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The Killing Wind: A Chinese County's Descent into Madness during the Cultural Revolution
Over the course of 66 days in 1967, more than 4,000 "class enemies"--including young children and the elderly--were murdered in Daoxian, a county in China's Hunan province. The killings spread to surrounding counties, resulting in a combined death toll of more than 9,000. Commonly known as the Daoxian massacre, the killings were one of many acts of so-called mass dictatorship and armed factional conflict that rocked China during the Cultural Revolution. However, in spite of the scope and brutality of the killings, there are few detailed accounts of mass killings in China's countryside during the Cultural Revolution's most tumultuous years.
Years after the massacre, journalist Tan Hecheng was sent to Daoxian to report on an official investigation into the killings. Tan was prevented from publishing his findings in China, but in 2010, he published the Chinese edition of The Killing Wind in Hong Kong. Tan's first-hand investigation of the atrocities, accumulated over the course of more than 20 years, blends his research with the recollections of survivors to provide a vivid account exploring how and why the massacre took place and describing its aftermath. Dispelling the heroic aura of class struggle, Tan reveals that most of the Daoxian massacre's victims were hard-working, peaceful members of the rural middle class blacklisted as landlords or rich peasants. Tan also describes how political pressure and brainwashing turned ordinary people into heartless killing machines.
More than a catalog of horrors, The Killing Wind is also a poignant meditation on memory, moral culpability, and the failure of the Chinese government to come to terms with the crimes of the Maoist era. By painting a detailed portrait of this massacre, Tan makes a broader argument about the long-term consequences of the Cultural Revolution, one of the most violent political movements of the twentieth century. A compelling testament to the victims and survivors of the Daoxian massacre, The Killing Wind is a monument to historical truth: one that fills an immense gap in our understanding of the Mao era, the Cultural Revolution, and the status of truth in contemporary China.
Years after the massacre, journalist Tan Hecheng was sent to Daoxian to report on an official investigation into the killings. Tan was prevented from publishing his findings in China, but in 2010, he published the Chinese edition of The Killing Wind in Hong Kong. Tan's first-hand investigation of the atrocities, accumulated over the course of more than 20 years, blends his research with the recollections of survivors to provide a vivid account exploring how and why the massacre took place and describing its aftermath. Dispelling the heroic aura of class struggle, Tan reveals that most of the Daoxian massacre's victims were hard-working, peaceful members of the rural middle class blacklisted as landlords or rich peasants. Tan also describes how political pressure and brainwashing turned ordinary people into heartless killing machines.
More than a catalog of horrors, The Killing Wind is also a poignant meditation on memory, moral culpability, and the failure of the Chinese government to come to terms with the crimes of the Maoist era. By painting a detailed portrait of this massacre, Tan makes a broader argument about the long-term consequences of the Cultural Revolution, one of the most violent political movements of the twentieth century. A compelling testament to the victims and survivors of the Daoxian massacre, The Killing Wind is a monument to historical truth: one that fills an immense gap in our understanding of the Mao era, the Cultural Revolution, and the status of truth in contemporary China.
533 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2010
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January 28, 2020
Bureaucratic Nightmares
Tan blames the official Chinese administrative Bureaucracy, because of its existence, its persistence, and its peculiar significance, for the lethal insanity of the Cultural Revolution . But I don't buy it.
Bureaucracy doesn't explain the emotional intensity, the physically violent ferocity, the sudden eruption and equally sudden cessation of what was essentially a gang culture among the various factions of the Red Guards.
Bureaucracy doesn't account for the holding of family grudges for decades and yet the failure to remember the civic horror of the destruction of virtually all institutional life immediately upon the return to somewhat normal living conditions.
Bureaucracy doesn't produce the evident hatred or the techniques of masochistic torture that millions of so-called 'black elements', former landed peasants and their children, endured.
Bureaucracy isn't instinctively on the lookout for the creation of a defenceless scapegoat in these 'black elements' as a response to obviously false rumours.
Bureaucracy, if anything, remembers, it doesn't forget. It likes things documented and in triplicate, and with clear authorisation by the rules stated in codes, and regulations, and statutes and precedents. Yet these are entirely absent in the execution of almost every aspect of the craziness of 1967.
