The Wuxuan cannibalism frenzy, China 1966

In 1968, during the cultural revolution in Wuxuan of Guangxi, a case of widespread cultured cannibalism occurred. This is a quick post compiling the best quotes from Consuming Counterrevolution: The Ritual and Culture of Cannibalism in Wuxuan, Guangxi, China, May to July 1968 (1995). This paper is itself heavily based on the book Scarlet Memorial: Tales of Cannibalism in Modern China (1993).

Wuxuan in 1966 was a fairly remote county reporting a population of 221,786.

From May to July, struggles were held in all or the great majority of the 114 brigades (villages and streets [jie]), and no fewer than 90 had one or more struggle meetings that terminated with on-the-spot execution. Of a total of 524 executed, 64 (later amended to 75 or 76) were eaten throughout the county's municipality and nine communes, according to the official investigation (Zheng 1993:58, 96). 

His second chapter is closely based on the official report of what happened, dated May 1987, and a separate list of 64 victims, dated July 4, 1983. Fifty-six had their heart and liver cut out; 18 were completely consumed (down to the soles of their feet), 13 had their genitals eaten, one was decapitated after being eaten, and 7 were actually cut up while they were still alive (Zheng 1993:96).

Only 15 were punished by jail sentences, for only up to 14 years.

The cannibalism was brief, lasting only 6 weeks, but it was "lawful evil", ritualized, and symbolically meaningful (like the Aztec human sacrifices).

Wuxuan's cannibalism was not an isolated act of spontaneous vengeance but a custom that briefly flourished and had its own political and cultural logic... The forces of law and order, not the revolutionary rebels, were the killers and eaters. Moreover, the forms of cannibalistic consumption varied within a narrow range. People agreed on the best body parts and insisted on them being cooked; and the selection, killing, and consuming of victims were relatively systematized. Cannibalism evidently made sense to and had its own meanings for the participants. It was in fact ritualized. Besides being rich in symbolic meaning, it was carried out by people as a group, demarcated from ordinary life, in a fully predictable sequence of events. The human flesh banquets (人肉宴席), as they were called, were integrated with the ritual of struggle (批斗)...

Many different kinds of joined in:

old women lining up with baskets (Zheng 1993:74), local state functionaries, and even some teachers -- participated in Wuxuan cannibalism...

On [June 18], a geography teacher of the Wuxuan Middle School, Wu Shufang, was beaten and killed after a series of struggle meetings directed at the faculty. Student leaders forced four of the other teachers, identified as a black gang, to carry the body to the river and made one of them cut out the heart and liver and slice off the thigh flesh. The flesh, packed into plastic bags or slung from rifle muzzles, was carried back to the school grounds. A woman from the kitchen staff was roused to open up the main kitchen, and seventy or eighty students partook of the teacher's flesh; other parts were cooked in an earthenware pot in the campus lodging of the vice head of the Revolutionary Committee and eaten by four students in his presence. A third group of students barbecued on a walkway outside classrooms number 31 and 32 (Zheng 1993:69-70).

Castration and eaten alive:

Gan Dazuo, after his struggle session, was castrated and disemboweled alive by other men surnamed Gan, who ignored his cry, "Wait 'til I'm dead, then cut." Gan Ziyang, who had shouted, "The Seven-inch [七寸, meaning penis] is mine, no one else can cut it off!," was the first to move, ignoring Dazuo's terrible screams. Others swarmed up and cut the flesh clean. Gan Ziyang eventually received the light sentence of a seven-year incarceration (Zheng 1993:73).

It seemed that even in death, misogyny rules, because of Chinese belief about the ying and yang. The meat of men is "yang" and thus healthy, while the meat of women is "yin" and thus unhealthy.

When a teacher was discovered to have eaten a "beautiful" girl student for medicinal purposes, he was not copied but stigmatized as deranged (Zheng 1993:44).

And turns out that communism doesn't mean equality, even in cannibalism

In the several examples given, governmental units appropriate the flesh and share it around a table, denying ordinary people; a militiaman takes off with the prized liver and heart; an unnamed youth is left to lift up and shake the intestines, the least desirable portion (Zheng 1993:68-69). This may be an echo of the ritual distribution of pork widely found in South China lineages after the offering at the ancestral grave, when the cooked pigs are divided among the branches according to their status.

