CHINA: A new leadership is taking over in China - many of them graduates of the Red Guards Cultural Revolution. Jasper Becker examines a generation described by one observer as tough, cynical, ruthless and antipathetic to ideology
Look closely around Qinghua University's campus and you can still detect tell-tale traces where Red Guards tried to tunnel their way out of the besieged science faculty during the 100-day war during the Cultural Revolution.
Qinghua University, birthplace of the Red Guards, is where in Beijing's Red August of 1966, middle-school students began beating their teachers in a bloodbath endorsed by Chairman Mao.
Many of those who witnessed or more often participated in those atrocities at Qinghua are stepping into the highest offices of state. Thirty-eight Qinghua alumni are getting top government posts, starting with Hu Jintao, the new Communist Party leader who will become China's president and head of state. Three other Qinghua graduates are in the nine-member politburo standing - Wu Bangguo, Wu Guangzheng and Huang Ju.
Some believe Hu has surrounded himself with a Qinghua gang; friendships and rivalries forged during the Cultural Revolution are key factor in Chinese politics. Among classmates whom Hu Jintao is promoting are Wang Shucheng, the minister of water resources, Zhang Fusen, the justice minister, Xu Rongkai, deputy party secretary of Yunnan province, and Jia Chunwang, minister of public security.
Qinghua represents not just the buried past but continues to play a part in the life of China's "fourth generation" of leaders. Qinghua was where Hu, dubbed China's gray man, chose to host President Bush on a state visit last year.
What Hu and his classmates said or did during the Cultural Revolution has been carefully air-brushed out of their official biographies but is a key to understanding what colours the choices they will make about China's future. "They have a very dark side but also a bright side," says Cultural Revolution historian Song Yongyi.
He believes many, including China's new rulers, emerged from this crucible as tough, cynical, anti-pathetic to any ideology, ruthless - and secretive too.
"The past is all very sensitive. Any real research is discouraged," argues Dr Wang Youqin, now a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago. "We still don't have the whole picture of what happened. The violence during Beijing's Red August has never been completely reported." She has tried to piece together what happened from over 1,000 eyewitness interviews The result is available on a website called memorial and includes the testimony of innocent teachers and professor. The site, which names 700 of the thousands of victims, was blocked in China last year perhaps because it contradicts the official line which the leadership counts among the Cultural Revolution's victims.
Even Western books like China's New Rulers: The Secret Files gloss over Hu's Red Guard past, reporting for instance that in 1968 he responded to Mao's call to "go where the fatherland needs you" and volunteered for service in Gansu province. Instead he was rounded up, imprisoned for several months before being expelled like many other troublemakers sent to the countryside.
Song Yongyi, a contemporary of Hu now at Dickinson College in the US, thinks he participated in the activities of the April 14th faction of the Red Guards at Qinghua. April 14th, named after its founding date, was one of two rival gangs. At first, members of both enthusiastically answered Mao's calls for a violent class struggle but later Qinghua's Red Guards split.
The ultra-leftists of the Jinggangshan Regiment led by chemistry student Kuai Dafu thought all officials must be targeted as "capitalist roaders" while the "moderates" denied they formed a post-1949 privileged class that must be overthrown to pave way for a socialist Utopia. As such, April 14th opposed attacking top officials although it approved of persecuting anyone labelled as "reactionaries".
The split was not just an obscure theological debate. Chairman Mao dangled before them the prospect of wielding real political power when he invited the students to join the governing revolutionary committees set up across the country. So when the Jinggangshan Regiment stormed China's Foreign Ministry, the April 14th faction tried to trump it by sacking the British embassy. A mob of 20,000 students from Qinghua University stormed the embassy in August 1967, setting it on fire and kicking and beating the 18 men and five women inside.
In 1968, militants from both sides known as "iron rods" quickly progressed from wielding spears, knives and revolvers to using rifles, hand grenades and Molotov cocktails, moving on to machine guns, mines and even tanks. Between 1966-1969, 48 people were killed on the Qinghua campus and 30 died with 400 injured in the 100 days war.
