Mao's Cannibal Red Guards

Indian Commies enjoy a clout far disproportionate to their popular acceptance because of their exceptional knack for dissimulation. In the last general elections, the CPI and CPIM together secured a vote share of 4.03% and just 10 seats (5.43%) in the 543-seat Lok Sabha. If despite such poor acceptance, they are able to dominate public discourse in this country, it is due to the left-illiberal milieu they planted, nurtured and cultivated over the decades.

If Indian Commies were able to strut about like intellectual statesmen, it is because much less is known about the nations ruled (‘enslaved’ would perhaps be the right word) by the revolution. Lying with a straight face is not a gift given to many. Our Commie friends perfected the art of concealing inconvenient facts, which amounts to the same thing as lying with a straight face.

Only after the collapse of Communism along with the Soviet empire in 1991, honest attempts have been made to assess the human cost of the Commie revolutions in various countries. The Black Book of Communism  (1991, Oxford University Press) makes startling revelations about the number of people brutally murdered in Commie revolutions to - hold your breath - bring people to power! In the erstwhile USSR, the Bolshevik revolution - from the rise to power of Lenin through the regimes of Stalin and Khrushchev - consumed 20 million (i.e. 2 crore) lives. China had murdered 65 million people (i.e. 6.5 crore people, roughly equivalent to the population of Gujarat) in the name of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. For the Communists human life has no value as they believed in Marx’s famous metaphor, ‘permanent civil war was the violent midwife of history!’

In the 1960s and early 1970s there were sporadic reports in Indian newspapers about macabre tales of the happenings during Mao’s Red Guards Revolution. One such story was about human beings being boiled alive and the decoction obtained being drunk by the revolutionaries. It was said that the decoction obtained from boiling human beings was highly intoxicating.

Zheng Yi, a Chinese journalist, meticulously collected evidence of the macabre cannibal feasts in the remote Wuxuan region of the Guangxi province, risking his own safety and life. He had to smuggle his notes and evidence when he left China after the Tiananmen Square incident in June 1989. His book Red Memorial appeared in print in 1993. Chapter 2 of the book details the flesh banquets of Wuxuan in 1968. (Donald S. Sutton translated the Chinese title of the book, “Hongse ji’ nianbei” (1993, Huashi, Taipei) as Red Memorial. Its English translation published in 1996 is titled Scarlet Memorial.)

The tussle between Wei Guoqing a former Communist military officer and his political rival Wu Chinnan to usurp power in the Guangxi province resulted in the killing of between 90,000 and 300,000 people. It was during the tussle that Wei Guoqing butchered his political opponents labelling them “counter revolutionaries” and “bad elements”. The tussle, the killings and the cannibal feasts continued for six months from May to July 1968. Wei ruled the province with an iron hand from 1954. 

[See Sutton, Donald S. (1995). “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. pp. 136-172]

The New Indian Express (Hyderabad May 12, 2016, p.11) published an account of the cannibalism in Wuxuan. The report notes that the cannibalism was not the result of any famine. The paper cited an official investigation report from the 1980s:

“The cannibalism was not caused by economic reasons, it was caused by political events, political hatred, political ideologies, political rituals. The murders were ghastly.”

It comes as no surprise for those who read Zheng Yi’s book!

The New Indian Express, Hyderabad. May 12 2016. p.11