Episode 20 Blood for Blood

Da jia hao tongzhimen and welcome back once again to the great proletarian cultural revolution podcast with your host Drew Smith once again broadcasting from the ancient city of Xi’an. Um, we’ve had a lot of series of seriously humid scorchers these days. Weather here in northwest China has been hot.

But, uh, today thankfully we found ourselves a nice respite with some cool breezes flowing through the air thanks to some recent rain.

Um, I sincerely hope you enjoyed last episode’s interview with our former Red Guard comrades, quote, Mr. and Mrs. Wang.

“Your kind words and positive feedback about the interview and all that have meant a lot to them, as well as to their granddaughter who arranged the interview.”

So, xie xie to the Wong family and to all the other OG rebels of the cultural revolution still out there today like Uncle Zhang and Uncle G Bing from prior episode who are using their golden years to keep history alive. And hey, guess what guys? Guess what? You know what day it is?

Next week. In fact, it’s a week from today. The holiest day in the communist calendar, Mayday, Revolutionary May 1st.

Yep. It’s going to be International Workers Day. The day that all proletarians of the world unite and celebrate our goal of a world without oppression, exploitation, tyranny, and to remember the victories that our class has won since the uprising of the Paris Commune in 1871.

Uh well these days here in China unfortunately Mayday is uh very much stripped of its political connotations and is treated about the same way as like Labor Day or Memorial Day is in the United States. Um well I I will say though that I do like the fact that we get three full work days off. Uh, in fact, for me, uh, because of my schedule this year, I get myself five full work days off plus the weekend afterwards. So, I am ready to kick back.

Um, I will probably will uh go be going to uh Niubeiliang, which is this beautiful mountain in the southeastern part of Shaanxi. Um me and the misses and uh the in-laws are going to go hiking up that mountain as a daring to scale the heights on a long march to communism as a together as a family. And uh also on Monday night uh I’m going to go to uh Vein Lab, which is a local underground concert venue, and uh a few black metal bands and uh uh death metal bands from Chengdu and uh Beijing are going to be there.

So, I’m going to get to hear me some true cult brutal Sichuan black metal that China has to offer.

So, yeah, it’s going to be a good Mayday weekend, even if it’s not, you know, even if it’s not what it used to be here. But you know, here at the GPCR podcast, we try to keep the red spirit alive and hold high the red banner of Marxism, Leninism, Maoism on International Workers Day. So, uh, before we finish our catching up section of our episode, all listeners, please raise your right fist or if you have a copy of The Little Red Book on hand, raise it high above your head. Put your other hand upon your heart and bow your head as we say.

[Chinese rendition of Internationale]

Geming [] wansui, Mao Zhuxi wansui

Okay. Now, um, so before we launch into today’s episode, before we get back to the rest of the story, I actually want to add a bit of a uh a content warning or a trigger warning here because, and you know, and I usually don’t do this, uh, but I think this episode it it’s going to be warranted cuz, uh, during this time, a lot of struggle sessions and uh vigilante witch hunts related to the factional battles really ramp up badly across February through April of 1968.

Um and honestly the excessive violence perpetrated by many of the Red Guard factions and by the people’s liberation army lead to a lot of people taking their own lives out of shame and desperation. So, uh, just warning you, there will be a notable amount of discussion of suicide in this episode.

So, you know, if if you’re not in a good head space right now in life, if you’re depressed, if this stuff kind of distresses you, you might want to set this episode aside and listen to it later when you’re you’re in a better head space, cuz this episode gets pretty dark.

Um, like I said, I rarely issue trigger warnings for for this podcast, but this episode as well as episodes 22 and 23 will definitely require at least some kind of content warnings just so that listeners who struggle with this kind of stuff can mentally prepare for because uh, you know, I care about you guys.

I’ve been there. I don’t blame you in the slightest. And honestly, across the next three chronological episodes, we are going to be at what many historians, even historians sympathetic to the Cultural Revolution, refer to as the Cultural Revolution’s darkest hour, not including the 1976 coup.

Okay, but with that out of the way, put on the kettle, brew yourself up a nice hot cup of oolong tea or some long jing green tea. Order your uh favorite combo from your local Chinese takeout delivery joint.

Get into your bunny slippers and put on your favorite pajamas. Lay back in your easy chair. And let’s get back to the story of the great proletarian cultural revolution during the first few months of 1986 known by many historians of global history as the year that shook the world.