Bureaucracy has an organisational solidity, a pyramidal stability that ensures the consistent transmission of orders and directives from the top of the pyramid to its foundations. This is not the way in which the Cultural Revolution, according to Tan's own account, was thrust upon the country from Mao. Communication with Beijing was not through 'proper channels' but via publicly broadcast directives which were interpreted in widely different, often contradictory, ways throughout the country.
The Bureaucracy was Mao's target, Tan says. Why would the Bureaucracy lead the effort to ensure its own destruction; and when that effort ultimately failed, proceed to business as usual as if no such effort had ever taken place? Why would it continue to promote the cult of Mao afterwards?
Almost as an aside, Tan says "The tragedy of China is that experience has accustomed our people to disaster and bloodshed, and even to apathy and forgetfulness." This is a heart-rending cry of cultural despair and the reader is brought almost to tears by Tan's twenty-year long crusade to overcome both apathy and forgetfulness among his countrymen, more than forty years after the events themselves. But how on earth can Bureaucracy be blamed for the inuredness of an entire nation to disaster and bloodshed. Surely Bureaucracy would provide the archival means for analysing, debating, and, in a sense, reliving these experiences however terrible.
Yet another incidental remark seems out of place to me. Tan thinks that "It's not death that's at issue, but how it happened and for what reason." I read this as the motivation for the book. He researches and writes, in other words, in order to understand. But not to achieve justice for either the dead or the still living who will soon be dead. His intention is not even to assist in creating a programme so that the horror can't happen again. Is there some sort of peculiar Chinese rationalism that finds it sufficient to merely understand in order to be at peace after such national trauma?
If the uncovering of the reasons (and by reasons I think he means individual motivations rather than institutional logic) for these deaths rather than the deaths themselves are what is most important to Tan, I must confess to being on a different moral planet. It seems to me that Tan wants to ensure that the deaths are recorded in history, as having occurred. But he also expresses himself as if he is writing into a particularly Chinese cultural sensitivity which prohibits him, and many of the subjects he has interviewed, from expressing personal outrage and desire for revenge at specific perpetrators. It seems as if it is more important to see the motivations of these criminals as a sort of cultural mistake that has to be recognised before any reforming or judicial action can be considered.
(I have the same sense of someone sitting on the writer’s shoulder, when reading Catholic theologians who are trying terribly hard to articulate a new theological idea without arousing the Vatican censors. It's as if the writer is not merely trying to find the least offensive formula, but also trying to disguise his own efforts at self-restraint)
This cultural reticence to blame and punish specific individuals for real criminal acts, combined with the quick facility to blame groups like the 'black elements' for obviously fictional cultural deviance, and summarily kill them on account of it, is deeply disturbing. Perhaps it is connected somehow to the Chinese penchant for giving poetic titles and slogans to often horrific social events: The Great Leap Forward, Smashing the Four Olds, Sweeping Away All Ox Demons and Snake Spirits, Rectifying The Class Ranks, or, one of the most disturbing, The Celestial Maiden Scattering Flowers for the use of dynamite to execute political class-enemies. Perhaps metaphor in Chinese both promotes and inhibits rationality.
A related mystery which Tan refers to but which he doesn't think needs explaining is the fundamental non-rationality of responses to the conditions at the time. He indicates, for example, that, "One of the key characteristics of the Cultural Revolution was constant reversals." The reversals he refers to range from policy directives from central government that contradicted each other from week to week, competing factional groups which were approved as orthodox one week and condemned as 'capitalist-roaders' the next, orders given at one level countermanded or cancelled at another level. Mob-rule is rarely logical. But the frequent shifts in direction of official Party policy were drastic and continuous. Yet people continued to respond to them until they were stopped by the army. Yet another consequence of metaphor?
This general attitude toward one's countrymen: socially deferential and reserved but simultaneously unconcerned about individual well-being, even death, combined with the capacity for violent and emotional arousal may well be a misconception on my part. The apathy that Tan criticises may be a preferred option if it is not. His nightmares about Bureaucracy run amok justify just about any coping strategy that is at hand.
