Song Binbin and the Killing That Defined Mao’s Cultural Revolution

On August 5, 1966, Bian Zhongyun, vice-principal of the Girl’s Secondary School affiliated to Beijing Normal University, was beaten to death by students. This was the first murder in Beijing by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. Many more killings would follow during what became known as ‘Red August’, perhaps as many as two thousand in Beijing alone.

Feeling marginalised after the failure of the Great Leap Forward (1958-62) that had led to perhaps as many as 3o million deaths from famine, Mao Zedong considered that the revolution in China was floundering, that the Communist Party of China was shifting rightward, toward economic liberalisation, and that his enemies were too entrenched in the Party bureaucracy. In Mao’s opinion, the revolution had removed the capitalists and landlords from power, but their ideological influence still remained.

Mao set out to destroy the four olds – old customs, culture, habits, and ideas – and, because he had decided that the Party bureaucracy was controlled by his political adversaries, he looked outside of the Party for his ‘revolution within the revolution’, especially to students, stating that ‘education has to be revolutionised, and the phenomenon of the rule of our schools by bourgeois intellectuals must not go on anymore.’ And the students, heavily indoctrinated from birth by Party ideology, were only too happy to oblige, often in the most violent forms possible, calling themselves ‘Red Guards’.

But Bian Zhongyun had been the vice-principal of no ordinary school. The Girl’s Secondary School affiliated to Beijing Normal University was prestigious. Among its students were the daughters of many of the Party’s senior cadre, including: Liu Tingting, daughter of Liu Shaoqi; Deng Rong, daughter of Deng Xiaoping; and Song Binbin, daughter of Song Renqiong. Liu Shaoqi was at the time considered a possible successor to Mao, and Deng Xiaoping and Song Renqiong were two of the ‘Eight Immortals’, founder members of the People’s Republic of China.

Liu Tingting, Deng Rong, and Song Binbin had all become Red Guards at the school, their family connections making them very aware of the political winds of change, more so than the schoolteachers and administrators who were soon to be their victims, their standard attire a military uniform with sleeves and trouser legs rolled up and sporting a red armband. But it was Song Binbin who was soon to emerge into the public eye. She was but 19 at the time.

On August 18th 1966, there was a million-strong rally for the Red Guards held in Tiananmen Square. Mao arrived in military dress unlike many other senior Party figures who had to rush home to change. Song Binbin was invited to tie a red armband around Mao’s arm, the photograph of the event bringing her fame (later infamy), Mao’s acceptance of the armband electrifying the Red Guard movement, spurring it onward. Mao told her she should change her name from Binbin, meaning ‘refined and gentle’, to Yaowu, meaning ‘militant’ – his blessing, perhaps, for the epidemic of violence now spreading across China.

But the Cultural Revolution would not be kind to Song Binbin as with many others of the Party faithful. Her own father, Song Renqiong, would be purged from the Party in 1968, and she and her mother would be placed under house arrest.

Later she would be sent into the countryside. Song Binbin graduated in 1975, earned a doctorate from MIT in 1989, and became a US citizen. She returned to China in 2003 during debates about the Cultural Revolution, becoming the ‘face’ of the Red Guards in the documentary ‘Morning Sun,’ though only her silhouette appeared. She later defended herself, claiming naivety and emphasizing her opposition to violence, asserting her gentle nature true to her name, Binbin.

After the Cultural Revolution, in 1981, despite pleas for justice from her husband, Wang Jingyao, prosecuting authorities declined to investigate the murder of Bian Zhongyun any further – the names of those involved perhaps too sensitive to proceed.

In 2012, Song Binbin made a formal apology to Wang Jingyao, and once more in 2014 when she visited her old school, bowing before the bust of Bian Zhongyun. But she died of cancer at the age of 77 on 16th September of this year without confessing or naming names.

In her remarkable book of remembrance, Victims of the Cultural Revolution, Wang Youqin, offers up a tentative and tantalising explanation for Bian Zhongyun’s being the first murder in Beijing – apart, that is, from Mao’s general and violent invective against educators. Bian Zhongyun was quite the egalitarian, had initially blocked Liu Tingting’s entrance to the school through poor grades, and believed that the daughters of the elite should not monopolise leadership positions in student bodies. Perhaps the Cultural Revolution had given these daughters of the elite the chance to seize the power that they wanted, the excuse they needed to exact their horrific revenge. I think Mao would have been proud.

(The author is a novelist, retired investigator with an abiding passion for Chinese history)