It could be argued honestly that spring of 68 in many parts of China started out with a glimmer of hope. In Hebei Province, which is the next door neighbor of the cities of Beijing and Tianjin, a new revolutionary committee was set up on February 2nd with former Beijing Municipal Party Committee leader Li Xuefeng at the helm and with rebel party cadres, Red Guard leaders, and mass organizations leaders heading the helm rather than PLA officers as was unfortunately the norm with most provincial revolutionary committees. The People’s Daily lauded this new revolutionary committee declaring that ‘northern China’s rivers and mountains are red’ and a 400,000 strong rally was held in the provincial capital of Shijiazhuang

3 days later on February 5th, the Hubei Revolutionary Committee was declared in Wuhan under Lieutenant General Zeng Siyu with 700,000 in attendance at the inaugural ceremony. While Zeng was a military man, he made sure that the majority of the vice chairs, secretary, the treasurers, and the steering committee of the Hubei revolutionary committee would be majority red guards, rebel workers, and rebel peasants.

Zeng, despite being part of the PLA officer brass, was deemed a reliable leftist by Mao and the CCRG. And it seemed like Zeng didn’t want a repeat of the prior year’s Wuhan incident. And I mean, who would really? Even Chen Zaidao, disgraced and laying low in the shadows, supposedly approved of the hardline red provincial revolutionary committee now in place in his former political stronghold if it meant stability and a prevention of return to factional warfare in Wuhan and other industrial towns around Hubei.

On February 21st in Guangzhou, 600,000 locals and soldiers gathered to witness the proclamation of the Guangdong Revolutionary Committee and the Guangzhou Revolutionary Committee led by new chairman Huang Yongsheng. Speakers at the Guangzhou rally denounced the double dealer Tao Zhu who you guys might remember from the first few episodes and Liu Shaoqi’s big man in Guangdong, Zhao Ziyang, who was the party chief of Guangdong province just after the great leap forward and he was a major proponent of market reforms uh in the early 60s and was a vocal opponent of the um take pulling out of the work teams in summer of '66.

On March 6, in front of the geological palace in Changchun, 300,000 people gathered for the establishment of the Jilin provincial revolutionary committee, led by new chairman Major General Wang Huai-xiang, the speakers that day declared victory over Liu Shaoqi’s attempts to restore capitalism.

On March 24th, the Zhejiang Revolutionary Committee under Major General Nan Ping was established at a 300,000 strong rally outside Hangzhou’s youth palace.

On April 4th in Changsha, the Hunan Revolutionary Committee was finally established, led by Major General Li Yuan. 300,000 people attended the inaugural rally. Unsurprisingly and sadly, of the 14 standing committee members now running in Hunan, eight were PLA men who had been initially toppled by the rebels during the January storm.

So, you know, unfortunately, the Hunan Revolutionary Committee was kind of one of those ‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss’. Looks like we got fooled again. The top civilian cadre of the Hunan Revolutionary Committee just so happened to be a guy named Hua Guofeng.

And well, for those of you who don’t know the history of the cultural revolution, you’re going to be hearing a lot more about him in the last few episodes of this podcast. Foreshadowing. On April 10th in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, a large crowd celebrated the formation of a provincial revolutionary committee once again dominated by the army. Womp womp.

The new head of the Ningxia leadership, General Kang Jianmin, told the rally to oppose rightism and capitulationism and attacked the Mongolian revisionists across the border as lackeys of Soviet social imperialism that threatened northwest China. And finally on April 18th, General Li Desheng became chairperson of Anhui Province’s new revolutionary committee with a 300,000 person inaugural rally and parade in Hefei.

Once again though, the Anhui Revolutionary Committee became one of those revolutionary committees that was stacked in favor of the army for better or for worse.

Still, the spring campaign of successful establishments of provincial revolutionary committees ostensibly meant to begin rolling back the civil war and establishing a nationwide grand alliance of party, army, and red guard rebel organizations was well, it was the exception and not the rule of the first half of 1968.

The factional war between Red Guard organizations was continuing on as horribly as ever, and the body count just kept piling up and piling up and piling up, and the capital of Beijing was hanging by a thread. What would happen if the Red Guard Civil War spilled out of the campuses and into government buildings and into army barracks?

