Chapter 5 The Controversy over the Incident

There has been a heated debate over the Bian Zhongyun incident among the Chinese for decades, little of which is known to Western scholars. In this chap- ter, we recount the key elements of this debate in chronological order then conclude by discussing the underlying implications.

5.1 A Chronological Account

The controversy over the Bian Zhongyun beating and subsequent death start- ed with an essay on The Brutality of Women published by in 1988. This marked the first time that Bian’s death 22 years before was publicly men- tioned. The same author published another paper and a book describing the incident in more details (Wang Youqin, 1995, 2004). Based on the description by Wang Youqin, Binbin and two other stu- dents had posted a big-character poster criticizing the leaders of the school, including Bian Zhongyun, as early as June 2, 1966. In late June of the same year, Bian was denounced by the Work Group sent by and . Bian was beaten to death by the students of the school on August 5, 1966. Only thirteen days after Bian’s death, , the leader of the of the school, went up to the Tiananmen Rostrum and pinned a Red Guard armband around Mao’s arm. Mao told Song to change her name to “Want Arms,” which implied his support of the violence being committed by the Red Guards. On the same day, Song’s father was promoted to the position of alternative member of the Politburo. Wang does not attribute Bian’s death specifically to Song Binbin but the re- lationship might not be too difficult to derive. To some extent, Song Binbin should be responsible for Bian’s death since she was the leader of the Red Guards even if she did not take part in the actual beating. To add confusion to the story, a paper by Fang Yingzhu was published in 1996 about a brutal killing by the Red Guards which was misunderstood as having been committed by Song Binbin. The author had been a serviceman in the People’s Liberation Army and had been transferred to the school to be a teacher. A Red Guard asked the teacher if he had ever killed anybody. He replied: “No. There has been no war after I joined the PLA. This is why I have

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004360471_007 50 Chapter 5 been discharged and have become your teacher.” “Then, you are inferior to me. I killed eight people in the church yesterday,” the Red Guard proudly answered. The Red Guard described these killings to the teacher. They drove away the nuns at the church and used the church as their slaughterhouse. They asked the police for information on local bourgeoisies, i.e., middle class Chinese with what were perceived to be counter-revolutionary attitudes. With the po- lice list in hand, they rounded up the identified bourgeoisies and their fami- lies and took them to the church. As soon as these people entered the church, each was taken by three Red Guards, who then waged a contest to see who could kill a person in the shortest amount of time. It was surprising that the champion was a girl who had previously been a shy, dainty, diligent, top stu- dent. Fang Yingzhu identified her surname as Song but did not reveal her first name in the paper. It was entirely coincidental that this Song and Song Binbin shared their surnames. A few years later, however, the girl student in the Fang paper had her name changed to Song Binbin by an anonymous writer in a paper that was circulated on the web. A late economist mistakenly recorded killings and killers in his book based on the website paper. Therefore, Song Binbin was incorrectly iden- tified as a murderer in the killing of Bian Zhongyun. In 2003, the Asian Studies Newsletter published a letter entitled An Apology to Song Binbin by the contributors and editors of the book entitled Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader (Brownell et al., 2003). The letter “publicly apologize[d] to Song Binbin and her family for including in the first printing of the book statements that presented Ms. Song as responsible for violent acts that occurred near the start of the CR.” With this apology in hand, Song Binbin made an allegation in an interview that Wang Youqin’s original description of the Bian Zhongyun incident was erroneous. Wang Youqin retorted that one of the authors of the apology let- ter (Emily Honig) denied that she had ever made any negative comments on Wang Youqin’s research on the CR. Wang Youqin held that her description of the Bian Zhongyun incident was correct and that it would not be affected by the so-called apology. Wang asserted that what she wrote in her book con- cerning how Bian was tortured, Song Binbin’s role in the school during the CR, Song’s presentation of the Red Guard armband to Mao, Song’s talk with Mao about her name, and her father’s promotion were facts (Wang Youqin, 2014). The film Morning Sun (directed by ) was released in 2003. It was a documentary film about the CR with archival and propaganda footage from the era and interviews with the Red Guards and victims. In the film, the cause of death of Bian Zhongyun was attributed to heart failure instead of bru- tal beatings—ironically, the same cause of that had been announced by the