This Week in China’s History: August 18, 1966
In the early morning of August 18, 1966, Máo Zédōng 毛泽东 walked to the railing of the Gate of Heavenly Peace — Tiananmen — as “The East Is Red” played. Standing above his own portrait, the two faces of Mao gazed out at the square filled, for the first time, by as many as 1 million people. As the crowd shouted “Long Live Chairman Mao!,” writes Yáng Jìshéng 杨继绳 in his book The World Turned Upside Down, “multitudes of Little Red Books rose and swayed like a red tide.”
In the crowd was one Sòng Bīnbīn 宋彬彬. Seventeen years old and a student at an elite high school affiliated with Beijing Normal University, Song was the daughter of Sòng Rènqióng 宋任穷, one of the P.R.C.’s “Eight Immortals” who had spearheaded the Party in its infancy, a list that included Dèng Xiǎopíng 邓小平, Chén Yún 陈云, and Bó Yībō 薄一波. As she recalled in People’s Daily the following day, “On August 18, when I saw our most beloved and respected leader, Chairman Mao, atop Tiananmen Gate, I became delirious with excitement. At that moment, I asked a comrade assisting in the organization of the rally meeting for permission to present a red arm band to Chairman Mao, in order to convey the infinite faith and love that all ‘Red Guards’ have for Chairman Mao. He escorted me to the Chairman. Ecstatic, I wrapped the ‘Red Guards’ armband around the arm of our great leader.” Photographs of Song attaching the red cloth, emblazoned with “Red Guard” (红卫兵 hóngwèibīng) to Mao’s arm — the two of them grinning at each other in front of a sea of fevered supporters — has become iconic.
The account — translated by David and Yurong Atwill and included in their excellent Sources in Chinese History — was probably ghostwritten. It’s likely that the presentation of the armband was choreographed, rather than the the spontaneous fit of zeal that Song describes, but it captured what might have been the quintessential expression of Maoism: the Chairman himself, standing above his own portrait, adored by an enormous, frenzied crowd, that was desperate to call Mao one of their own.
August 18 was the first of the Cultural Revolution’s mass rallies, and it elevated the Red Guards to a position of unquestioned official endorsement, but they didn’t begin then. The Red Guards were mostly teenagers — middle and high school students — who were violently enacting Mao’s call to rebel against all power structures and sources of authority. They first emerged at Beijing’s Tsinghua University Middle School in May and June. Historian Wáng Yǒuqín 王友琴 has documented the violence of the Cultural Revolution in a new book (translated by Stacy Mosher), Victims of the Cultural Revolution (which Ian Johnson reviewed for The China Project). Wang, who was a classmate of Song Binbin’s, records the start of violence in the spring. On June 8, three students at the middle school affiliated with Peking University beat one of their teachers for three hours, only stopping when the club they wielded broke. On June 21, students at Wang Youqin and Song Binbin’s school beat their vice principal, Biàn Zhòngyún 卞仲耘, for over four hours. Bian wrote later, in a plea to local authorities for help, that she was forced to wear a high hat, lower her head (eventually, bending over at a 90-degree angle), and kneel on the ground, with her hands tied behind her back, where she was beaten and kicked, hit with a wooden rifle, and her mouth filled with dirt.
The Party’s initial assessment of the Red Guards was mixed. Mao appeared supportive, but others, including Liu Shaoqi, tried to rein in the students. Within weeks, however, the leadership’s views became clear, as Mao’s opponents lost their influence (and often much more). In July, Mao rebroadcast and republished Red Guard manifestoes, leading many to infer that the movement had Mao’s support. On August 1, he wrote directly to the Tsinghua Middle School students confirming his support. With this endorsement, the Red Guards’ violence escalated quickly and dramatically, the start of Red August. Whether the name was assigned for ideology or for violence, it fit.
On August 5, a group of students resumed their attack on Bian Zhongyun, forcing her and two other school administrators to kneel on the ground while the students hit them with nail-spiked clubs and scalded them with boiling water for three hours. Bian was placed in a garbage cart, when she lost consciousness. Sometime later, she was examined at a nearby hospital and found to be dead. As Wang Youqin put it, “Bian Zhongyun, fifty years old, who had been working for this middle school for seventeen years, was the first educator to be beaten to death by students in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution.”
The violence spread throughout the month, the Red Guards emboldened by support from above. Anecdotes collected by Wang Youqin describe teachers being dragged down concrete steps, doused in boiling water, beaten with a variety of implements, kicked, and other forms of torture. On August 31, a second mass rally took place in Tiananmen Square, again with more than a million people. In official documents published by the leaders of the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards killed 1,772 people in Beijing during Red August, some of them in dramatic massacres in places like Lang’an Market and Daxing. Nationwide, more than 10,000 people died during the month, though the reliability of those statistics is difficult to determine. Other figures suggest that some 5,000 historic sites in the capital were ransacked along with more than 30,000 family homes. Hundreds of thousands of people fled the capital. Although August was the peak of the violence, massive rallies continued into the fall, and the Red Guards continued their terror for another two years.
Fifty years after she welcomed Chairman Mao into the Red Guards, Song Binbin issued a formal apology for her role in the death of Bian Zhongyun. Standing with former classmates she made a tearful statement that took responsibility for “fail[ing] to properly protect the school leaders,” adding that “this has been a lifelong source of anguish and remorse.”
Interviewed by the New York Times, Bian Zhongyun’s widower appeared unmoved. “[Song Binbin] is a bad person, because of what she did,” he said. “She and the others were supported by Mao Zedong. Mao was the source of all evil. He did so much that was bad. And it’s not just an individual problem…. The entire Communist Party and Mao Zedong are also responsible.”
On that frenzied morning in 1966, Song Binbin even had her name changed by the Great Helmsman. Rejecting the gentle, somewhat passive, 彬 bīn, Mao told her to change her name to “Be militant”: 要武 yàowǔ.
The advice was not needed; she had already heeded it.
This Week in China’s History is a weekly column.
