MCLC: The Killing Wind review

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The Killing Wind review
My review of Tan Hecheng's The Killing Wind has been published, in Italian and English, on the website of the Montepulciano Library. Find the English version below.
Silvia Calamandrei <silvia.calamandrei at skynet.be>
Source: http://www.biblioteca.montepulciano.si.it/node/844
Tan Hecheng, The Killing Wind
Reviewed by Silvia Calamandrei
This detailed and lively account plunges us into the tragic atmosphere of wild conflicts taking place in recent Chinese history and helps us better understanding why it is still so difficult to discuss a past whose scars are alive in the present. Let me underline that this is a Chinese firsthand account, based on documents collected at the local level, a signal that research effort has started and cannot be stopped indefinitely.
Following the steps of Mubei (Tombstone), the fresco of the disaster of the Great Leap Forward painted by Yang Jisheng (who writes an authoritative preface to this book and is just now publishing his own study on the Cultural Revolution), another journalist offers us an account of another type of hecatomb, even if more limited in scope and timing. Tan Hecheng depicts the dynamics of killings that took place in 1967 in the Dao district of Hunan Province (Daoxian), not too far away from Changsha and the village where Chairman Mao was born.
Similar episodes took place in other parts of China and the nine thousand victims are in line with the two thousand in Beijing alone in the Red August of 1966 (following the slogan "bombard the central headquarters") and with the one million and a half victims calculated for whole China. Not too many if compared with the death toll of the Great Famine in the same district (34,000): but at that time they starved to death, whereas in the Cultural Revolution they were savagely killed, even if sentenced to death by self-appointed courts of poor and medium poor peasants
In 1984-86 a Task Force was sent by CCP Secretary general Hu Yaobang to investigate this massacre. It was a short lived liberal and reformist effort to set clear accounts with the past. Liberalism would soon be criticized and Hu Yaobang would die in isolation, only to be commemorated by the students in the mourning opening the road to 1989 great demonstrations
Tan was charged by his newspaper, together with a reporter of the local radio, to report on the findings of the Task Force. Hu Yaobang's liberal approach encouraged transparency and wanted the conclusions to be made accessible to the great public as a signal of redress of past injustices and sufferings.
Was it possible to find those responsible for what had happened? Could the death toll be explained only as a consequence of anarchy and civil war, of the factionalism in the fight against "capitalist roaders"? The victims' families thought that there were many responsibles among the local leaders, mainly those who had made progress in their careers attacking the old cadres: masses had been instigated to prove their revolutionary zeal killing bad elements, so to gain work points or approval. The survivors had not gotten any redress in the 70's (they had even addressed Hua Guofeng, provincial leader at the time, with no result) and since 1978 they had flooded the central leadership with petitions, until they got the attention of Hu Yaobang, another Hunanese.
The first draft of Tan's account was written in 1986, when he still hoped to publish it. But transparency was halted by the campaign against bourgeois liberalism and Hu Yaobang wasn't even entitled to official mourning if not for the student mobilization that was going to end on Tiananmen Square. The new repression was not going to help to establish the truth on past events. Only a minimal percentage of responsibles were punished, and with light sentences (less than 10 years of prison, amending the Code to allow this reduction of punishment for homicide).
Tan honestly asks himself if he would have been among the victims or the perpetrators. He has understood the complexity of establishing rights and wrongs in a turbulent period of fighting and has realized how many were involved in the killings, not only the killers but also the ones who were not reacting and assisted passively. He went ahead in his search and finally published a longer version in Hong Kong. The abridged English version is based on the 2008 Hong Kong edition.
In his search he gradually became aware of the difficulty of having justice reestablished when the totalitarian system is still in place, even if in a new shape. And he questions not only the Cultural Revolution excesses, but goes back to previous campaigns and movements, and to the agrarian reform period itself, when people in the countryside were classified in different categories and so many got the black hat of the landlord class, becoming the targets of all the following campaigns.
What happened in August 1967 was that local leaders, confronted with factionalism and the distribution of weapons among the rebels (on encouragement of the Central Group of the CR at the beginning, when Jiang Qing and maybe Mao himself asked the Army to stand on the side of the rebels, only to change attitude later), tried to direct the anger of the masses against the traditional black categories, counterrevolutionaries, landlords, people with connections with the Guomindang and so on. It was a sort of diversion, finding other targets to protect themselves. Spreading panic and rumors of anticommunist rebellions the local cadres showed their fear to be attacked by people they had oppressed and persecuted; they didn't feel stable and solid in their power and tried to find scapegoats to the anger of the masses. The sorcerers at the top, the Central Group of the Cultural Revolution, had opened the Pandora vase of violence, and they will need the Army to stop the fightings and the homicide wind.
Invoking the danger of counterrevolutionary plots, the district leaders invited the masses to smash the black categories, reduced to a subhuman class of people: how many landlords had been found in a province where middle and poor peasants were the big majority (think of Mao's family itself!)! Among the killers there were surely criminals, but also so many faithful executors of the Party's orders. Often people were killed to get their goods and their women. Women were considered prey of the winner and the Task Force didn't enquire on rapes unless they ended with a killing. And it was not enough to kill a single person, the whole family had to be exterminated, to ensure that nobody would seek vengeance afterward. Agricultural brigades would compete in the killings, opening a sinister emulation campaign. Thanks to lack of communication, certain areas were exempt of killings, because the order was not transmitted; sometimes there were also people who opposed the violence or obstructed it. But there were also zealots, such as a girl who wanted to prove that women and men are equal even in killing capacity and killed fifteen black elements by her own hands.
Only an Army Unit (6950 company) succeeded in stopping the killings and the fighting. In March 1968 a conciliation session was organized to try to unite opposing factions (the Red Alliance and the Revolutionary Alliance who fought each other only to prove their loyalty to Mao). No real unity was established and the Leftists gained again supremacy, persecuting and arresting their "enemies". It took the the fall of Lin Biao to register an improvement in the situation. After the arrest of the Gang of Four the victims' families asked for redress and compensations; the most active to present petitions was Li Niangde, who had 13 members of his family killed. Still in 1985 the local police arrested and blocked eighty people who were traveling to Beijing to ask for justice.
The verdict of the Task Force was that not only the killed but also the killers had been victims: the later acted for love of the Party and loyalty to their leaders; if you disobeyed you would have been an antiparty element. A sentence of Khrushchev was quoted: it is necessary to forgive because too many were involved. Better avoid going too much into details, show magnanimity rather than severity, do less rather than more. The aim is not to punish people, but to promote stability and order. The percentage of people to punish must stay under 2% (always a quota to be respected by lower cadres, to conform to the wishes of the top).
Better to forget, to drop the case, and to keep the materials secret. However Tan didn't want oblivion to prevail. We must be grateful to him to help us understand how difficult is "transitional justice", a new concept introduced at the end of the 80's after the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe and of dictatorships in Latin America. In China "transitional justice" lived a short season, redressing the sentences on the former rightists (around 3 million people persecuted in the 50's) and giving legal form to the trial against the Gang of Four (now discussed by Alexander Cook in The Cultural Revolution on Trial, Cambridge University Press 2016).
by denton.2 at osu.edu on February 8, 2017
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