Mao sat back and thought of a way to struggle ideologically with the rebels and decided that injecting them with a healthy dose of the immortal science of Marxism Leninism would possibly be the ticket.

After all, it had worked in many places on a small scale. Um, if you guys remember in the last episode, our two former Red Guard friends that we interviewed said that usually if there was a dispute between two opposing factions in their city, the two factions would come together and they’d sit down, study Mao’s works, and come to a resolution.

And so, I can see why Mao was being optimistic like that. And so Mao sent propaganda teams into every poor and nook and cranny of Chinese society, setting up Mao Zedong Thought study groups where people would read the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and of course, most importantly, the chairman.

Red Guard factions that hated each other’s guts were ushered into classrooms and forced by the PLA or people’s militia to sit down and actually think scientifically in an all-around Marxist way about what they were doing and how to resolve the contradictions they were facing. In Beijing on February 5th, the Beijing PLA garrison did just that.

They gathered up the leadership of as many university and high school red guard factions as possible. marched them into the boardroom of the great hall of the people and into the assembly halls of various colleges and told the kids to hit the books.

For two months, hundreds of Red Guards leaders were retrained in the Marxist classics and instructed on how to think critically about Mao’s quotations and not just use them as excuses to turn every contradiction into an antagonistic one.

Mao himself hoped that a deeper understanding of the Marxist classics of the five heads, if you would, would help build a grand alliance of the city’s red guards and establish a more robust and democratic set of revolutionary committees. Alas, it was of no use.

And the Beijing Red Guard Mao Zedong thought study groups ended with everyone walking out on only more convinced that the Marxist Leninist canon justified their own particular factions’ politics. Andrew G. Walder says of the failure of the study sessions in his book Fractured Rebellion, quote,

"In a deeply flawed policy pursued until the middle of '68, student factions were expected to forge their own alliances and establish revolutionary committees via study groups. By this point, however, the mutual charges each side had directed against each other had made the prospect of defeat or compromise unthinkable.”

Mao’s attempt at using his theories for reconciliation and unity-struggle-unity ended up being fruitless.

Now let’s turn our attention. We’ll come back to Beijing, but let’s turn our attention to our lovely city of Shanghai.

In Shanghai, the red flag was flying high and the rebel workers seemed to be able to keep factional warfare to a minimum. Remember this was a place where people were literally fleeing to in order to seek refuge from the civil wars in their home provinces.

Now, of course, Shanghai was no utopia. There were still problems. Uh, for example, on February 22nd, Jiang Qing issued an edict with a list of top officials from the Shanghai Public Security Bureau that she wanted arrested, saying that there were still rightists hiding within the police ranks.

And as you guys will see later on in this episode, some struggle sessions that were unauthorized by the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee and the Workers General Headquarters occurred on the University campus of Shanghai. often ending in tragic results. Still, Shanghai is a fascinating case study to me.

As Elizabeth Perry and Li Xun point out in their text, Proletarian Power, quote, “Rebel workers in Shanghai remained politically influential for much longer and with far greater impact than the student red guards.” End quote.

One interesting case of the Shanghai Red Guards around this time was in April of that year when a coalition of Red Guards from various schools declared war on Zhang Chunqiao and launched a mass campaign calling for the masses of the city to topple him as a capitalist roader who was upholding the bourgeois reactionary line.

On April 12th, a rally of about a thousand red guards broadcast via speaker phones, dazibaos, and passed out leaflets claiming that Zhang Chunqiao betrayed the revolution to the Guomindang back in the 1930s as a spy.

Thanks to the intervention of Jiang Qing, however, a battalion of Air Force troops were able to break up the protest march onto the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee offices and dispersed the crowd that was attempting to drag Zhang out and capture him. The red guards who participated in this last ditch offensive suffered severe reprisals.

According to Perry, quote, “official government statistics cited that 856 students at seven universities in Shanghai were disciplined for the incident, of whom 368 were incarcerated, 12 were persecuted to death by fellow rebels, and 12 were driven mad.” I’m not sure quite what that means, but uh you be the judge of that. I guess that meant they were confined to mental institutions. Not sure.

What is also very interesting is that around spring of 68 there was on the flip side a big push in Shanghai to rehabilitate young people who had been part of the scarlet guard movement in 1966 by enrolling them in compulsory Mao Zedong Thought study groups and other forms of re-education.

