Former Chinese Red Guard apologizes for 1966 killing
CHRIS BUCKLEY
HONG KONG — The New York Times News Service
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Nearly half a century after Bian Zhongyun was beaten, kicked, tormented and left to die, bloody and alone, at the Beijing girls’ school where she was deputy principal, a daughter of the Communist Party elite has offered public penance – of a kind that instantly brought controversy – for her part in one of the most notorious killings of the Cultural Revolution.
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Growing numbers of former Red Guards have declared their contrition for violence perpetrated in 1966, when Mao Zedong urged students to turn against the school and certain party authorities he accused of stymying his vision of a revolutionary society cleansed of ideological laxity.
But the apology, from Song Binbin, reported Monday by The Beijing News, quickly drew attention and was featured on many Chinese news websites. Here was a daughter of a veteran revolutionary apologizing for what has been widely described as the first killing of a teacher in the decade-long Cultural Revolution.
Song’s father was Song Renqiong, a general who served as a senior official under Mao and later Deng Xiaoping. Song Binbin herself won fame as a member of the first wave of Red Guards when she was photographed meeting Mao. But for years, many of them spent in the United States, she was silent about the death on Aug. 5, 1966, of Bian, a deputy principal at the elite Beijing Normal University Girls High School, where Song was a student.
The Cultural Revolution remains a delicate and heavily censored chapter in China’s history. President Xi Jinping mentioned it only once, briefly, in a speech last month celebrating the 120th anniversary of Mao’s birth.
On Sunday in Beijing, Song, who was born in 1949, told a gathering of former students and teachers from the school that she was sorry.
“Please allow me to express my everlasting solicitude and apologies to Principal Bian,” she said, according to The Beijing News. “I failed to properly protect the school leaders, and this has been a lifelong source of anguish and remorse.”
Tearfully, Song read a statement about her “responsibility for Principal Bian’s terrible fate.” (Though Bian was actually a deputy principal, she served as the school’s leader.) The newspaper showed a photo of Song and other former students bowed before a bust of Bian.
“The Cultural Revolution was a massive calamity,” she said, according to a text of her statement published on Consensus Net, a Chinese website that specializes in intellectual and political discussions. “How a country faces the future depends in large part on how it faces its past,” she said.
Song added: “I hope that all those who did wrong in the Cultural Revolution and hurt teachers and classmates will face up to themselves, reflect on the Cultural Revolution, seek forgiveness and achieve reconciliation.”
Song’s apology immediately prompted rival views on the Internet in China. Some welcomed her words; others called them belated and inadequate. Some said the Communist Party itself should apologize.
Yin Hongbiao, a scholar at Peking University who studies the Cultural Revolution, said in a telephone interview that Song had taken a valuable step in confronting her past and that rumors had overstated her role in Bian’s death.
But Cui Weiping, a retired professor of literature in Beijing who has written about China’s struggle to recall – or forget – its traumatic past, said Song lacked candor.
“Given who she was, this wasn’t enough” Cui said. “She was an important figure among the Red Guards, and so the demands should be higher than for ordinary people. It’s meaningless to say you witnessed a murder and then say you don’t know who the killers were.”
Song’s declaration of remorse also appeared unlikely to satisfy Bian’s widower, Wang Jingyao, who for years has accused Song and others of hiding their role in Bian’s death.
Since then, Wang, 93, has preserved his wife’s memory and sought an honest reckoning from the perpetrators. He took photos of her battered body soon after she died and has kept a shrine to her in his home. In a telephone interview Monday, he said he had heard about Song’s apology but had not heard directly from her.
“She is a bad person, because of what she did,” he said. “She and the others were supported by Mao Zedong. Mao was the source of all evil. He did so much that was bad.
“And,” Wang added, “it’s not just an individual problem” of someone like Song.
“The entire Communist Party and Mao Zedong are also responsible,” he continued.
Mao started his Cultural Revolution to purge the authorities of perceived ideological foes, but initially its most ardent young supporters were the sons and daughters of powerful party officials, who saw the campaign as a chance to display and hone their revolutionary credentials.
Song was among the band of students who formed the school’s first group of Red Guards – youths pledged to enforce Mao’s revolutionary will – which organized rallies to criticize and humiliate the school authorities and teachers accused of sabotaging the Cultural Revolution. She was among the members of that early wave of Red Guards, who soon fell from Mao’s grace and were then often attacked by even more radical groups.
In a memoir published in 2012, Song said she and other Red Guard leaders at the school had twice tried to stop students from assaulting Bian and other school staff members who had been dragged to a school sports ground. Only later was Song told that Bian was close to death, Song wrote in Remembrance, a Chinese magazine devoted to Cultural Revolution memoirs that circulates by email. A senior party official told Song soon after the killing to keep quiet about it, she wrote.
But other accounts, often citing Bian’s husband, have indicated that Song played a bigger role in the death, by abetting or implicitly endorsing the attacks and conspicuously failing to help Bian afterward.
In the ensuing mayhem of the Cultural Revolution, many other deaths followed. In August and September 1966, nearly 1,800 people died in attacks instigated by Red Guards and other radicals across Beijing, according to party estimates published in 1980.
Two weeks after Bian died, Song was among the members of the Red Guards taken to meet Mao as he stood at the Gate of Heavenly Peace overlooking Tiananmen Square, where throngs of adoring students had gathered.
After the Cultural Revolution, Song went to the United States to study and completed a doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She worked for the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, Bloomberg News reported in a 2012 profile of the family. Song moved back to China in 2003, she said in her statement Sunday.
The Beijing News asked Song how she would respond if people called her apology insincere. “If I wasn’t prepared for that,” she said, “I would not have stood up to do it.”
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