Da jia hao tongzhimen, and welcome back to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution podcast with your host Drew. Drew Smith once again broadcasting from the ancient capital of Xi’an. Yep, it’s back to school time once again. My university students are resuming their classes. I’m very excited to have them returning uh because they’re they’re awesome students. I’m ready to greet the new incoming freshmen next week and uh I’m sure they will excel under my tutelage.

So, uh, you guys might remember that I said that me and my fiance were going to be going to Beijing this summer, and we did. It was awesome.

Um, number one thing I got to tell you guys is, yes, I got to see Chairman Mao’s embalmed body at the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall for the first time. So, that was a real treat. Uh, I got to lay flowers at his feet, you know, raise a fist and bow reverently. Then I got a nice fountain pen and the bookmark at the souvenir shop. Uh Tiananmen Square was great. Uh the National Museum this year was fantastic.

For one thing, the National Museum is right up there with like the Smithsonian, the British Museum, the Met, uh the Hermitage, the Louvre. In terms of the great museums of the world, uh it’s got 5,000 years of history across a 5h hour tour. It’s a real treat. you really should go.

Um, we also went to Siji Minfu Beijing Roast Duck Restaurant, which was next door to our hotel. Honestly, I’ve been to a lot of Beijing Roast Duck restaurants. I’ve been to Quanjude, which I’ve mentioned before in this podcast. I’ve been to Bianyifeng, but Siji Minfu, that was the best Beijing roast duck I’ve ever had. Hands down. In fact, I’d say it was one of the greatest meals I’ve ever eaten in my 37 years.

So, it was worth the 3-hour in our hotel room. Uh, we also went to the summer palace. Uh, we went to the main tombs for the first time. That was cool. Uh, this year we skipped the forbidden city and the temple of heaven and the great wall, but you know, we wanted to see some other things we’ve never seen before. But those are those kinds of things that we’ve been to so many times and uh you know they’re not going away anytime soon. The only thing was is like Beijing always is in July. It was swelteringly hot. I’m talking like 40° C or 101 Fahrenheit and like 80 to 90% humidity. No cloud cover most days we were there. It was absolutely dreadful.

Now I’m back at the podcaster’s seat and I’m ready to continue on with the rest of the story. Uh now just a warning before we get into the story. This is definitely going to be probably the most graphic and violent episode of this entire podcast series. So uh content warning, trigger warning, listener discretion advised, whatever you want to call it.

We’re going to be dealing with some very gruesome violence. We’re going to be dealing with a lot of mass killings. Uh there’s going to be brief mention of [r-word for non-consensual coitus]. There’s going to be mention of suicide and even outright cannibalism. So consider yourself definitely warned.

Um, I’ll try to deal with these topics delicately, but you know, there are just things that we’re going to have to address if we as historians want to have a holistic summation of the cultural revolution in both terms of its successes and its failures. Also, we have a lot to cover today. So, I will be jumping around a good bit in terms of chronologically.

Um, so bear with me, be patient, and let’s get into it. So last episode we left off with the 100 day war at Tsinghua University. Last time we left off, the 414 Red Guards and the Jinggangshan Corps Red Guards had whittled down to their last few hundred fighters fighting room to room, building to building their bloody attempt to seize control of the Qinghua campus despite having been completely alienated from the masses, the party and the broader Beijing Red Guard movement for their refusal to cease their counterproductive slaughter. Yet, the two factions remained resolute in their fight.

On July 3rd, 414 member Zhu Yusheng (my note: Zhu Yisheng?/ Zhu Yusheng) was building fortifications around his faction’s positions when he was cut down by AK-47 fire from across the no man’s land. Next day, another 414 Red Guard, Yang Zhijun, was ripped to shreds by heavy machine gun fire from the Jinggangshan Corps in their positions in classroom building number one while attempting to drift on the same edge of the no man’s land.

On July 6th, Jinggangshan’s efforts to force their siege resulted in another death. Lab assistant Yang Shuli when a second tank made by the 414 force tried to run vegetables through the blockades of the science building. An armorpiercing shell seized from a South China shipment of supplies bound for Vietnam penetrated the tank’s armor plate and killed the driver.

The next day, July 7th, a group of PLA troops from the Beijing garrison, visiting Qinghua University with a copy of Chairman Ma’s latest directive, the July 3rd directive, which was a call for a ceasefire between the factions in Guangxi province, and a lot more on that later, but yeah, the party center wanted that ceasefire between the factions to apply to the entire nation. Their attempts were rebuffed, saying that unless Chairman Mao personally specified their university in the directive that the battle must continue.

The Beijing Revolutionary called for the Beijing garrison to pull back and convene a conference as to what to do next. And the gunfight between the two factions lasted sharply across the next two days, alight with minimal casualties.