Once again, as per Perry and Li, quote, ‘according to an April 1st, 1968 report commissioned by the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee, the previous year, a total of 15 concentrated study sessions had been organized for some 500 former backbone elements of the Scarlet Guards at city and district levels. Of the 264 leaders surveyed, 144 or 54.5% now supported the rebels wholeheartedly and 104 or 39.5% acknowledged their errors but still harbored some reservations about the rebels. Only 6% remain adamantly opposed to the rebel forces.’

I must say I find it fascinating that the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee actually put forward effort into rather than just executing or jailing or throwing them into struggle sessions, taking these scarlet guards and rehabilitating them even though they were viewed as diehard reactionaries and capitalist roaders. and they were successful in winning over about 55% of them to a Maoist position with another 40% at the very least being willing to self-criticize and assume a neutral stance.

And you know, in future social societies, I think that’s something we could all learn from. But maybe I’m just too nice for my own good. Kind of like Mao in Beijing. However, midspring couldn’t be more of an opposite compared to Shanghai. By this time, all the factions in Beijing had coalesced into two major coalitions.

The Heaven faction led by Nie Yuanzi’s New BeiDa Commune Red Guards and Kuai Dafu’s Tsinghua Jingangshan Red Guards on one side. And then there was the Earth faction which was led by the Tsinghua 414 Red Guards and the Geology Institute ‘East is Red’ Red guards as well as a group that was called the Red Guard army. Now just to be clear, just remember this. Just remember this. Heaven faction, Nie Yuanzi and Kuai Dafu. Earth faction 414 and East is Red.

Just keep that in mind when I talk over the next few minutes cuz this is going to get a little confusing. I mean, we’re talking about the Beijing Red Guard movement. Of course, it’s going to get confusing.

Oh god. So each day was a tit for tat, blood for blood scuffle that would eventually set off the largest, bloodiest, and most decisive red guard battle of the cultural revolution in the city of Beijing. One that would cause so much damage that it would act as the beginning of the end of the red guard movement nationwide.

On March 20th, the geology institute ‘East is Red’ Red guards part of the earth faction of Beijing rebels invaded the BeiDa, remember that’s the Beijing University Bay campus with a force of thousands of other students from several other Earth faction universities in retaliation for Nia Yuanzi’s forces criticizing police minister Xie Fuzhi.

The mob called for Nie to be dragged out and subjected to a violent struggle session. But the new Beida Commune red guards loyal to Nia reorganized themselves quickly across the day into a fully armed-to-the-teeth red guard militia. That’s what they called them. They called themselves the Red Guard militia and countered attacked ‘the East is Red’ Red Guards chanting slogans through loudspeakers denouncing Xie Fuzhi as a capitalist roader.

The next day, vice chairman of the Beijing Revolutionary Committee, Wu De sent out a communicate warning that criticisms of the Mao Zedong Thought study classes cannot be used as an attempt as to undermine Xie Fuzhi and that the Beijing Revolutionary Committee would not stand for it and that both the Heaven and Earth factions should call for an immediate ceasefire and continue on with the Mao Zedong Thought study classes.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town at Zhongnanhai, Mao was dealing with problems from within the Central Military Commission and the People’s Liberation Army top brass. Frustrated with their antagonisms towards Jang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, and Lin Biao. On March 23rd, Mao drew up a list of army bigwigs to be demoted or expelled from the party.

PLA Chief of Staff Yang Chengwu, Beijing Garrison Commander Fu Chongbi, and Chief Political Commissar of the Air Force Yu Lijin were all given the pink slip and arrested for various official reasons, allowing Lin Biao to put his own loyal officers into these positions. Ruhroh.

Mao thought that this would be a victory for the left within the PLA and might pull the army brass leftward at a time where the rebel movement was literally drowning itself in blood. But as you guys will see in 1969 and 1971, time will tell whether or not this was going to be true.

That same day, the Beijing Revolutionary Committee held a meeting to deal with the beef between Nie Yuanzi and Xie Fuzhi. Both were committed members of the Maoist camp on a national level, and the Beijing Maoist couldn’t afford to lose one or the other. The Red Guards within the city’s revolutionary committee proclaimed that if Nie did not back down, they would raise a vote to have her kicked off the committee.