In any case, for the moment I can find no better way to express my confusion. Tan's work is undoubtedly courageous and important. But it is courageous and important in ways that are beyond my ability to appreciate. One can only wish him and his fellows good luck… and great fortitude.
Tan blames the official Chinese administrative Bureaucracy, because of its existence, its persistence, and its peculiar significance, for the lethal insanity of the Cultural Revolution . But I don't buy it.
Bureaucracy doesn't explain the emotional intensity, the physically violent ferocity, the sudden eruption and equally sudden cessation of what was essentially a gang culture among the various factions of the Red Guards.
Bureaucracy doesn't account for the holding of family grudges for decades and yet the failure to remember the civic horror of the destruction of virtually all institutional life immediately upon the return to somewhat normal living conditions.
Bureaucracy doesn't produce the evident hatred or the techniques of masochistic torture that millions of so-called 'black elements', former landed peasants and their children, endured.
Bureaucracy isn't instinctively on the lookout for the creation of a defenceless scapegoat in these 'black elements' as a response to obviously false rumours.
Bureaucracy, if anything, remembers, it doesn't forget. It likes things documented and in triplicate, and with clear authorisation by the rules stated in codes, and regulations, and statutes and precedents. Yet these are entirely absent in the execution of almost every aspect of the craziness of 1967.
Bureaucracy has an organisational solidity, a pyramidal stability that ensures the consistent transmission of orders and directives from the top of the pyramid to its foundations. This is not the way in which the Cultural Revolution, according to Tan's own account, was thrust upon the country from Mao. Communication with Beijing was not through 'proper channels' but via publicly broadcast directives which were interpreted in widely different, often contradictory, ways throughout the country.
The Bureaucracy was Mao's target, Tan says. Why would the Bureaucracy lead the effort to ensure its own destruction; and when that effort ultimately failed, proceed to business as usual as if no such effort had ever taken place? Why would it continue to promote the cult of Mao afterwards?
Almost as an aside, Tan says "The tragedy of China is that experience has accustomed our people to disaster and bloodshed, and even to apathy and forgetfulness." This is a heart-rending cry of cultural despair and the reader is brought almost to tears by Tan's twenty-year long crusade to overcome both apathy and forgetfulness among his countrymen, more than forty years after the events themselves. But how on earth can Bureaucracy be blamed for the inuredness of an entire nation to disaster and bloodshed. Surely Bureaucracy would provide the archival means for analysing, debating, and, in a sense, reliving these experiences however terrible.
Yet another incidental remark seems out of place to me. Tan thinks that "It's not death that's at issue, but how it happened and for what reason." I read this as the motivation for the book. He researches and writes, in other words, in order to understand. But not to achieve justice for either the dead or the still living who will soon be dead. His intention is not even to assist in creating a programme so that the horror can't happen again. Is there some sort of peculiar Chinese rationalism that finds it sufficient to merely understand in order to be at peace after such national trauma?
If the uncovering of the reasons (and by reasons I think he means individual motivations rather than institutional logic) for these deaths rather than the deaths themselves are what is most important to Tan, I must confess to being on a different moral planet. It seems to me that Tan wants to ensure that the deaths are recorded in history, as having occurred. But he also expresses himself as if he is writing into a particularly Chinese cultural sensitivity which prohibits him, and many of the subjects he has interviewed, from expressing personal outrage and desire for revenge at specific perpetrators. It seems as if it is more important to see the motivations of these criminals as a sort of cultural mistake that has to be recognised before any reforming or judicial action can be considered.
(I have the same sense of someone sitting on the writer’s shoulder, when reading Catholic theologians who are trying terribly hard to articulate a new theological idea without arousing the Vatican censors. It's as if the writer is not merely trying to find the least offensive formula, but also trying to disguise his own efforts at self-restraint)
This cultural reticence to blame and punish specific individuals for real criminal acts, combined with the quick facility to blame groups like the 'black elements' for obviously fictional cultural deviance, and summarily kill them on account of it, is deeply disturbing. Perhaps it is connected somehow to the Chinese penchant for giving poetic titles and slogans to often horrific social events: The Great Leap Forward, Smashing the Four Olds, Sweeping Away All Ox Demons and Snake Spirits, Rectifying The Class Ranks, or, one of the most disturbing, The Celestial Maiden Scattering Flowers for the use of dynamite to execute political class-enemies. Perhaps metaphor in Chinese both promotes and inhibits rationality.