Then on July 9th, Jinggangshan Redguards attempted to finish off the 414 Red Guards who were held up inside the new science building by barricading the building’s exits shut and then throwing Molotov cocktails and hand grenades into the open windows, then used high-pressured hoses to spray gasoline onto the fires inside. Immediately, the building quickly went up in flames and the only reason the 414s inside weren’t all burned alive was because a squadron of armed firemen were able to fight their way into the campus and put the fire out.

On July 9th through 12th, a meeting between Chairman Mao, Zhou Enlai, the Beijing Revolutionary Committee, and the Beijing garrison was finally held to finally figure out how to end the entire debacle.

The Beijing Revolutionary Committee wanted to send the Beijing garrison to arm, disarm and force a ceasefire between the Qinghua factions. Mao said that he was in favor of finding a way to disarm the mass orgs, but he didn’t want to get the army involved just yet.

Xie Fuzhi proposed that the Ministry of Public Security launch a nationwide investigation into mass killings by mass organizations which Mao and Zhou gave the approval. Xie was particularly worried about the fact that the suicide rate had skyrocketed nationwide with many more people taking their lives out of either humiliation or disillusionment than people were being killed in factional warfare or in vigilante struggle sessions.

During that time, Mao and Zhou got word that Liu Shaoqi had contracted pneumonia and that its symptoms were expanding rapidly. It’s kind of ironic. Right as the Cultural Revolution’s arch enemy was seemingly on his deathbed, the Cultural Revolution more broadly seemed in danger of dying from the inside.

At the end of the meeting, a representative of the Beijing garrison went to visit Kuai Dafu at his office from which he was directing the 100 day war. He begged Kuai to order the Jinggangshan red guards to lift the blockade of the campus and allow the PLA to come in to begin negotiations. Kuai refused and called Xie Fuzhi to tell him that he would only stop fighting if Xie branded the 414s as a counterrevolutionary organization and would arrest the entire faction. Xie refused, saying it was ridiculous.

Things continued to putter on with the fighting on both Qinghua and to a lesser extent BeiDa campuses going on unabated. Nie Yuanzi and her Xin BeiDa commune were able to capture the leadership of their rivals, the Beida Jinggangshan, and put them on trial and imprison them in a makeshift prison.

Then on July 26th, 1968, just after sending a cable to Xi’an calling for a complete disarmament of all Red Guard and rebel groups all remaining here in Shaanxi, Mao gave a signal to the PLA to put an end to all of this once and for all.

The army went into the factories and workplaces of Beijing and recruited thousands of workers to be part of new formations called the workers’ Mao Zedong Thought propaganda teams which would be deployed to the university campuses to allow the proletariat to take the helm of the revolution and peacefully disarm the rebel students.

To quote William Hinton in his book 100 Day War, quote, "Propaganda teams were actually work teams sent into various cultural and production units to solve problems. They were called propaganda teams, though, because the designation of work team had been in disrepute ever since the work team sent in by Liu Shaoqi to suppress the masses and the students all over China in spring and summer of 1966.”

Also, since the key solution to most problems was deep study of Mao Zedong’s thought, they made propaganda, the propagation, Mao Zedong thought, the heart of their work. 62 factories sent over 30,000 people altogether. But these figures only include those who were officially counted in the organized columns. Many other workers showed up on their own. Some say that 100,000 workers surrounded Qinghua that day, although this figure is probably exaggerated. No one really knows the true count. It could have easily been twice as the official count, though.

Um, all according to Hinton, all roads leading north out of Beijing were jammed with cars, trucks, and buses. So great was the exodus that ordinary citizens in Beijing streets wondered what all the commotion was about. And this was in a period when mass actions and demonstrations made commotion commonplace in and around Beijing.

On the morning of July 26, tens of thousands of workers marched onto Qinghua’s campus, holding up large portraits of Chairman Mao and waving the little red book, shouting revolutionary slogans through loudspeakers.

Immediately the 414 red guards rushed to greet the workers’ propaganda teams and surrender joyfully. Kuai Dafu, on the other hand, told his Jinggangshan red flag faction to refuse to surrender. He suspected that the workers’ propaganda teams were Liu Shaoqi aligned work teams like those that had been deployed in spring and summer of '66.

The workers began a massive sit-in protest, refusing to leave until the Jinggangshan red guards turned in their arms.

On the evening of the 27th, a heavy rain began pouring down. But the worker propaganda team stayed strong. Jinggangshan fighters began to throw stones and glass bottles down on the propaganda team from the top of classrooms and dorm buildings, causing some of the workers to fall back.

The workers then regrouped, stripping off their soaked shirts and pumping their fists in the air, chanting unison, “Use reason, not violence. Use reason, not violence,” and shouting to the students to remember about contradictions among the people versus antagonistic contradictions with the enemy.

