Zheng Yi’s famous 1993 book may include exaggerations. However, most scholars agree that “ritual” Communist cannibalism did occur in Guangxi in the 1960s.
by Massimo Introvigne
In Italy, the sentence “Communists Eat Children” became and remains idiomatic to allude to the exaggerate American-sponsored anti-Communist propaganda during the Cold War. Seriously suggesting that some Communists did eat children, and adults as well, may invite immediate ridicule. Yet, this is what some Chinese Communists most probably did in the late 1960s.
The story starts with Chinese dissident novelist Zheng Yi, born in Chongqing, Sichuan, in 1947. A former Red Guard, he became critical of the Cultural Revolution, and his books expressing such criticism became acceptable in China after Deng Xiaoping succeeded Chairman Mao. However, in 1989, Zheng was in Tiananmen Square, demonstrating with the students, which led him to hide first and flee China later escaping to Taiwan after the June Fourth Incident. In Taiwan, with others, he published in 1993 the monumental “Hongse jinianbei” (Red Monument), a book on the horror of the Cultural Revolution. The same group, under the pseudonym “T.P. Sym,” published roughly one third of “Hongse jinianbei” in English, under the title “Scarlet Memorial: Tales of Cannibalism in Modern China” (Boulder, CO: Westview Press).
As the subtitle said, the part that was translated into English was about Cultural Revolution cannibalism. This, Zheng claimed, was different from known incidents in history where extreme poverty led to cannibalism. What he described was a form of cannibalism that a sociologist cannot help but call ritual, where “enemies of the people” were eaten in mass gatherings, a fact that had no precedents even in the bloody history of Communism.
Zheng believed that cannibalism probably took place elsewhere as well. However, his investigation and the documents he gathered covered only a few prefectures in the southwestern province of Guangxi, notably Wuxuan County, where the massacres of the Cultural Revolution were especially notorious.
There, Zheng reported, cannibalism was practiced during the “struggle sections” where “counter-revolutionaries” were publicly put on trial. Victims were slaughtered and selected parts of their bodies—the heart, the liver, and sometimes penis—removed, often before the “enemies of the people” were dead, cooked on the spot, and eaten at what were explicitly called “human flesh banquets” at the time. In Guangxi alone, Zheng Yi puts the number of “cannibalized” people at least ten thousand, although even scholars sympathetic to him later regarded the figure as exaggerated. The extraordinary aspect of the events in Guangxi arises from the fact that cannibalism is documented by Zheng not from anti-Communist propaganda, but from investigations and trials promoted in Deng Xiaoping’s time by the Chinese Communist Party itself.
As mentioned earlier, these facts are not to be confused with earlier incidents of cannibalism in the pre-Cultural-Revolution era of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962), which were due to hunger, not ideology, even though hunger had been caused by Mao’s ill-advised reforms. In the Stalin-era Russian incidents described in “L’île aux cannibales” by French historian Nicolas Werth (Paris: Perrin, 2006), guards ate inmates, but it is not as if they had much else to eat. On the contrary, in the China of the Cultural Revolution no one was starving as it happened during the Great Leap Forward. The “human flesh banquets” were not aimed at appeasing hunger, but were, Zheng concluded, “exemplary elimination demonstrations,” the purpose of which was to terrorize every potential dissident and inflict on the “enemy,” that is, anyone who thought differently from Mao, and to the “enemy’s children, a treatment that showed everyone that the CCP did not consider them human beings.
The idea of “enemy” was very broad. Not only dissidents or descendants of landowners were “cannibalized.” The Red Guards themselves had split into a “big faction” and a “small faction” (also called “4.22” or “rebel” faction) and Mao himself played on the clash to better control the movement. When Mao sided decisively with the “big faction,” hundreds of “small faction” Red Guards members were themselves “cannibalized.” Zheng Yi regards as the most disturbing aspect of his investigation not the fact that children (whose flesh was considered more tender and tastier) were eaten in front of their parents, and women horrendously tortured before ending up on the table of the “banquets,” nor that the hearts and livers of the victims were preserved for years in salt to be consumed later as delicacies endowed with alleged healing powers. What upset Zheng the most was that, when it came to the Red Guards of the “small faction,” they had their flesh slaughtered or shredded while still alive shouting “Long live the Party” or “Long live Chairman Mao.” They died convinced that the Great Helmsman ignored or disapproved of the atrocities. They were wrong, Zheng claimed: Mao not only knew but organized terror to its most extreme limits, as part of a complex maneuver to preserve his absolute power.
The question is, of course, whether we can believe Zheng and his team. CCP critics have called “Hongse jinianbei” a work of fiction, and it admittedly novelizes certain incidents. A criticism shared by Western scholars who are not favorable to the CCP is that Zheng’s figures are exaggerated (some believe the cases of cannibalism in Guangxi were around 1,000) and the statement that cannibalism was “probably” also practiced in provinces other than Guangxi is not supported by evidence. On the other hand, most Western and even some Chinese scholars do admit that cannibalism happened in Guangxi during the Cultural Revolution, and that it was a tool of political terror, not a fruit of poverty and desperation. This is confirmed by CCP, not Western, documents, although they were later withdrawn and hidden (see Donald S. Sutton, “Consuming Counterrevolution: The Ritual and Culture of Cannibalism in Wuxuan, Guangxi, China, May to July 1968,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 37, no. 1, January 1995, 136–72).
Hunger was never a justification. Adults, women, old people, and children were eaten not out of food necessity, but to celebrate a political ritual with “religious” overtones. Parenthetically, Zheng was wrong when he argued that this never happened before in the history of modern ideologies. A precedent can be found in the cannibalism against Catholic Vendean insurgents practiced by the most fanatical troops of the French Revolution and documented by French historian Reynald Secher. The ideological hatred against real or imaginary “counter-revolutionary” was not that much different.