A related mystery which Tan refers to but which he doesn't think needs explaining is the fundamental non-rationality of responses to the conditions at the time. He indicates, for example, that, "One of the key characteristics of the Cultural Revolution was constant reversals." The reversals he refers to range from policy directives from central government that contradicted each other from week to week, competing factional groups which were approved as orthodox one week and condemned as 'capitalist-roaders' the next, orders given at one level countermanded or cancelled at another level. Mob-rule is rarely logical. But the frequent shifts in direction of official Party policy were drastic and continuous. Yet people continued to respond to them until they were stopped by the army. Yet another consequence of metaphor?
This general attitude toward one's countrymen: socially deferential and reserved but simultaneously unconcerned about individual well-being, even death, combined with the capacity for violent and emotional arousal may well be a misconception on my part. The apathy that Tan criticises may be a preferred option if it is not. His nightmares about Bureaucracy run amok justify just about any coping strategy that is at hand.
In any case, for the moment I can find no better way to express my confusion. Tan's work is undoubtedly courageous and important. But it is courageous and important in ways that are beyond my ability to appreciate. One can only wish him and his fellows good luck… and great fortitude.
Want to read
January 13, 2017China’s Hidden Massacres: An Interview with Tan Hecheng
Ian Johnson
in:
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/01/...
Ian Johnson
in:
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/01/...
Read
September 13, 2020坚持读完这本书需要有很强的心理素质
September 22, 2021
If you ever want to see just what the Cultural Revolution was like for the people on the ground, the actual peasants, or if you've ever wondered what communism actually looks like in practice rather than the pretty perfect daydream that academics and tankies pretend is reality, this is the book for you. The first few chapters are a little bogged down in explaining the geography of the area - all the counties and village names are kinda unnecessary unless you come from the area - but once it picks up speed this is a terrifying account of how easily people will turn on their neighbours once mass hysteria sets in.
There are many tales of murder, rape, and injustice in this book. Children killed because their grandfather worked as a teacher, women gang-raped because their husband lent someone money and the debtor didn't want to pay it back, people buried alive in lime, a river so clogged with corpses that it stops flowing. But for me, the worst is the witness testimony of Zhou Qun - the daughter of a traffic warden, and therefore sentenced to death as counter-revolutionary offspring - which is laid out in chapter 28. It's been over a decade since I first read her brave words and they have never left me and never will.
It's tempting to consider communism a cure-for-all-ills, a societal panacea made of fairness and equality and co-operation. But the tales laid bare in these pages are the reality of what actually happens when human beings are given the opportunity to play judge, jury and executioner towards anyone they have the slightest grudge against.
There are many tales of murder, rape, and injustice in this book. Children killed because their grandfather worked as a teacher, women gang-raped because their husband lent someone money and the debtor didn't want to pay it back, people buried alive in lime, a river so clogged with corpses that it stops flowing. But for me, the worst is the witness testimony of Zhou Qun - the daughter of a traffic warden, and therefore sentenced to death as counter-revolutionary offspring - which is laid out in chapter 28. It's been over a decade since I first read her brave words and they have never left me and never will.
It's tempting to consider communism a cure-for-all-ills, a societal panacea made of fairness and equality and co-operation. But the tales laid bare in these pages are the reality of what actually happens when human beings are given the opportunity to play judge, jury and executioner towards anyone they have the slightest grudge against.
Want to read
December 1, 2017positive rec. NYR by Ian Johnson "When the CHinese Were Unspeakable"
killings during cultural revolution in a poor village in southern china. named Feng Shu Shan [maple wood mountatin] ear city of Caozhou in Dao Country. South of city named SHuangpai. All near the source of the Xiao river which goes north to join the Yangtze.
Th author was a journalist and when the authorities covered up this massacre by local government, he decided he needed to publish the story.