The only meat mentioned as being mixed with human flesh is pork (Zheng 1993:61)

Due to cultural reasons, the heart and liver are particularly prized parts.

... the two organs seem to be identified with life itself... Cutting out a powerful enemy's heart may be regarded as the Chinese equivalent of the royal decapitation in Europe, where the king symbolized the head of state. Thus, the political cannibal of folklore and history often ate both the heart and liver, a cultural precedent followed in Wuxuan in 1968. When Wuxuan Middle School colleagues of the geography teacher... were forced to use a knife on him, armed students warned them, "We just want the heart and liver!'" (Zheng 1993:70, cf. 74-75). 

87.5% of the known Wuxuan victims initially had their heart and liver gouged out (Zheng 1993:96).

Interlude: Chinese food culture

European culture, drenched in Christianity, believes that humans are the most superior lifeforms on earth. Thus, one important way Europeans decide what to eat and not to eat is by measuring the distance from humans.

Leach (1964) argued that the Western classification of animal edibility corresponds to distance from human society. We are revolted by the thought of eating dogs, "man's best friend," to whom we give names and give the run of our houses; we find the consumption of horses imaginable because they live further away, yet still distasteful because they work closely with people; we find pork quite acceptable because pigs are only scavengers not partners, and we regard beef as the superior food because cows are the farthest removed of all four animals.

This system powerfully excludes cannibalism.

However, Chinese culture classifies food and medicine mainly as "hot" or "cold", and proper eating requires a balance of hot and cold. Eating too much "hot" food (like chili pepper) or too much "cold" food (like mung beans) would cause corresponding diseases of excess.

This system does not exclude cannibalism at all. The Chinese taboo on cannibalism is, instead, moral. Cannibalism is bad because it is consuming a moral creature. The flip side is, of course, that it's fine to eat a human that is so immoral that it is no better than a beast. Thus the cannibalism of one's mortal enemies and executed criminals is not taboo.

Finally,

The extensive discussion of food taboos by Chia Ming (1368) out- laws almost nothing from the healthy diet. What he warns against is excess in eating and drinking, neglect of the consumer's state of health, the wrong time of the year, the wrong combination of foodstuffs. His advice, then, was conditional and contextu

Here I'd like to insert a personal anecdote. The stereotype that (some) Chinese people has no strict food taboos is accepted inside China, as illustrated by a funny saying,

四条腿的板凳不吃,两条腿的活人不吃,天上飞的飞机不吃,地上跑的火车不吃,水里游的轮船不吃。其它的通吃不误。

Of the four-legged, don't eat the bench, of the two-legged, don't eat humans; of the flying, don't eat planes, of the running, don't eat trains; of the swimming, don't eat boats. Everything else can be eaten.

While this is usually used as a mild slur against some parts of China, the liberal attitude towards food is clear. If some food combination is not taken, it's usually because it "tastes bad", or "unhealthy", or perhaps "acquired by immoral ways (such as killing a person)". As such, one sees how the Chinese attitude on the good food is contextual.

Interlude end

Now we get back to the logic of cannibalism in Wuxuan.

A culture of cannibalism was rooted in Chinese written records and folk ways. Traditional tales, fictional or not, spread the belief that eating people was not just practiced by wild beasts and monsters but was justifiable in the right situation. This is not to say that the leap from cultural familiarity to practice, from imagery and metaphor to reality, was an easy one. There had to be an extraordinary political atmosphere and particular local reasons we shall return to. What occurred in Wuxuan was a sort of carnival...

Murder and cannibalism had their uses. In the Cultural Revolution, the world turned red and black. Those in the red must either convert those in the black or destroy them. In this revolution, brutality against enemies could earn one status and glory.

An unmarried woman only eighteen years old, Wang Wenliu, became famous as a result of her bravado at the conclusions of struggle sessions, for reputedly she had a preference for cutting off male genitalia, which she cooked at home and shared with her sick mother. She won repeated promotions and soon served as deputy head of the Cultural Revolutionary Committee of the entire county (Zheng 1993:52, 74-75).

It was also a way to settle old grudges once and for all. Family feuds could be settled by destroying the enemy family.