Around midnight, Kuai Dafu rushed to the Beijing Revolutionary Committee who were holding a round-the-clock meeting to keep up with the developments at Qinghua. Kuai stormed into Mayor Wu’s office, demanding to know who was behind the march on Qinghua. Sitting next to Wu were Beijing garrisons and officer Liu Feng. Liu and Wu didn’t mince words. The Central Committee and the People’s Liberation Army had called in the workers.

If I had been Kuai, I would have realized that I was in the wrong and told my crew to stand down. But what did Kuai do? Well, frankly, Kuai lied. Kuai called campus headquarters and instead of relaying Lu and Wu’s words, he reported that the opinion of the central committee was that the workers should return to their factories and the students should be allowed to settle their own affairs.

Taking their commander at his word, Jinggangshan red guards proceeded to throw spears and grenades at the workers who had begun to scale the walls of the dorms and classrooms to pull the remaining militants out of their positions.

It was like the battle of Helms Deep in Lord of the Rings, man. Like shit was getting wild, brutal.

After uh 12 hours, dozens of deaths, and hundreds of casualties, Jinggangshan Corps red guards finally realized that history was no longer on their side, and they surrendered. The 100-day war was finally over.

At 11 p.m., Chairman Mao called for a driver to collect his freezing and exhausted personal physician who had been part of the propaganda team from the campus of Qinghua University for a debriefing. He filled in Chairman Mao on all that had happened, and Mao called on a late night conference with all the main red guard leaders of the city of Beijing.

At 3:30 a.m. in the dead middle of the night at the call of the people, Mao, Lin Biao, Jiang Qing, and Kang Sheng received Nie Yuanzi, Wang Dabin (Wan Debing?), Han Aijing, and Tan Houlan, and solemnly sat them down. Surprisingly, Kuai Dafu was absent.

Mao, Lin, Jiang, and Kang all gave the Red Guard leadership a sound verbal thrashing. Mao said he had wanted the Red Guards to ‘struggle, criticize, reform society’ in order to defeat the capitalist roaders within the party and to use as little violence as possible. But they had failed at this and now it was better to just quote ‘struggle criticize quit’.

Lin quipped that the Red Guard movement had isolated themselves from the workers, peasants and soldiers. Now it was very clear. The July 3rd Guangxi Declaration and the July 25th Shaanxi Declaration applied to the entire country and that any group opposing the PLA or killing people were to be annihilated.

Mao asked why things had gotten so bad at Qinghua University and Kuai was still absent from the meeting. Han Aijing spoke up and defended Kuai Dafu saying ‘he’s still stuck riding the tiger of the rebel movement’. Mao scoffed. ‘If he cannot get off the back of the tiger, then I say, let us kill the tiger.’ A gasp went across the room.

Was Mau really calling for an end to the rebellion? Just then, despite being hours late, Kuai Dafu burst into the room, sobbing hysterically, tears running down his eyes, and begged Mao for forgiveness.

Kuai reported to chairman Mao that a black hand has intervened at Qinghua and there’s a massive conspiracy.

Mao stood before Kuai and said to him, “You say there is a black hand. I am the black hand.”

After five hours of sharp and intense criticism and outlining his plan to use the propaganda teams to further the cultural revolution and youth students being forced to take a back seat from here on out, Mao dismissed the meeting and with that effectively pulled the plug on the Red Guard movement.

Two days later, transcripts of Mao’s talk with the Red Guard leaders were posted all around Beijing and sent to party and revolutionary committee offices around the country with an addendum stating that factionalism was to no longer be tolerated.

On August 8th, the People’s Daily put out a special editorial that celebrated 2 years since Mao’s Bombard the Headquarters poster had been published with an interesting twist. The editorial ended by telling readers that now it was the time to note ‘unite under Mao’s headquarters’, not bombard the headquarters.

Unite under Mao’s headquarters. Very honest what they were trying to say here. On August 10th, the last weapons being held by the two factions of Qinghua Red Guard groups were turned over to the propaganda teams and all prisoners taken by both sides were set free.

The propaganda team instituted a year-long course of mandatory Mao Zedong Thought study classes for all who had taken part in the fighting. The hope was to rehabilitate the guards and prepare them to build a grand alliance which would then become the basis for a revolutionary committee at Qinghua University.

But the workers knew it would take a long time for all that bad blood to settle, especially with a guy like Kuai who was quite stubborn.

On August 17th, Nie Yuanzi’s weekly tabloid newspaper, Xin BeiDa, printed its last edition and was closed down on orders from the party center, instituting a wave of closures of student newspapers nationwide and a de facto ban on non-party press.