Facing this risk, Nie backed down and the Heaven faction self-criticized for attacking Xie and declared their allegiance to him once more. March 25th, Xie Fuzhi visited BeiDa campus and declared his support for Nie Yuanzi and used his power as minister of public security to order all opposing factions to leave the campus.

While most non Beida Earth faction groups left, the Earth faction group on Beida campus, the Beida Jinggangshan Brigade Red Guards, once again, not to be confused with Kuai Dafu’s Qinghua University Jinggangshan Red Guards. They were part of the Heaven faction.

Anyways, the Beida Jinggangshan Brigade refused to back down and said that armed battles would continue if Nie did not resign from the Beijing Revolutionary Committee and her position as a professor at Bay.

On March 28th, with Nie and her faction having refused the other faction’s terms of surrender, an armed battle erupted. Red Guards began stabbing each other with knives, throwing homemade IEDs at each other, and engaging in shootouts with weapons stolen from the local police and militia garrisons. That evening, Nie Yuanzi attempted to meet with the Beida Jinggangshan brigade leadership in order to negotiate a truce, but was stabbed and nearly died at the scene. The army sent in troops to restore order and Xie Fuzhi visited the next morning saying that those who attempted to murder Nie should be arrested as counterrevolutionaries.

A temporary ceasefire was reached on March 30th, but both sides made it clear that the key word was temporary ceasefire and continued to hold separate rallies on opposite sides of the campus, denouncing each other as running dogs of Liu Shaoqi’s bourgeois reactionary line. On April 23rd, the dam burst and the ceasefire broke down at a mass rally of PLA soldiers and pro-Heaven faction Red Guards. Nie Yuanzi received a mass pledge of support from the commanders of the Beijing army garrison.

In response, the BeiDa Jingangshan Brigade began to dig trenches, lay down sandbags, and build barricades around their part of the campus. No amount of study groups and friendly unity-struggle-unity meetings could stop what was about to happen across the next month at Beijing University. Shit was about to get real ugly, y’all. Real ugly.

That same day at Tsinghua University, Kuai Dafu’s Tsinghua Jingangshan Red Guards launched a preemptive attack on a building held by the 414 Red Guard faction, which was repelled by rocks and spears. In retaliation, the 414 faction ransacked the on-campus housing for faculty and staff, ferreting out any professor, administrator, or even lowly maintenance worker who pledged loyalty to Jinggangshan. Jinggangshan returned the favor by attacking any faculty and staff possibly aligned with the 414.

Some faculty were beaten and thrown out of their apartment windows to their deaths. Others committed suicide upon hearing the sound of the approaching mob kicking down the doors of their apartment buildings.

All the rebel party cadre factions, rebel teacher factions, and the rebel campus police and militia factions on Tsinghua campus all agreed. This battle was dumb.

They said, “We don’t have a bone in this fight, and it’s frankly useless for advancing the cause of the Cultural Revolution more broadly.”

And so, by the evening of the 26th, all non-student residents of Qinghua campus had vacated their homes and washed their hands of the entire matter.

On April 27th, the Qinghua campus was carved up into two combat zones held by the opposing factions. Just like BeiDa, trenches were dug, sandbags were laid down, barbed wire was thrown about, windows and occupied buildings were fortified, and Jingangshan and 414 Red Guards laid down their knives, clubs, and revolvers and picked up Russian AK-47s, Type 67 heavy machine guns, Type 53 sniper rifles, RPG-7 rocket launchers.

For the next three and a half weeks, one of the bloodiest battles in the story of the Cultural Revolution in Beijing would unfold in a horrific, senseless slaughter. The 100 Day War had begun. But that, my friends, I will tell you about in our next two chronological episodes.

Yeah. So, before I tell you guys the rest of the story of the 100 Day War, I wanted to catch up on a few other things cuz many people have been asking what’s been up with Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping the whole time. You know, the two guys who were considered public enemies number one and number two across the entire Cultural Revolution. We haven’t heard from them in a few episodes now, have we?

Well, Liu and Deng had been sentenced to house arrest in Zhongnanhai, oddly in the same apartment complex that Mao and many CCRG members resided in. Liu and his wife Wang Guangmei were still periodically dragged out to the gates of the Zhongnanhai complex to be struggled against, but Deng and his wife Zhuo Lin were pretty much kept hidden away. They were repeatedly denounced in the press and on dazibao pasted along the walls of their apartments, of course, but overall they were rarely subject to the wrath of the mob like Liu and Wang were.