Probably one can learn a lot from this small-scale case study.
killings during cultural revolution in a poor village in southern china. named Feng Shu Shan [maple wood mountatin] ear city of Caozhou in Dao Country. South of city named SHuangpai. All near the source of the Xiao river which goes north to join the Yangtze.
Th author was a journalist and when the authorities covered up this massacre by local government, he decided he needed to publish the story.
Probably one can learn a lot from this small-scale case study.
June 27, 2020
《血的神話：公元1967年湖南道縣文革大屠殺紀實》
人類到底要經過幾場腥風血雨纔能達到安然的狀態呢？
一開卷沒料到該書充斥了人的痛苦、悲傷、冤枉...
讀者未必瞭解此場慘案之成因。重要的是，人間已萌生了這類的大屠殺。
越讀越覺得肉麻，其中原因是人殺人時需要創意，砍人時還用辭藻命名殺人方式。“仙女散花”是甚麼？“坐土飛機”呢？
讓人鬱悶的是殺人還算為壹種事業。一條命一筆錢，所以不光是大人被砍死，高齡婦孺孕婦等也逃避不了死神之斷魂刀。
因殺人風颳過而死亡的人，靈魂至現在還在呻吟嗎？
殺人風在人之心扉醞釀仇讎。
殺人風颳過了，留下的只是孽障。
---
嗚呼哀哉~
人類到底要經過幾場腥風血雨纔能達到安然的狀態呢？
一開卷沒料到該書充斥了人的痛苦、悲傷、冤枉...
讀者未必瞭解此場慘案之成因。重要的是，人間已萌生了這類的大屠殺。
越讀越覺得肉麻，其中原因是人殺人時需要創意，砍人時還用辭藻命名殺人方式。“仙女散花”是甚麼？“坐土飛機”呢？
讓人鬱悶的是殺人還算為壹種事業。一條命一筆錢，所以不光是大人被砍死，高齡婦孺孕婦等也逃避不了死神之斷魂刀。
因殺人風颳過而死亡的人，靈魂至現在還在呻吟嗎？
殺人風在人之心扉醞釀仇讎。
殺人風颳過了，留下的只是孽障。
---
嗚呼哀哉~
Want to read
January 11, 2017Reviewed by Asian Review of Books
July 29, 2020
Dark and pedantic, but very well put together.
October 5, 2024
This is a problematic book to review because it's poorly written. But the subject matter is important, so I have given it a 3-star rating as a compromise. In 1967, two leftist factions began to fight each other in the county of Daoxian in Hunan province, thus triggering one of the worst massacres of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Around 9,000 people were slaughtered in a few weeks.
The author, Tan Hecheng, took a trip to the area when young, and unaware of what had taken place, ate a meal at a restaurant and noticed everyone recoiling in horror when he ate fish. So many people had been killed in Daoxian that disposal of the bodies became a problem, so these were simply tossed into the river. So many fish became fat and bloated from eating the corpses that they themselves became bloated and died, and some fish were found with human eyeballs and fingers in their stomachs. Eating fish in Daoxian became a taboo for a long time afterwards because you never knew if you were eating your relatives.
With the winking approval of the local Communist party officials, Daoxian peasants and thugs trumped up charges against anybody and everybody, and triggered a mass orgy of murder, rape, and robbery. Many of those killed were innocent of the charges, but they made the mistake of having a bit of cash or a few goods someone else wanted, or a wife to be turned into a widow and then married by force. To give an example of the absurdity of the charges, having a little education caused you to be labelled a member of the Landlord Class even if you or your ancestors never owned any land. The people of Daoxian were simply miffed at anyone who had ever been middle class, or ancestors who were middle class, much the same way Pol Pot killed all the educated people he could get his hands on in Cambodia. However, many of those killed at Daoxian were peasants, often those who had had some sort of past quarrel with a neighbor. One man was killed because his father had cut down a neighbor's camphor tree many years previous, for example.