In mainstream press, People’s Daily ran an editorial commemorating Mao’s 1st August 16th, 1966 Red Guard reception and said, quote, “The Red Guard movement has in a way played a pioneering role in the cultural revolution and said that the party hopes that the revolutionary students would now prepare to transform their role as secondary supporters of the new working class upsurge.”

On August 19th, the propaganda team arrived at Beida University and were welcomed by Nie Yuanzi. The propaganda team quickly disarmed both the Xin Beida Commune and BeiDa Jinggangshan Red Guard factions and released all prisoners taken by Nie.

The propaganda team were very terse with Nie Yuanzi and said that her intransigence made violence inevitable and demanded that she make a public self-criticism which she did do.

A few days later on August 29th all Red guard organizations at Beijing University and Qinghua University were forcibly dissolved. On August 25th, Red Flag Journal printed a groundbreaking theoretical article by Yao Wenyuan titled, “The working class must lead in everything.”

A resounding call to arms and endorsement of the workers propaganda teams, Yao declared that it was anti-Marxist to limit workers control the factories and, in interest of advancing the class struggle, the propaganda teams were to control universities indefinitely.

If classes at China’s universities were to resume after almost two years of the universities being closed, they would need to do so on a generally communist, not revisionist, basis and that a proper Marxist Leninist pedagogy would be needed to be put in place and that this would only be possible supervision of the working class.

Honestly, I would actually highly recommend going to Marxist Internet Archives, Peking Review archive and looking at the August 30th, 1968 issue of Peking Review, which features the English translator work. And it’s actually a pretty thought-provoking piece and really um it really is revealing, kind of like where the party center was to take the cultural revolution after this with its rhetoric.

On August 29th, multiple workers’ propaganda teams were deployed around our lovely city of Xi’an, including at Xi’an Xiaotong University, Northwest University, G*da (Xi Gong Da?), Northwest Polytechnical University, Shaanxi Normal University, and Chang’an University.

While Xi’an had been overall peaceful since the ceasefire of September 3rd, 1967, sporadic violence had plagued the Xi’an Jaotong University campus across spring and summer of 68. And it was time to put a lid on what could have spilled out and caused the otherwise peaceful city to become a cauldron of chaos like Beijing.

Well, by the last day of August, every middle school, high school, and higher education institute in Beijing had been taken over by workers’ Mao Zedong Thought propaganda teams, and every red guard faction in Beijing was forced to hand over all weapons. Their leaderships were disbanded, and all activities, be it fighting or mass work, were to be completely suspended.

On August 30th, Zhou Enlai held a press conference of propaganda team, PLA, and university leaders, and consensus was reached that all schools nationwide, not just Beijing, whether they had experienced factional fighting or not, were to be taken over by propaganda teams and Yao’s call for the working class to exercise control and everything to become a firm reality.

And with that, the Beijing Red Guard Movement effectively and completely ceased to exist.

Now, why do I think the Beijing Red Guard movement failed so spectacularly? Well, I’ll answer that question at the end of this episode when we discuss other aspects of the end of the rebel mass movements in August of 68. But for now, let’s get into one question.

Why did Mao wait for so long to disband what had already been out of control for months?

You know, so many lives had been lost over needless, senseless bloodshed for, you know, over a year. Why act now?

Well, William Hinton posed his own hypothesis in the 100 Day War. Quote, "It is perhaps important to ask why Mao Zedong and the central leaders waited so long before intervening in Kuai’s affairs. Surely the seriousness of the situation was known to them. How could they let it continue month after month? I can only speculate on the answer, but what seems to be most probable is that Mao could not intervene until the situation had matured to a certain point.

He could not intervene until the students proved that they could not settle their affairs themselves, until the situation was clearly hopeless and until this was apparent not only to outsiders, the students themselves. And he could not intervene until working class forces had developed the unity and strength to do the job as it should be done through a concentrated mass effort and without violence." End quote.

I myself think Hinton’s theory is probably most likely correct. Mao basically just wanted to make sure that he was acting at the right place, the right time where the workers and peasants would be completely behind him. You know, the party had begun to be reconstituted through the revolutionary committees and at the end of the day all options had been completely exhausted.

So, now that we’ve seen the rebel movements ended in Beijing, let’s take a look at how the rebel movements ended in the south of China, specifically Guangxi.

Now, why am I having us take a look at Guangxi province? Well, I’m taking a look there because quite frankly, this is where the cultural revolution enters its darkest hour.

You think things were bad on Qinghua campus during the day war? Oh, my friends, brace yourself, cuz this is about to get seriously ugly. Like I said earlier, content warning, trigger warning, listener discretion is advised.