At the vegetable market Plumtree Li gave a short speech denouncing their crimes and threw the usual question to the crowd, "Should they die?," with its invariable answer, "该死 [They should die!]." The victims were beaten to death on the spot, their bodies taken to the riverside, abdomens cut open, liver and genitals removed, and the remains cast into the river. Afterwards the party returned to the Peartree Li's house; four of them again gang raped his widow, confiscated and destroyed house and outhouses, stole all the belongings, killed the family pigs, cut down the vegetables, and had a great banquet, celebrating the mighty victory of mass dictatorship. The men had all been killed, and the women had to remarry. Henceforth there was no Peartree Li family in the village (Zheng 1993:72).

The majority are forced to join in the cannibalistic carnival, to prove their revolutionary hearts, and to not become a target. In this way, the cruel minority managed to get the weak majority as their accomplices, who would then be unlikely to denounce the cruel minority.

In the village outside Wuxuan Plumtree Li, the brigade head, had mobilized his entire brigade to struggle the Peartree Li men or face losing a day's work points (Zheng 1993:72). In another unit during a human flesh banquet, two young girls whose political standpoint was suspect were forced to eat the flesh to prove they were on the right side (Zheng 1993:68). Thus, more or less direct pressure could enforce the participation of the reluctant majority.

And the ideological fervor was also real. People genuinely believed that some counterrevolutionaries were so evil that they cannot be reformed, so they had to be killed, and since killing them was not immoral, their meat was fine to eat.

Mengshan, another Guangxi county. A man classified as a landlord was picked out as a target. A sympathetic neighbor returning from a planning meeting knew this but did not dare to tell him directly. As he passed the man working his fields, he called out "Bad weather! Watch out!" The landlord looked up at the sky, taking him literally, demurred, and returned to his hoeing. When the militiamen arrived, one of them was recognized as an acquaintance who used to come and visit. But they killed the man and his sons on the spot, sparing only the wife. One of the two boys cried out as he was picked up, "Uncle Seven, don't hurt me!," thinking he was playing. But the militiaman tied a rope round the boy's neck and hurled him to his death in a drainage ditch. None of the militiamen uttered a word (Zheng 1993:45-47). 

As with similar deeds elsewhere, it was not a question of blindly obeying orders. Such men had internalized the official categories and saw the need to extirpate the evil. The sons had to be killed on the principle of "pulling weeds out by the roots."

Now that we've examined motivations in the Wuxuan cannibalism case, we will examine its ritualistic elements. Here, the paper talks about how these cannibalism rituals were part of a "rite of passage" that starts with a struggle session and ends with digestion. According to Arnold van Gennep, there is a standard model of the rite of passage:

1. Separation. The person is removed from the group.
2. Margin. The person stays on the edge of social categories, not this or that, with an uncertain role. The person eventually transforms from one role to the other, moving across the edges.
3. Aggregation. The person, after finding a new role, rejoins the group.

Now, this model can be applied:

1. Separation. The "bad element" is named and caught.
2. Margin. The person is paraded, put on stage, insulted, struggled against, and killed.
3. Aggregation. The person, after being transformed into a pile of meat, rejoins the group by digestion after a dinner party.

One more possible reason for the cannibalism carnival to happen in Wuxuan is that it's considered a frontier of China, not fully Han Chinese, and

Frontier Han not only applied to other ethnic groups all the stereotypes of barbarians as cannibals and witches, but some also treated them not quite as human beings. The exemplary and unprovoked massacre of minority non-combatants by Han armies was a feature of the 1911 Revolution both in west Hunan and Guizhou (Shen 1981:19-25; Sutton 1980:130-1). The flesh of the aborigines of Taiwan was openly sold in pork baskets in one town during the nineteenth century (Sangren 1987:223), and an American Chinese working in Guangxi in the 1940s told me that it was common knowledge that human brains could be purchased there.

Bonus: a pro tip about how to cut up a human

Zheng notes an arresting scene hinting at specialist local knowledge of cannibalism. In one of the first Wuxuan murders in June 1968, when a man with a knife hesitates before the corpse wondering where to cut, an old man comes forward and explains, "Cut in the shape of 人" (Zheng 1993:68, note). Was this local wisdom acquired at the execution ground.