On Jan. 12, Song Binbin, the daughter of a former prominent member of the Communist Party, created a stir on China’s blogosphere when she joined some fellow former Red Guards at a Beijing high school and offered a public apology for her part in one of the most notorious killings of the Cultural Revolution. In August 1966, the school’s vice principal, Bian Zhongyun, was tormented, beaten and left to die by students at the school. Ms. Song said she had tried to stop them but did not try hard enough. She said she did not participate in the beating.
The Cultural Revolution wreaked devastation on the lives of millions of Chinese people. Mao, who unleashed the movement by urging young people to rise up against their parents and teachers, was attempting to regain prominence after years of failed policies by purging the Communist Party of “capitalists.” For 10 years, the nation was reduced to a state of barbarism.
Because Mao has continued to be revered by China’s leaders since his death in 1976, genuine public reflection on the lessons of this disastrous time has been impossible. Attempts by intellectuals to publicly address the Cultural Revolution have been suppressed; only a smattering of research by state-funded scholars has seen the light of day. The result has been a gradual receding of memory. The economic surge of the past 30 years has even led some deluded souls to look back on the period with nostalgia. But given the authoritarian nature of today’s leadership, many people fear the prospect of a return of the terror that marked the Cultural Revolution.
Still, a sort of “apology compulsion” appears to have taken hold among people like Song Binbin who were lured into villainy during that tumultuous period. Wang Jiyu, haunted by a fatal beating he carried out in 1967 when he was 16 years old, published an article in a pro-reform journal, Yanhuang Chunqiu, in 2010, reflecting on his transgressions.
Wang Keming, who admitted to badly beating an older man during the Cultural Revolution, compiled a book of articles by people willing to tell their stories. He finished the book in 2013, but he could not find a publishing house willing to take on the project.
Perhaps the most prominent example is Chen Xiaolu, the son of a former foreign minister, Chen Yi, who created a storm late last year when he apologized for ordering teachers to line up in their school auditorium and wear dunce caps.
Among those who have apologized, Song Binbin and Chen Xiaolu do not appear to have committed very serious crimes. It is those who committed the greatest atrocities, such as the cannibals of the Guangxi region, or the people who actually killed Vice Principal Bian Zhongyun, who remain silent.
Yet the public reaction suggests that many Chinese people — especially the younger generation that is active online — consider Song Binbin’s apology insincere. Many netizens accuse her of grandstanding; some argue that her apology is meaningless if she does not say who killed the vice principal. Many doubt she was telling the whole truth. “Now she apologizes for her crime. Which of her words are true?” asked one anonymous commentator. Another wrote, “The apology didn’t have much meaning.”
The truth is that we should not limit public reflection to the Cultural Revolution alone. China’s history has been marked by an endless series of massacres and government-led persecutions — from the Great Famine right through to the more recent “hard-strike” anti-crime campaigns, the Tiananmen Square massacre and the persecution of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, to name just a few.
But a public accounting of our tragedies will not come anytime soon. It is only because of the massive involvement of ordinary people in the Cultural Revolution that official suppression has failed to prevent some participants from spontaneously offering apologies.
Can China continue the momentum and create a framework for wider public acknowledgement? Are the Chinese people ready for such a mass reckoning?
Justice requires the application of legal principles, and a basic consideration for human feelings. In the case of the Cultural Revolution, an apology is the most important thing, more important than any punishment. More apologies should be encouraged — and accepted — even if they come 40 years late.
The concern is that those who might be willing to step forward will be discouraged from doing so for fear of facing excessive criticism, like Song Binbin. If those who publicly apologize are continually put through an online gauntlet, and are eventually subjected to absolute justice, the more reluctant perpetrators will certainly stay in the shadows.
We Chinese need to build an appropriate environment for the wrongdoers to come forward. First and foremost, this requires that people who were fortunate enough not to experience the Cultural Revolution put themselves in the place of the perpetrators. While they have a right to criticize perpetrators of past crimes, they should repress the impulse to harshly condemn those who come forward. We should not be making excessive demands on this process. Chinese people should try to consider what they themselves might have done under similar circumstances.
But as the vitriolic reaction to Song Binbin’s apology shows, Chinese society is not ready for a public reckoning. There is simply not enough good will to accept the apologies of the Cultural Revolution’s criminals.
The question remains whether society can come around before all of the victims have died, and the Cultural Revolution becomes yet another tragedy in our history that never receives the public airing it deserves.
Xiao Han is an associate professor at China University of Political Science and Law. This article was translated by Stacy Mosher from the Chinese.