Mao himself said at one meeting with Jiang Qing, Kang Sheng, Lin Biao, and Zhou Enlai, “Liu and Deng cooperated. Deng must be criticized for this.” But then Mao paused and said, “Hm, my idea is that he should be distinguished from Liu Shaoqi. Their cases must be treated separately.”

Mao then went to suggest that further investigations and denunciations of Deng should be put to a halt and tabled until the summer. Possibly in case Mao might have a use for a rehabilitated Deng Xiaoping down the line. FORESHADOWING. FORESHADOWING. FORESHADOWING.

Deng Xiaoping’s kids weren’t faring as well as their parents, though. They were students at BeiDa majoring in physics and for the past two years they were subject to constant harassment, beatings, insulting dazibao plastered around their dorm rooms.

Eventually, Deng’s daughter, Deng Nan, and his son, Deng Pufang, were placed under house arrest in their dorm rooms and told they would not be let out until they denounced their father and turned over as much personal family information as possible to both Red Guard factions on Bay campus.

Both Nan and Pufang refused to relent. And a few months later in September of '68, shortly after the end of the Red Guard movement, well, something pretty notorious happens to Deng Pufang that we’ll discuss later when he has a bit of a quote-unquote “accident” that he’s still paying for to this day.

Yes, Deng Pufang is still alive and uh there is a reason that he is still to this day president of the China National Disability Association. Now, if you guys remember from episode 14 in Tibet, clashes between hardline Maoist Gyenlo and pro-PLA Nyamdre continued on and off again across spring of '68, although mostly confined to the remote countryside and not nearly as brutal as they had been in '67.

Clashes in rural Xinjiang between the pro-PLA First Headquarters and the hardline Maoist Second Red Headquarters also continued during that spring. But Mao knew that Xinjiang was going to be a wide-open weak spot for any potential Soviet land incursion.

So he tried to keep the leadership of the two headquarters in Xinjiang confined to Beijing as much as possible to take part in the aforementioned Mao Zedong Thought study groups in hopes that revolutionary class consciousness would bring both sides to a proper revolutionary position and to unite against the more pressing matter of a possible Soviet invasion.

However, if you’ve listened to episode 14 and read the literary sources that I provided at the end of that episode, you know that that was easier said than done.

So, well, what about things here in Xi’an? You know, the oasis of peace and stability compared to the rest of Shaanxi province’s near-apocalyptic guerrilla warfare. Well, I mean, yeah, the Workers Alliance Red Guards and the Workers General Headquarters Red Guards may have indeed forged a grand alliance with the local PLA garrison and had greenlit the creation of a Xi’an Municipal and Shaanxi Provincial Revolutionary Committee with the target date being the upcoming May Day holiday.

But some universities still saw some pretty gruesome action going down on their campuses, primarily Xi’an Normal University and Xi’an Jaotong University.

At Shaanxi Normal University across March and April of 1968, the leadership of the university’s Red Guards put out a call to sweep out any quote-unquote “poisonous weeds” in order to make sure their campus would be sufficiently red before the May Day deadline for the revolutionary committee.

900 faculty members were arrested and denounced by a coalition of Red Guards and rebel teachers in a series of struggle sessions and interrogations.

While the vast majority of these 900 people were let go and found innocent of being counterrevolutionary or just simply let go with a warning, 14 faculty were tortured to death or committed suicide out of humiliation.

On the other side of town at Xi’an Jaotong University, which is considered to be the most prestigious university in Shaanxi Province, had its own tragic situation stemming from the current campaign.

On March 27th, Peng Kang, the president of Xi’an Xiaotong University, was put through a day-long struggle session at the Xi’an City Walls East Gate by the Red Guards.

The Shaanxi Provincial Archives doesn’t give a specific charge that the Xiaotong University Red Guards laid upon him, but it might stem from him possibly supporting the work teams in spring of '66, two years earlier. I don’t know, just my conjecture. Like I said, the county annals and the archives really aren’t clear on the matter.

The next day, Peng Kang was put through a second struggle session at the Xi’an City Wall that lasted across the day until Peng collapsed from exhaustion. University staff from the Jaotong School of Medicine made their way through the crowd and towards the stage where they picked up the unconscious university president and tried to get him to a nearby hospital.

