The below is a translation of a piece that was published in Guangzhou-based newspaper the Southern Metropolis Daily yesterday. Although written like a memoir, it was published in the form of a comment piece, and is very telling as to the place that the Cultural Revolution holds in Chinese discourse these days: i.e. unlike some other major episodes, it is not covered up.

The author is said to be an amateur playwright. Although the writing can be clunky and repetitive, the story makes it well worth reading.

“A Story from the Cultural Revolution: The Mystery of the Hanging Corpses in Guangzhou”
by He Yufeng

In August 1967, two mass organisations in Guangzhou were in conflict. The streets were filled with a sense of foreboding as members of political factions walked about with knives and guns.

On the morning of August 10, a loudspeaker on the streets announced that that evening, a large number of escapees from a prison camp would descend on Guangzhou. The announcer encouraged citizens to return home early and avoid going out or risking putting themselves in harms way. Back then, a lot of people didn’t have work to go to so could return home early and stay in for the night.

By 5 p.m. I was cycling home from Xinji Road in the west of the city to Dongshan Guigang. The ride would take about 45 minutes. By the time I was halfway there, there was not a single pedestrian out. The shops were all closed and even bus drivers had taken their vehicles to the garages for the night. There was only me on the empty streets and I was overcome by a sense of discomfort.

The red sun was starting to descend towards the buildings, its light spilling through the trees and onto the ground.

Then a pick-up truck appeared from behind me. The people standing in the back were wearing arm bands symbolising that they were Red Guards and were holding knives and guns. On the front of the truck was a red flag indicating which school the guards came from. I was taken aback by the sight.

Several minutes later, another pick-up truck started speeding towards me. I pushed my bike to the side of the road and hid behind some pillars. As I cowered there, I was struck by a red hot horror. This was normally a time when people were finishing work and the markets were buzzing with activity. But as the street was bathed in red sunlight, you could hear a pin drop through the whole city.

Periodically, a pick-up truck would pass with a red flag hanging off it, symbolising that it was being driven by Red Guards. As a matter of fact, I later discovered that the car I was hiding from was that of a new breakaway faction of the Red Guards.

After I got home, the night became completely dark. Everybody was hiding in their home and, outside, the city was at its creepiest. The next day the sun was again red. Like the aftermath of a natural disaster, people wandered out onto the streets to see what damage had been done.

That is when people discovered the hanging corpses spread throughout the city. Some were hanging from pylons, others from traffic control booths at intersections. On my journey to work that took in Donghua East Road, Wenming Road and Taikang Road, I saw three hanging corpses bathed in the red sunlight.

It was then that I was overcome with a different fear. The day before I had been outlandishly fortunate that those Red Guards hadn’t mistaken me for an escaped prisoner and shot me.

When I got to work, a colleague told me that on Zhen’an Road (now Kangwang Road) to the west of Culture Park there were more corpses. I went out to look and saw that three male corpses were tied with their hands behind their backs to electric poles and roadside barriers.

There was no blood on the ground, which suggested that the men had been killed in another location. A journalist later told me that he had it on good authority that more than 150 bodies were recovered that day.

In the aftermath of this incident, the city was shrouded in fear. Citizens organised defence teams of their own, using objects such as bamboo branches and metal rods taken from gates for weapons.

At that time, I lived alone in a dormitory in Shamian. Red Guards had erected road blocks at the nearby east bridge and west bridge. To get past, you had to recite a passage of Chairman Mao’s writings and give the name of your work unit and address. At busy times, a queue would form, just like the queues you get at immigration now. Once while standing there, I noticed that most people’s preferred passages of Mao to recite were the ones that went “Serve the people” and “Challenge selfishness and criticise revisionism” because they were short and easy to remember.

Almost half a century has passed since this horror took place and many of the suspicious things that went on are still a mystery to all but those who were directly involved. But some things are certain: the corpses were not those of escapees from a labour camp. If they really were fugitives, it is impossible that they would have fled to Guangzhou collectively.

In late March 2008, I went with a tour group to Yunnan. It so happened that several members of this tour group worked in prison administration. I mentioned this night to them, and one old lady in her 70s said that she worked in administration for a labour camp at the time the incident happened.

She told me that during the Cultural Revolution, a lot of prisoners in labour camps begged to stay when their sentences ended. This was because they feared the political ramifications they would face in the outside world as ex-convicts. For this reason, there is no way this particular point of history would have seen such mass prison breaks.

So who were these “ghosts” who were found dead in Guangzhou that day? Were they locals, outsiders, or a mixture of both? Nobody has the resources to find out the names, let alone the hukou information of these corpses that have long since become dust and ash.

In 2007, the Chinese Literature and History Press published a book titled “The Ten Year Dream: A Memoir of the Cultural Revolution.” The author was a Red Guard who was in Guangzhou when the incident took place. Citng a member of the Public Security Bureau as a source, the author claimed that, of the 180 people killed that night, not one of them was local. But this claim is somewhat unconvincing and suggests that there is a cover-up.

In the aftermath of the incident of the hanging corpses, there were all kinds of accounts of what had happened. Anti-military people suggested it was a conspiracy by (General) Huang Yongsheng in which the prisoners were released into the city to make trouble for the new breakaway faction of the Red Guards. Pro-military people said the killings had been prearranged by Red Guards.

Huang Yongsheng, who commanded the Guangzhou Military Region during the Cultural Revolution, image courtesy of Google

According to this version, the Red Guards took to the streets in the morning and announced that a bunch of prisoners had escaped so they had to stay indoors. Then, under cover of darkness, they carried out a bunch of killings of people with disagreeable political views, this would enable them to make the military look bad while maintaining order in Guangzhou.

According to another account, the information that a bunch of prisoners had escaped was simply erroneous. A bunch of drifters and vagrants had been mistaken for escaped prisoners and killed en masse.

All of the accounts have their own logic, but none are complete. In over 40 years I have never heard a satisfactory explanation of what went on and why. I have no doubt that there are still people alive who know what happened but have good reason not to come forward. Perhaps the best hope is that one of these people, when on their deathbed, will give into their conscience and give a full confession explaining everything that happened.