Guangxi Massacre

In April 1981, an investigation group of over 20 people was formed under the arrangement of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the General Office of the Communist Party of China, the Organization Department of the Communist Party of China, the Ministry of Public Security, the Supreme People's Court, and the Supreme People's Procuratorate.[5]

In June 1981, the investigation concluded that the death toll was over 100,000, while some officials and civilians claimed privately that the death toll was 150,000, 200,000 or even 500,000.[1][3][5] In addition, Qiao Xiaoguang reported to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection that the death toll was 70,400.[5]

In March 1983, another investigation group of 40 people was formed by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.[5]

In January 1984, the investigation concluded that 89,700 deaths could be identified by names and addresses, over 20,000 people were missing, and over 30,000 deaths could not be identified by names or addresses.[1][3][5] In particular, due to the clashes between the two opposing factions, 3,700 people died during direct fighting, 7,000 were persecuted to death, while 79,000 were beaten or shot to death in a planned and systematic matter.[5] In Nanning, the capital of Guangxi, eight out of fourteen counties saw a death toll of over 1,000, with Binyang County alone losing 3,777 people.[5]

In 2006, Professor Su Yang (苏阳) of University of California, Irvine argued that the Guangxi massacre was the most serious massacre during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. He stated that among the 65 accessible official county documents of Guangxi, 43 counties report local massacres with 15 of them recording a death toll of over 1000, while the average death toll was 526 among all the counties which reported massacre.[10]

Quotations of Mao Zedong in Wuxuan, Guangxi.

• In 2016, Agence France-Presse (AFP) interviewed a local man named Luo who responded, "Cannibalism? I was here then, I went through it. But Wuxuan has developed rapidly in recent years and now. That history 'has no meaning'."[6][15]
• In 2016, a high-ranking member of an early 1980s official investigation told AFP that "[a]ll the cannibalism was due to class struggle being whipped up and was used to express a kind of hatred. The murder was ghastly, worse than beasts."[6][15]
• In 2013, Yang Liping, a notable Chinese dancer, claimed that she had seen cannibalism during the Cultural Revolution, although not necessarily in Guangxi. She stated that "I am pessimistic about humanity and pessimistic about humans. Because we have been through the Cultural Revolution, we have become very alert. I am very alert, alert like a peacock. Be careful, because humans are the most horrible animals, otherwise Michael Jackson wouldn't have died......I saw people eat people, and people hurt people, just like nowadays. Nowadays people can hurt you anytime, yet they don't even know why they hurt you."[16][17]
• In 1995, Donald S. Sutton, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, wrote in his research paper, "Did cannibalism actually take place in Wuxuan?......That the incident truly occurred was independently confirmed by a recent visitor to Wuxuan, the scholar and journalist, John Gittings. An off-duty local clerk spoke airily of the killings and the cannibalism-obligingly writing down his name and address when asked-and added with a touch of pride, "In Wuxuan . . . we ate more people than anywhere else in China" (The Guardian, November 27, 1993)."[2]

• In 2016, Ding Xueliang (丁学良), a professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, told AFP that "[t]his was not cannibalism because of economic difficulties, like during famine. It was not caused by economic reasons, it was caused by political events, political hatred, political ideologies, political rituals.”[6][15]
• In 2013, Qin Hui, a professor at Tsinghua University, discussed the contributions of Deng Xiaoping with Ezra Vogel, a professor with Harvard University, when Qin said "my hometown is in Guangxi, where people were killed in massacres during Mao's era, and some of them were eaten by others! In the bloody summer of 1968, people in Hong Kong and Macau all knew that there were corpses floating down from Xi River to Pearl River."[18]
• In 2006, Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals disputed that it was communism that compelled the Zhuang in this area towards cannibalism, noting that similar incidents occurred under pressure from the Kuomintang secret police in the republican period.[19]
• In 2001, Perry Link, a professor of Chinese at Princeton University, stated that "I believe Zheng's story [of cannibalism]. He's a writer of integrity, and the rich detail has the ring of authenticity."[9]
• In 1999, sinologist Gang Yue questioned how "systematic" the cannibalism could have been, given the inherent factionalism of the Cultural Revolution.[20]
• In 1997, Key Ray Chong, a professor of history at Sōka University, wrote in his review of Zheng Yi's book of cannibalism that "[d]uring the Cultural Revolution, quite a few Chinese officials knew of this horror, the equivalent of the Nazi Holocaust in the 1940s and the killing fields of Pol Pot in the 1970s. But they remained silent about the subject."[21]

• In 2016, The Irish Times stated in its review of Cultural Revolution that "[t]errible stories abounded. There were tales of cannibalism in Guangxi province where 'bad elements' were publicly butchered and more than 70 victims were eaten in Wuxuan."[22]
• In 2016, The Guardian stated in its review of Cultural Revolution that "[p]erhaps the worst affected region was the southern province of Guangxi where there were reports of mass killings and even cannibalism."[23]
• In 2013, Renmin Wang, the official media of the Communist Party of China, as well as some other Chinese media reprinted an article from China Youth Daily, which stated that during the Cultural Revolution "in some places such as Guangxi, the hearts and livers of people were eaten after they were beaten to death, and, surprisingly, such cannibalism was prevalent in that region!" The article further stated, "throughout the human history of the 20th century, was there any country that had experienced the Cultural Revolution like ours? The only comparable time was Nazi Germany. However, up to this date, we do not even have a decent review or reflection on this period of history...... A society that does not reflect on the Cultural Revolution is perhaps still a tribe of cannibalism. Such tribe, no matter how beautiful people look on the outside and how modernized the fruits of civilization are used (in society), is still a tribe of cannibalism without humanity."[24][25][26]
• In 2001, Time stated that "Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution was an eruption of ideological fervor, mass hysteria and outright brutality that left an estimated 10 million Chinese dead and ruined the lives of millions more. Now tales of even more horrible excesses from the years between 1966 and 1976 are coming to light: allegations of cannibalism, involving hundreds of men and women who violated mankind's most powerful taboo in the name of revolutionary purity."[9]
• In 1996, The Washington Post stated, after Zheng Yi published his book that "[t]he party wants to block any deep-going analysis of the role played by the late Chairman Mao Zedong and numerous party members. Full disclosure of the truth might destroy what little legitimacy the party still clings to."[8]
• In 1993, Newsweek stated that "[t]he accounts were harrowing. Principals killed in schoolyards by students, then cooked and eaten. Government-run cafeterias displaying human bodies hanging from meat hooks and dishing them out to employees....... Documents smuggled out of China last week described atrocities of the Cultural Revolution in grotesque detail."[27]
• In 1993, The New York Times stated that "[t]he incidents reported from Guangxi were apparently the most extensive episodes of cannibalism in the world in the last century or more. They were also different from any others in that those who took part were not motivated by hunger or psychopathic illness. Instead, the actions appeared to be ideological: the cannibalism, which the documents say took place in public, was often organized by local Communist Party officials, and people apparently took part together to prove their revolutionary ardor."[4]