And uh you might not want to be eating anything while you’re listening to this part um because you will lose your appetite. So, a little bit of background about Guangxi province. So, Guangxi, whose capital is called Nanning, uh was one of the poorest and most underdeveloped provinces in China, rivaled only by Tibet, Gansu, and Guizhou. Even today, outside of the provincial capital, Guangxi, it’s seen as very much, you know, the sticks or the boonies of southern China.

Guangxi was headed by uh this ethnically Zhuang military strongman named Wei Guoqing who was very much part of the right-wing the PLA. You know, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping’s good old boys’ club, if you will. I’ve talked a little bit about the good old boys club before um among the army brass.

Uh many of the working class and rural population in Guangxi resented Wei for his heavy-handed and corrupt methods of ruling. But the problem is that we also had a lot of street credit as a hero during the Chinese civil war as well as helping the Vietnamese national liberation struggle at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

Uh he was also the guy who was in charge of making sure that China’s military and medical aid shipments reached Vietnam in their struggle against the Americans because Guangxi uh was on the northern border of Vietnam.

And uh this becomes a big problem because you know when Wei is at odds with the party center party center is like yeah this guy’s a capitalist roader but at the same time if we topple him too hard then it screws up the supply lines to the you know to the Vietnamese. So what do we do? Well it’s not so great.

So the power seizures during the January storm in '67 in the provincial capital of Nanning and the province’s other major city Guilin had fallen apart quickly and the rebels split in April of 67 into the allied headquarters of the proletarian revolutionary rebels. Uh from now on I’m going to call them the Allied command - who were the conservative pro-Wei faction with the backing of the provincial PLA command.

And then there was the April 22nd Red Guards, aka the April faction, who were the hardline Maoist faction that was initially backed by the Central Cultural Revolution Group and uh some other PLA units in the southern China region.

Factional warfare fanned out across Guangxi province across spring of 67 and summer of 68, causing thousands of deaths and constant tit for tat fighting.

Things got really bad though. Rumors began to circulate that the April 22nd Red Guards were actually a cover group for a secretive terrorist network of Guomindang from Taiwan and former landlords called the anti-communist army of patriots with the Allied Command accusing the April faction of being Taiwanese spies and the April faction accusing Allied command of being capitalist roaders. It was definitely one of those uh kind of rumbles where neither side wanted to give the other quarter.

On July 3rd, like I said, Mao issued a directive saying that all factional fighting in Guangxi was to cease immediately and that it was time to end the senseless bloodshed. Now, you think, oh, awesome. Mao called ceasefire and called for a grand alliance and uh you know they were going to create a a nice provincial revolutionary committee and everything was going to be gucci gravy, right?

Eh no, instead, Wei Guoqing who had been ended up uh elected as leader of Guangshi provincial revolutionary committee and had maneuvered so that the Guangxi revolutionary committee was overwhelmingly stacked by allied command and aligned party cadres, mass or representatives, and PLA officers. Uh, let’s face it,

The Guangxi Revolutionary Committee was just fucking ass, y’all. It was like literally the same group of guys that ruled prior to the January storm were back in power. They had just quote unquote ‘self-criticized.’ I’m not even fucking joking here. It was fucking ass, y’all.

Um, anyways, so Wei launches this huge quote anti-factionalism campaign. And by anti-factionalism campaign, he meant kill all the April 22nd Red Guards and any citizen of the province who supported them or was even in any way connected to them.

On July 16th, PLA artillery divisions began shelling rebel held districts in Nanning, indiscriminately pummeling residential and industrial sections of the city. They also went on to attack the waterfront of the Yongjiang River that flows through Nanning because um the rebel workers’ groups and revolutionary workers’ congresses, on the docks and stuff, among the ships in the area, the shipping area, they were all aligned with the April 22nd faction.

In the ensuing bombardment, 166 boats containing 3,200 tons of cargo were sunk and thousands of people were killed or wounded.

On July 24th in Binyang County, Guangxi province, the local revolutionary committee launched a purge of quote 23 types of class enemy and started executing hundreds of people In Futong,? Guangxi, people’s militia units aligned with the Allied command and killed 120 and captured 70 April 22nd Red Guards. Most of the captured were executed.

So y’all would think that since the April 22nd Red Guards were the CCRG approved re action that the CCRG would have put a stop to all this, right? Eh, you’re wrong. Instead, Kang Sheng and Zhou Enlai had the wool pulled over their eyes and they told delegates from Guangxi that Wei Guoqing’s military crackdown on the April faction was legitimate.

Because even though Kang and Zhou hated Wei, they were convinced by the reports that they had been given that the April faction was behind the supposed quote unquote ‘anti-communist army of patriots’.

On July 30th, several PLA companies and thousands of militia placed Nanning under martial law for Wei Guoqing in a two-week military operation in which 3,951 people were killed in action, 50,000 people were left homeless due to artillery shells and missiles destroying their homes, and 9,840 April 22nd Red Guards were imprisoned.