Many in the crowd booed and jeered at the medical staff, calling their attempt to rescue him a reactionary act. Despite this, Peng Kang died at the age of 67 en route to the hospital in an ambulance.

A few days later on April 4th, another Xi’an Jiaotong University professor named Qian Xianlun, his wife, and his wife’s mother were swept up in the chaos and were accused of being Guomindang spies for Taiwan. Fearing the rage of their students, the three committed suicide using gas.

Unfortunately, and uh this is the point where a few of you might want to fast-forward through this part. Uh guys, um, I’ll let you know. Um, mass suicides weren’t just confined to Xi’an obviously.

On February 19th at Beijing Agricultural University, high-ranking rebel party cadre An Tiezhi was so humiliated by a struggle session by a rival rebel faction that he jumped from a classroom building to his death.

On March 19th, Dr. Wu Weijun from Beijing Agricultural University committed suicide after being given notice that he was to be put through a struggle session across the next few days.

Sadly, even on some campuses in Shanghai, remnant quote- ‘loyalist and ultra-leftist Red Guard factions unaligned with the rebel workers of the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee were instituting a new wave of harassing professors.’

On March 3rd, while forced into solitary confinement, the famous Shanghai Jaotong University physics professor Ma Youyuan committed suicide.

On March 19th, deputy director of Shanghai Haiyan Film Studios, Zhang Youliang, was captured by a group of student Red Guards, denounced as having produced films lacking in proletarian class character, and he was beaten within an inch of his life. Realizing that his career was essentially finished, Zhang jumped to his death from the top of the film studio headquarters.

On March 23rd, Dr. Hao Li, a professor of Russian and English languages at Shanghai’s East China Normal University, was accused of being a spy for American imperialism and Soviet social imperialism. He committed suicide out of the shame of the public accusations.

I could go on and on really. I in fact counted about 17 other suicides of prominent intellectuals, cultural figures, and Red Guard and rebel faction leaders during the months of February, March, and April. But I honestly have to stop because it’s just too much. It’s just too gruesome.

But my point stands. Unfortunately, at this point, the Cultural Revolution had become so mired with pointless bloodshed, paranoia, and a lack of direction that it seemed that for many, no matter what strata of society, no matter what their political alignment, no matter what their profession, life seemed hopeless.

The revolution seemed lost. And death was the only way out. And for many, sadly, it was only going to get way worse across late spring and early summer of that year. After all, as Chairman Mao said, revolution is not a dinner party.

But, you know, maybe we can, maybe, we can turn some frowns upside down. While a great deal of bloodshed marked late winter and early spring of '68, and while industrial and agricultural output was markedly lower compared to the second half of 1967, there were still some glimmers of hope that the Cultural Revolution could still continue on successfully across the year.

One example was the preliminary educational reform program of April 1968.

Spearheaded by Red Guards and rebel teachers who volunteered to go to various parts of the countryside. This reform program brought new education reform to the countryside that built upon earlier educational initiatives from the early years of the People’s Republic.

New schools were built in remote villages that had been overlooked during the early 1950s. Educational reforms, often in places where parents were forced to send their children long distances to overcrowded schools in county seats and in the cities.

Student-to-teacher ratio in the classroom was lessened, allowing more interaction and in-depth education tailored to students’ individual needs and ambitions. School schedules became more flexible to the needs of the parents of the students in terms of collective farm harvest or work pace production quotas.

Kids got to learn not only the three Rs of read and write and arithmetic and Marxist-Leninist theory, but also practical stuff that would help them later on in life in their careers of choice. Sometimes everyday workers and peasants would come to help teach the kids basic skills.

Learn from the people to serve the people. That’s the way it was seen. So once again, like I always say, like I always say in every episode, even in the Cultural Revolution’s darkest hours, there’s always some untold stories of the people coming together to transform society in new and innovative ways. And that’s what made the whole thing, at least in my opinion, worth it in some way.

Another example is the Chinese people’s steadfast internationalism that continued to surge across 1968.

When African-American civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, thousands of miles away from China, Chairman Mao was so moved that he decided to write an editorial in solidarity with the civil rights movements in the United States called, quote, “A New Storm of Imperialism.” At the end of the statement, Mao made a provocative call.

"The struggle of the black people in the United States for emancipation is a component part of the general struggle of all the people of the world against US imperialism, a component part of the contemporary world revolution.

I call on the workers, peasants, and revolutionary intellectuals of all countries and all who are willing to unite against US imperialism to take action and extend strong support to the struggle of the black people in the United States."

The Chinese people took those words to heart. Mass demonstrations, sometimes numbering hundreds of thousands, broke out all across China in solidarity with Black liberation and other people’s struggles within the United States.

Cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, even smaller cities like Xi’an, Lanzhou, Fuzhou, Taiyuan, Lhasa, Urumqi saw massive pro-civil rights marches, demonstrating that the Chinese people, even when violently at each other’s throats in factional sectarian squabbles, were able to show a strong internationalist spirit and a firm belief in Marx and Engels’ words in the Manifesto, the working man has no country and workers of the world unite.

And these demonstrations didn’t go unnoticed in the United States. Black radical groups like the Black Panther Party, SNCC, and other Black nationalist formations had already been studying Mao’s works in the past two years in hopes that his teachings would be, you know, possibly applicable to their own national liberation struggle.

But now it seemed every black radical from Oakland to Atlanta was wearing a Mao badge and making use of quotes like “Serve the People” and “It’s right to rebel.” Maoist slogans and symbols were even raised across the riots of April and May of 1968 in response to King’s assassination.

And it wasn’t just Black revolutionaries who were moved by the Chinese people’s demonstrations of solidarity with the civil rights movements. More and more members of groups like Students for a Democratic Society began wearing Mao badges and organizing Mao Zedong Thought study groups within their own organizations and parties.

In California, a group of Maoists, including prominent student activists and labor union organizers Liebel Bergman, H. Bruce Franklin, and Bob Avakian gathered some of their proud comrades to found a new collective called the Bay Area Revolutionary Union, which would quickly come to prominence as the largest and most influential Maoist organization in the US. But uh we’ll get to them a little later in the series.

And boy, let me tell you, if you think that the Chinese workers and students were passionate in their demonstrations of solidarity with the Vietnamese national liberation struggle and the African-American civil rights movement, just wait till our next chronological episode when you see how the people of China react to the May '68 uprisings that take the world by storm, especially in places like France and West Germany.

Well, all right, folks. Here we are, the end of April at the beginning of the 100 Day War at Tsinghua University and the beginning of the radical student uprisings around the world that would take Mao as their guide to quote Don McLean in his song “American Pie.” And in the streets the children screamed, the lovers cried, and the poets dreamed.

So, let’s put a bookmark here and we’ll continue with our chronological telling of the story of the Cultural Revolution in June with episode 22 when we’ll be discussing the first half of the 100 Day War at Tsinghua University. Before that though, in May, we’ll be doing a very special thematic episode in which we’ll be discussing Chinese-Albanian relations during the Cultural Revolution and the reform and opening up.

Finally, finally, we’ll be able to dive deep into exploring the why and how of the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania’s decision to assure remaining part of the Soviet Eastern Bloc and throw its diplomatic and ideological hat into the ring with their fellow revisionist anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninists, the People’s Republic of China, despite China and Albania being over 7,000 kilometers apart from one another as well as their tragic divorce after Chairman Mao’s death. Trust me, you won’t want to miss it.

But until the end of next month, I bid you a warm and happy goodbye, a happy May Day, a happy International Workers’ Day, the deepest of revolutionary socialist solidarity, and hope to hear from you guys again on Twitter and Discord in between now and then. So from the ancient city of Xi’an, I once again say, zaijian.

Sources for today’s episode include:

Mao’s Last Revolution by Roderick McFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals,

Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement by Andrew G. Walder,

Agents of Disorder: Inside China’s Cultural Revolution by Andrew G. Walder,

Proletarian Power Shanghai During the Cultural Revolution by Elizabeth J. Perry and Li Xun.

The World Turned Upside Down: A History of the Cultural Revolution by Yang Jisheng,

The Battle for China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution by Gao Mobo,

The Unknown Cultural Revolution by Han Dongping,

Deng Xiaoping: A Revolutionary Life by Alexander Pantsov and Steven Levine,

Turning One’s Back on the Party and the People: Suicides During the Chinese Cultural Revolution by Fei Yan,

the Shaanxi Provincial Archives, Xi’an Jaotong University Archives, Shaanxi Normal University Archives, and the Marxist Internet Archives Peking Review Archives.

All right, have a great one.

Zai jian