Daoxian massacre

Background

During the Cultural Revolution in China which lasted from 1966 to 1976, millions of people deemed "counter-revolutionaries" or who did not side with Mao Zedong were persecuted. Mao endorsed the revolutionary discourse and the attacks on authority figures, whom he believed had grown complacent, bureaucratic, and anti-revolutionary. Local Red Guards attacked anyone whom they believed lacked revolutionary credentials, and then eventually turned on those who simply failed to wholeheartedly support their efforts and intentions. In August 1966, the Central Committee issued a directive entitled the “Decision of the Central Committee of the Chinese Party Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” (a.k.a. the Sixteen Points) in an effort to define the revolution’s goals. Later that month, Mao began to greet huge parades of Red Guards holding aloft his Little Red Book.

The movement grew but also splintered into independent movements and Red Guard factions, each with its own vision of the movement. Despite official directives and encouragement from the Party leadership, local forces were left to act according to their own definitions of the Revolution's goals, and many of them ended up inflicting violence upon their communities and clashing with each other. Nobody wanted to be considered a “reactionary,” but in the absence of official guidelines for identifying “true Communists,” almost everyone became a target of abuse. People tried to protect themselves and escape persecution by attacking friends and even their own families. The result was a bewildering series of attacks and counterattacks, factional fighting, unpredictable violence, and the breakdown of authority throughout China.

The Build-Up

At the time of the massacre Dao County had not yet established its own local revolutionary committee to deal with "counter-revolutionaries". Thus, local army officers were the administrators of the county’s leading group for “grasping revolution and promoting production”.

At two countywide meetings on August 5 and August 11, Liu Shibing, the Political Commissar of the county's militia headquarters, spread a conspiracy rumor: Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist troops were going to attack mainland China, and the county’s class enemies, particularly the Five Black Categories, planned to rise in rebellion in cooperation with Chiang’s war plan. In addition, Liu claimed that a number of people under the Five Black Categories" in Dao County "had plotted to kill all Communist party members and poor- and lower-middle peasant leaders in the county." Liu Shibing, along with Xiong Binen, Deputy-Secretariat of the Dao County CCP Committee, ordered all levels of militia personnel and security officers to start an urgent preemptive attack against the class enemies. Although they did not specifically state the word “kill”, all levels of party leadership understood the meaning of this strong signal. There is no doubt that those government officials at the highest county rank were the decision-makers. They not only manufactured an imminent threat to justify the approaching massacre but instructed their subordinates to execute the killing as well.

The Killings

Almost everyone could be a target during the massacre. Victims ranged in age from a ten-day-old infant to a 78-year-old grandfather. Those killed or driven to suicide not only included people deemed "Black Five Categories", but sometimes were killed due to personal resentment and a history of conflicts from local authorities and residents, who often abused their power to settle personal disputes.

The district and commune level instigators created their own brutal and lawless way of organizing the massacres in their areas. Prior to the executions they would often hold a short “trial” (lasting only a few minutes) in the lawlessly created “Supreme Court of the Poor and Lower-middle Peasants”. The “judges” were unsurprisingly the local leaders who prearranged the killings. If the victims were sentenced to death (and they almost always were amid the corruption and lawlessness), they were trussed up by armed militia and taken to a mass rally for denouncing their “crimes.” Then, they were killed in public or by the public. Sometimes the local CCP and militia officials considered that it might be dangerous to take the victims to the public. They would then quietly send a team of armed militia to the victims’ homes to carry out the slaughter. The victims would often be informed while away from home that an issue had risen requiring them to return, in order to lure the victims back home where their killers would be waiting. Victims were killed in a number of ways, ranging from shooting to beating to decapitation. Those directly involved in the "executions" were rewarded for their work with higher salaries than they earned by their regular employment in the commune or district, an incentive that was a major factor for the high number of people who participated in the killings; a number of local CCP and militia officials personally led the killings. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the lack of law enforcement, local criminals also joined in the violence. Most of those in the militias were social outcasts and little respected people who sought to earn honor by participating in the killings.

The episode of mass violence in Daoxian eventually spread to other counties in Hunan province as other groups wanted to cleanse their own areas of "counter-revolutionaries". Eventually, after receiving serious complaints from survivors of the massacre, on August 29 the CCP Central Committee and the Hunan Provincial Revolutionary Committee sent the 47th Field Army to force all local CCP and militia members to stop the killing. However, sporadic killings occurred up until October 17. In total, 4,519 people, were recorded as having been killed or driven to suicide in Dao County alone, and over 14,000 were said to have participated in the killings. Only a small number of the perpetrators were ever punished, and none were sentenced to death.