress because I did not know her name. To be precise, I “forgot” her name. Because in 1966, everyone in the school knew that someone had been killed in the old chemistry lab. Three months later, the situation changed a bit. She had six brothers, all workers, who came to the school to complain that their little sister had been killed. I saw them on the campus, along with their wives. They were simple and honest people wearing black cotton jackets and pants with fat and loose pants. They were very mournful for their little sister.
I remember writing her name down in my notebook. Later I went to the countryside as an “intellectual youth”, and my parents were also devolved. I lost all the notebooks I had left at home.
In 2000, when I finished writing the chapter “Bian Zhongying” (it was 20,000 words long), I thought I could quickly find the name of the young waitress. There were 1,600 students on campus at the time, so someone must have remembered. Those students whose families had been in Beijing might still have information from back then. However, I have not been able to find it for more than ten years. One of the students said that the Yuhuatai Restaurant had moved from Xidan to near the “Wuzhou Grand Hotel”. She went there to ask about it, but no one there knew about it. Another student went to the catering company to ask about it, because the restaurant was under the control of the catering company. But the company said they had no record of her.
I felt especially sorry. An 18-year-old waitress was killed and forgotten.
In 2017, one of the teachers who taught me told me that her name was Guan Yaqin.
I was very touched. This teacher remembered her name, even though 51 years had passed.
What happened to Guan Yaqin?
She was a waitress at the “Yuhuatai Restaurant” in Xidan, and had just joined the workforce after having attended junior high school. She was taken to the campus of the Beijing Normal University Girls’ High School and tied to a pillar in the old chemistry lab with a rope. The Red Guards whipped her with a copper headband. She screamed out in agony. This place was very close to the school gate. People passing by heard her screams. As the beating continued, her screams stopped. The Red Guards who beat her called Dr. Liu from the school infirmary. When Dr. Liu came, he opened her eyelids with his fingers and said, “Her pupils are dilated, she is dead. You guys put her down.
An alumnus wrote.
“When I arrived at school I heard the shocking news that the Red Guards had arrested a pair of hooligans from the street! Now they are locked up in the bungalow to the left of the school gate. A classmate and I ran quickly to see what kind of people were there.
Looking in through the door of the locked room, we saw two people tied to a post deep inside the room, probably beaten, both with their heads hanging down and their faces invisible. I heard from my classmates that the two men were having bad behavior in the street. It seems that the two people were lovers. 1960s lovers in broad daylight can have what bad behavior? It is unimaginable to hug and kiss in front of people as couples do nowadays. At most, the words and actions are more intimate than normal people. Unrestrained love outwardly in the eyes of the Red Guards is hooliganism! This brought about the death of the two lovers.
We could not bear to watch any longer and was about to leave when a few Red Guards came and opened the door and went in. We two intuition to bad, speed up the pace of departure. Sure enough, from behind came the sound of angry curses, the sound of the swishing belt and screaming.
We later heard that the couple, both of them, had been killed.”
But it is still not known which day it was that Guan Yaqin was killed. People only remember that it was in late August, after Mao Zedong received the millions of Red Guards in Tiananmen Square (Aug. 18). On that day, Song Binbin, a Red Guard from the Beijing Teachers’ University Girls’ High School, put on the Red Guard armband for Mao Zedong on the Tiananmen Square. The violence escalated massively after that huge rally. The targets of violence expanded from school principals and teachers to residents outside the school, with the main groups of victims being so-called “hooligans,” religious people, people who owned private property, people with “problems” in their history, and people with so-called “bad family backgrounds. Young people with “bad family backgrounds”. The post-Cultural Revolution Beijing Daily (December 20, 1980) said that 1,772 people were killed in Beijing in August and September 1966. But the newspaper did not say who they were or what their names were.
In August 1966, two people were killed on the campus of the girls’ high school affiliated with Beijing Normal University: Bian Zhongying and Guan Yaqin. Bian Zhongying was the principal, fifty years old, and the mother of four children. Guan Yaqin was a waitress in a restaurant, eighteen years old. They were unrelated, but both had the misfortune to be targets of the Cultural Revolution, and both were killed by Red Guards without trial.
I hope that someone in the readership knows the date of Guan Yaqin’s murder and other circumstances.
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