But the main driver of the killings were large numbers of people vying for the approval of local Communist officials by showing how diligent a Communist you were by killing Black Elements. Killing became a fad, like hoola-hoops and mood rings. When killing became the cool new trend in one area, Communist officials in other areas exhorted the peasants to follow the trend to keep from looking like slackers to the higher-ups. Because theft of the victims' property was the reward for murder, along with extra food and work points, the popularity of killing soared.
Even children were murdered because everyone knew they might grow up to take revenge, and any woman who didn't cooperate in marrying one her family's killers was also killed. One of the more heinous incidents occurred when a female teacher and her entire family were thrown into a pit inside a cave, only to survive the fall because so many other people had been thrown in that the huge pile of dead bodies cushioned their plunge. The teacher had to listen to her husband and three children die of thirst and hunger in the dark over the next few days. She only survived herself because a little rainwater trickled in to help her live, and one of her old students and a relative heard her voice in the pit and were able to haul her out. A few others survived by bolting to the countryside and living like hobos.
The murders in Daoxian only ended when the Communist authorities were taken aback at the stark number of many thousands dead, and they sent in the army to sit on everybody. In later years, the Communist Party allowed some examination of the horrors of Cultural Revolution, (hence this book) and paid a small amount of restitution to some of the families of the survivors. However, the author, who did his first set of interviews in the 1980s, had difficulty in getting survivors to talk because of the trauma.
After reading this book, if you don't realize that Communism is simply Jealousy repackaged as a political movement, you aren't paying attention.
The author, Tan Hecheng, took a trip to the area when young, and unaware of what had taken place, ate a meal at a restaurant and noticed everyone recoiling in horror when he ate fish. So many people had been killed in Daoxian that disposal of the bodies became a problem, so these were simply tossed into the river. So many fish became fat and bloated from eating the corpses that they themselves became bloated and died, and some fish were found with human eyeballs and fingers in their stomachs. Eating fish in Daoxian became a taboo for a long time afterwards because you never knew if you were eating your relatives.
With the winking approval of the local Communist party officials, Daoxian peasants and thugs trumped up charges against anybody and everybody, and triggered a mass orgy of murder, rape, and robbery. Many of those killed were innocent of the charges, but they made the mistake of having a bit of cash or a few goods someone else wanted, or a wife to be turned into a widow and then married by force. To give an example of the absurdity of the charges, having a little education caused you to be labelled a member of the Landlord Class even if you or your ancestors never owned any land. The people of Daoxian were simply miffed at anyone who had ever been middle class, or ancestors who were middle class, much the same way Pol Pot killed all the educated people he could get his hands on in Cambodia. However, many of those killed at Daoxian were peasants, often those who had had some sort of past quarrel with a neighbor. One man was killed because his father had cut down a neighbor's camphor tree many years previous, for example.
But the main driver of the killings were large numbers of people vying for the approval of local Communist officials by showing how diligent a Communist you were by killing Black Elements. Killing became a fad, like hoola-hoops and mood rings. When killing became the cool new trend in one area, Communist officials in other areas exhorted the peasants to follow the trend to keep from looking like slackers to the higher-ups. Because theft of the victims' property was the reward for murder, along with extra food and work points, the popularity of killing soared.
Even children were murdered because everyone knew they might grow up to take revenge, and any woman who didn't cooperate in marrying one her family's killers was also killed. One of the more heinous incidents occurred when a female teacher and her entire family were thrown into a pit inside a cave, only to survive the fall because so many other people had been thrown in that the huge pile of dead bodies cushioned their plunge. The teacher had to listen to her husband and three children die of thirst and hunger in the dark over the next few days. She only survived herself because a little rainwater trickled in to help her live, and one of her old students and a relative heard her voice in the pit and were able to haul her out. A few others survived by bolting to the countryside and living like hobos.
The murders in Daoxian only ended when the Communist authorities were taken aback at the stark number of many thousands dead, and they sent in the army to sit on everybody. In later years, the Communist Party allowed some examination of the horrors of Cultural Revolution, (hence this book) and paid a small amount of restitution to some of the families of the survivors. However, the author, who did his first set of interviews in the 1980s, had difficulty in getting survivors to talk because of the trauma.
After reading this book, if you don't realize that Communism is simply Jealousy repackaged as a political movement, you aren't paying attention.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews