By the time she was transported to the hospital, her body was already in rigor mortis. Even as she lay unconscious on the steps outside a dormitory building, some students kicked her, accusing her of playing dead. She was pummeled with baseball bats and table legs and scalded with boiling water. Only by tracking down the faculty member who had slept next to this instructor did Wang learn how he had taken his life.Īmong the first to perish in the purges was Wang’s high school principal, Bian Zhongyun. By day, he was subjected to humiliating “struggle sessions.” By night, he was corralled with a dozen other faculty members into the classroom, where they slept on dirt floors covered with loose straw. She discovered that the classroom where she used to attend lectures over the chirpings of passing sparrows had been awash with the blood of a Russian-language lecturer, who slit his wrist with a razor to end the pain of persecution. She set out to learn more about the circumstances of their deaths, each of which was officially deemed a suicide. When she returned to Beijing 13 years later, in 1979, to enroll at Peking University, Wang learned that several of her high school teachers, and a few professors from her university, had died. By the time the dark decade ended in 1976, more than 1.7 million others would have perished.
The next morning his father collapsed into a coma after predawn cleaning duties and died. When Cheng intervened, his classmates kicked him and chased him away. When he paused to rest, he took a beating from the Red Guards. On one oppressively hot day in the month that the purges began, Cheng’s father was made to sweep the school grounds for hours without being allowed a sip of water. In colleges and high schools throughout the country, they repudiated their teachers and principals as “capitalists” or “stinking intellectuals” and pressed them into service as laborers. Youth mobs, buoyed by idolatry for Mao Tse-tung, threw themselves into a crazed campaign as Red Guards. The purges that defined the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution began 50 years ago, in August 1966. “I understand they were under the influence of the political system.” “Almost overnight they turned against my father,” said Cheng, 69, whose dry eyes belied pain. To this day, Cheng still remembers finding his father, a high school vice principal, slumped over a sandbox steps away from his old office after being beaten with long sticks by his own students. For half a century, Cheng Zhangong has mourned his father’s passing but didn’t want to dwell on how he really died - at the hands of Cheng’s high school classmates.