The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957

by Frank Dikötter

Some victims were executed away from the public eye, in forests, near ravines and riverbanks, alone or in batches. The bodies were thrown into pits or shallow mass graves, but a few were left to rot. Relatives often spent weeks trying to find the corpses of their loved ones. Those who were fortunate collected what remains they could gather and gave them a discreet burial. Zhang Mao’en had to wait ten months before receiving permission to collect the body of his brother, who had been shot by the roadside and dumped into a ravine in Yunnan. ‘My brother’s rotting corpse looked like a fallen tree stuck in a stream. My second oldest brother and my mother went down into the water to drag it out, and it fell to pieces. We collected the bones, washed them, and put them in a box we had brought with us.’27 Sometimes the bodies were eaten by wild animals. In Hebei some of the mass graves were so shallow that feral dogs dug up the remains and devoured them. In Sichuan one woman suspected of having hidden a gun was dragged away and so badly tortured that she hung herself from a tree. Her body was dumped in the forest and eaten by wild boars.