In August in Fengshan County, Guangxi, 1,016 people were killed by the people’s militia that were supporting Wei Guoqing.

In Binyang County, a second official campaign against the 20 class enemies ended with 3,681 dead and 176 entire households exterminated. Then the report started coming into Beijing. Remember that night, that part in the Night of the Living Dead, the killers are eating the flesh.

Well, that’s exactly what was happening, folks. In addition to multiple instances of things like uh you know, uh gang [r-word for non-consensual coitus] female comrades, buried alive of supposed anti-communist army members.

The Allied command was literally fucking eating people that were members of the April 22nd Red Guards and much of Guangxi.

Okay, now a lot of you are here sitting there and stammering like I did when I first heard this.

What? Drew, what the fuck are you talking about? Cannibalism? What the literal fuck, why were they eating each other? And who was eating too? Okay. So, the reason that cannibalism became part of the liquidation of the April faction needs a good bit of explanation.

So, a lot of info comes uh not just from um Andrew G. Walder’s recent book about the Guangxi uh revolution, but a um article by oh, what was his name? Donald S. Sutton which was called ‘consuming counterrevolution the ritual and culture of cannibalism in Wuoxuan, Guangxi China, May to July of 1968.’

Um so just letting you know that this is where these two sources are where I’m getting all of this from. So Sutton points out the forces of law and order, not the revolutionary rebel maoists, were the killers and the eaters.

uh human flesh banquets, renrouyanshi as they were called, were integrated with the ritual of struggle sessions.

In one instance, allied command members cut up two April 22nd red guards and turned them into hot pot. So, uh yeah, I’m not going to Haidilao anytime soon. Uh such a death. And it’s interesting because it was kind of the ultimate diss. Such a death in Chinese culture violated the filial obligation to parents and ancestors to keep the physical body in one piece after death.

And uh it’s also um Sutton claims that it’s a echo to the ancient Chinese practice of exposing criminals guilty of treason by chopping them up in the marketplace and displaying their dismembered body parts. To chop up, cook, and eat was even more of a way of offending the bodily integrity and autonomy of the supposed quote unquote class enemies and depriving the enemy of humanity to, you know, making him food.

And it’s interesting because eating political enemies who have lost the mandate of heaven has been attributed to different dynasties in China. uh the Xia dynasty, Shang dynasty, Zhou dynasty, Han dynasty, even as late Ming dynasty.

For example, it is said in ancient China that the yellow emperor who had been the founder of civilized warfare and Chinese civilization was the first to defeat the half monster warrior Chiyou, who was cut apart and into a meat stew among the victorious soldiers. And then the Xia dynasty could only be established after the defeat of the usurper.

The archer Yi was fed to his own son by a treacherous minister who was overthrown in turn. The Shang dynasty could only replace the Xia when the founder offered himself up as a meal of sacrifice.

Then the Zhou dynasty was replaced by Shang according to some text when the dead king was overthrown and offered up as sacrifice and its founder had personally killed King Zhou by eating him raw and drinking his blood.

And indeed to this day there is still a saying in Chinese which means I hate him so much I could just eat him. And uh often times in Chinese literature to metaphorically eat someone means to use extreme measures to overthrow someone who has uh unjust authority which you know that’s what revolution is all about.

So the people that were aligned with the Allied command, they were basically just taking these things very l literally. So for the people of Guangxi I would argue cannibalism was not seen as an act of savagery, depravity, degeneration, it was seen as the ultimate act of mass dictatorship against supposed traitors to the cultural revolution.

I would also argue that in times of Chinese society in times of war in Chinese society class war or otherwise it it’s interesting the idea of cannibalism as like the ultimate taboo alongside a necrophilia, pedophilia, incest, genocide it’s just not present especially in southern China where other than the prohibition of pork and alcohol among Hui Muslims, pretty much anything is fair game to eat.

You know, in northern China, they often look down upon southern Chinese for eating things like dog, bat, snake, certain parts of cows and pigs that are seen as taboo. So that’s why I don’t think there was so much of a shame to eat the political enemies.

Um, thus uh, Sutton points out he cannot deduce that the cannibalism seen in Guangxi is simply evidence of the cultural revolution being 10 years of chaos or an inherent particular violence within Maoism, but a complex mix of Chinese tradition, the province’s geography and socioeconomic status, and a revolutionary situation.

A perfect storm that could never have been found in other situations such as uh the Bolshevik revolution in the Soviet Union, the uh Vietnam War in Vietnam or the people’s war in Peru. You just wouldn’t see that or even in northern China. That’s why we see no instances of cannibalism literally anywhere else.

Needless to say, at the end of August, PLA units from other provinces were deployed to put a leash on Wei’s PLA units and their allied command lackey, and both the Allied command and April 22nd Red Guard coalitions were forcibly disbanded.

Unfortunately, it had ended up costing a 100,000 people’s lives and around 300,000 people imprisoned by the new revolutionary committee. Yes, some scholarly estimates say up to 1/5 of all the casualties resulting from the factional quote all-round civil war of March 1967 to July of 1968 happened in Guangxi in summer 1968.

It was by far the worst and bloodiest episode in the entirety of the great proletarian cultural revolution, notwithstanding the mass killings in the aftermath of the coup against gang of the four in October of 1976.

But uh we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Another part of southern China that saw a great deal of brutal mass violence was Guangdong province.

After the January storm, the rebel movements in Guangdong divided into two coalitions. The Red Flag Red Guards, who were the Maoist Rebels and the Conservative PLA-aligned East Wind Red Guards.

When the Guangdong Provincial Revolutionary Committee was established in February of ’ 68, the Guangzhou Capital Military Region, Chief Huang Yongsheng, maneuvered to make sure that the East Wind faction dominated the province’s provincial, municipal, county, and workplace revolutionary committees.

Enraged by this, seen as a violation of democracy, the Red Flag Red Guards launched an uprising that resulted in a great deal of bloodshed across February and July of 1968 with deaths in the hundreds in the capital city of Guangzhou and in many of the rural counties.

In July of '68, much what like happened in Guangxi, the People’s Liberation Army used Mao’s July 3rd directive and the excessive vigilante killings committed by the Red Flag factions as the justification for completely annihilating the Red Flags and approximately 8,000 to 10,000 people were executed and 30,000 imprisoned in a brutal bloody purge until August 30th, 1968 when all rebel mass organizations in Guangdong province were forcibly dissolved by the provincial revolutionary committee.

Unfortunately, it seems Guangdong was like Guangxi, one of those provinces where the dismantling of the mass movements of the PLA was actually bloodier than it was meant to stop. And uh this uncomfortable fact is something that we’re going to dig uh a little deeper into in our October episodes.

So now let’s turn our eyes to Shanghai where, in the spring and summer of 68, we had seen a rash of fatal attacks on intellectuals and party cadres by red guards on the city’s university and high school campuses and a series of sharp factional splits within some factory’s revolutionary committees. To quote Elizabeth Perry and Li Xun in their book proletarian power which, if you have not read it you really should, quote

“a more favorable Able opportunity for enlarging the political participation of worker rebels came with the establishment of the workers Mao Zedong Thought propaganda teams in summer 1968. Dispatched to schools, factories, and even party offices across the country, the propaganda teams were charged with restoring order in work units and universities beset by factory strife. On July 28th, 1968, the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee established a six-person leading small group for workers’ propaganda teams whose membership included three soldiers sent by the Shanghai garrison and Wang Hongwen, Chen Ada, and Zhang Baolin of the workers general headquarters. Soon a workers propaganda team office was set up under the small to handle units with especially serious and long-standing problems.”

This was called the Lao Da Nan {Ban} office as it came to be known. And there were two subordinate offices. The cultural and educational front office led by Wang Xiuzhen and the industry and transport battlefront offices headed by Dai Liqing

These two offices were responsible for sending propaganda teams to resolve conflicts at work units where factionalism was most acute. Termed the army of 100,000, Shanghai’s worker propaganda teams were assigned to every university, high school, and middle school, as well as to all Shanghai Revolutionary Committee offices and to each district, county, and bureau communist party agency.

In systems or work units that did not employ industrial labor, propaganda teams were dispatched as occupiers to take charge of everything. As a consequence of this massive deployment, workers gained even more unprecedented clout in the city administration. Under Yao’s slogan of the working class leading in everything, the workers’ propaganda teams dismissed most of the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee’s working groups which been established the year before and assumed power directly.

It was at this time that Wang Xiuzhen and Wang Jinghai (I can’t ID if this person existed) assumed major administrative duties in the municipal government with Wang eventually taking over effective control of the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee and the uh Shanghai Revolutionary Workers Headquarters on beginning in September of 1968.

The cleansing of the class ranks campaign that went on from 68 to 69 uh did cause a massive shakeup in the rebel worker movement.

But overall, what’s interesting is the mass movements among workers in Shanghai long outlived the rebel worker mass movements in the rest of China. and they continue to have an abnormally large amount of influence on the city’s governments and popular society well into the later parts of the cultural revolution.

Okay, so we’re going to take a little break here and I want to enjoy something a little lighthearted uh since we had to deal with such heavy topics because now we’re going to talk about mangoes.

Now, yes, we talked about the mangoes in episode 16, food and cooking during the cultural revolution, but it’s important that we talk about them in this episode, too, because they’re a key part of the aftermath of the Qinghua University 100 Day War.

Okay. So on August 4th, 1968, a few days after the 100 day war had been quashed by the workers Mao Zedong Thought propaganda teams, foreign minister Chen Yi had a meeting and banquet in Beijing with Pakistani foreign minister Mian Arshad Hussein. Hussein brought with him a crate of 50 mangoes which he was specifically wanting to give as a gift to Chairman Mao.

Next morning, Hussein met with Mao, Zhou Enlai, Jiang Qing, Kang Sheng, and Lin Biao, and he presented the mangoes to Mao. Mao decided to be extra nice and instructed the mangoes to be given to the workers propaganda team at Qinghua as a reward for their excellent work in ending the 100-day war.

When the workers received the mangoes, they went absolutely nuts about them. A gift from Chairman Mao himself. The overjoyed workers reported to People’s Daily, “These are not mere mangoes. They are the rain and sunshine.”

Some workers preserved their mangoes in formaldehyde or preserved them in wax and sent them to tour the country where they would be greeted by thongs of crowds and great fanfare. People who did eat mangoes claimed to have experienced miraculous healing benefits from them.

From curing toothaches to gout or even curing deafness and blindness, were everywhere. Wax and plastic replicas became household decorations. Mango themed bed sheets and tapestries were found in many homes and uh mango scented and flavored everything could be found in supermarkets across the country.

Um, in fact, I even have several Mao badges from late ’ 68 and early 69 which have mangoes displayed prominently under Chairman Mao’s profile.

The funniest thing to me though was the giant mango floats that were part of the 1968 National Day Parade in Tiananmen Square, the ultimate culmination of the Maoist Mango Mania.

Um, now we shouldn’t ignore the international decision of August 1968 for China though. So on August 20th, 1968, the Soviet Red Army and the Polish, Hungarian, and Bulgarian People’s Armies supported by the East German National People’s Army launched an invasion of the Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia, the wave of liberalization and political reforms known as the Prague Spring that had been launched by Communist Party of Czechoslovakia first secretary Alexander Dubcek who promoted a doctrine of socialism with a human face.

Soviet leader Brezhnev’s doctrine stated that the war packed countries had the right to intervene militarily in any member states affairs if the member states government threatened Soviet quote actually existing socialism. As such, Dubcek’s reforms were reversed at gunpoint by Soviet tanks and the Chinese were aghast.

While Mao and company were by no means fans of Dubcek in his reforms, they were horrified at the blatant disregard for Czechoslovakia’s self-determination as a sovereign country.

It was also a sign that Brezhnev was growing bolder in his attempts to use the Soviet military to force the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s line onto other communist parties. So, the Chinese found themselves wondering, “What if we’re next?”

On August 22nd, Xinhua news agency reported that the invasion of Czechoslovakia revealed the national ego and paper tiger nature of the revisionists. Later that day, Mao met Zhou Enlai, Chen Yi and others to discuss the situation. Mao declared to people’s daily that they should issue a strong condemnation.

Zhou Enlai, in his own personal public press release, said that the Soviet led invasion of Czechoslovakia was an act of social imperialism and drew comparisons with Nazi Germany’s own annexation of Slovakia.

Mao himself said that it was proof that the USSR was no longer just a revisionist social imperial state but an outright quote fascist state of a big Hitlerite type.

The declaration in People’s Day entitled the brutal aggression of the Soviet revisionist clique against Czechoslovakia must be resolutely condemned was co-signed by Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, the party of labor of Albania, the Swedish Communist League Marxist Leninist and the Revolutionary Communist Party of Chile.

Other Maoist and pro-Beijing/pro-Tirana parties and organizations around the world joined Beijing and Tirana in their condemnation of Moscow’s tanks in the strengths of Prague. The Chinese concern was not entirely unfounded and indeed less than a year later the Sino Soviet border conflict would break out on China’s northeastern border.

Anyways, back to the main topic of today’s episode. By the end of August, the Red Guard movement was gone. The rebel mass movements in general had ended too. Revolutionary women’s committees, rebel peasants committees, rebel workers congresses, etc., etc., were to cease all independent operations.

The only place where the rebel worker movements continue to be of note, like I said, was in Shanghai. The Red Guards officially can continued on at least on paper in K through 12 schools as little Red Guards and the quote red guard communist youth league. But those outfits were little more than time young pioneer and youth league branches with red armbands and little red books. They didn’t even wear the olive drab uniforms in most schools.

They were politically involved in mass mobilization campaigns in the latter half of the cultural revolution like criticize Lin Biao and Confucius, criticized Deng Xiaoping but not with the same amount of militancy and autonomy that they had possessed from spring of 60 to summer of 68. And with that the Red Guards stepped away from the stage of history and the cultural revolution took a very very different turn.