No one has dared to reveal exactly what Hu Jintao's role was. Gathering information about that time is still such a dangerous activity that Song Yongyi was arrested in China three years ago when collecting Red Guard publications and only released after an international campaign.
Hu had stayed on in Qinghua after graduating in 1964 to work in the Communist Youth League as an assistant political instructor. He almost certainly participated in the initial Red Guard activity and reportedly put up posters attacking faculty members stigmatised by their class background or "feudal ideas".
Among the targets in his former department of hydro-electric engineering must have been Li Piji, a male professor who jumped off the laboratory roof after months of torture.
How far Hu went is not known and no evidence suggests he was part of the attack on the British embassy; however it is revealing that he has surrounded himself by those who must have been heavily involved.
Justice minister Zhang Fusen, for instance, was the former president of Qinghua student union in 1961, politburo standing committee member Wu Guangzheng is the former deputy party secretary of Qinghua students branch while Xu Rongkai was president of the student union in 1966.
One former April 14th faction leader is Jia Chunwang, the minister of public security who is now being promoted to run China's judiciary as head of the state procuracy.
"Jia was also a member of the cultural revolution preparation committee of Qinghua at the onset of the turmoil. He was also involved in factional fighting. He is proud of the fact that he was captured by the Jinggangshan Regiment and almost beaten to death," Song says.
Another associate from those times is Ren Yansheng, until recently running Beijing University, another hotbed of the Cultural Revolution. "Ren was extremely violent and during the 100-days war at Qinghua, he was one of the leaders in the fighting," Song says. "Every body knows this, it is an open secret."
It is also revealing that only the "moderate" Red Guards are now in power because after 1979, their rivals ended up serving long prison terms. Kuai Dafu was given a 17-year jail sentence as was Nie Yuanze, the firebrand philosophy student from Beijing University.
Many others now being promoted as the rising stars of the "fifth generation" and they were not undergraduates but teenagers during the Cultural Revolution. This only means that they were more violent than their elders.
The first to answer Mao's call, the lao sanjie, the name for the high school classes of 1966, 1967 and 1968, took the lead in wreaking murder and mayhem.
The Red Guards made their appearance in China at the middle school attached to Qinghua. In mid-June 1966, pupils formed a "dog-beating team" which targeted the principal, Wan Bangru, and his vice-principal, Han Jia'ao. On August 1st, 1966, Mao wrote a public letter voicing his "enthusiastic support" for the Red Guards at the middle school as well the Red Flag Fighting Group of Beijing University's middle school.
Throughout Beijing's Red August, pupils repeatedly organised "struggle" or beating sessions. One day the students of Qinghua's eighth grade forced Han Jia'ao to kneel on the floor of their classroom and they took turns beating him, one after another, with a club, whip or leather belt for more than an hour and then burned his hair.
Dr Wang Youqin recalls how many of those most enthusiastic were the children of China's most powerful men and women. She was at Beijing Normal University's Girls School, attended by Liu Tingting, a daughter of Liu Shaoqi, then number two in the party hierarchy, and Deng Rong, the daughter of Deng Xiaoping, when the headmistress, Bian Zhongyun died at hands of her adolescent charges. On August 5th, 1966, a mob wielding bats, bench legs and wide military belts surrounded Bian on the sports field.
"They all acted like crazed animals. The beating lasted at least four hours," Dr Wang says. Bian died at the bottom of a dormitory stairway after one girl hit her with a bench leg.
She says that Liu Tingting, now a successful consultant for multinational investors in China, once boasted she had helped to kill three people at a time when saying such things showed one's revolutionary ardour.
That August, more than 100 teachers died in Xicheng, one of Beijing's districts. At one school in the middle of the capital, the children wrote "Long Live the Red Terror" on a school wall and later repainted it with brushes dipped in the blood of their victims.
On August 19th, the students of Beijing fourth, sixth, and eighth middle schools held a "struggle meeting" inside the Forbidden City at which several dozen teachers were beaten so severely that one witness said they "no longer looked human". On August 24th, the Red Guards from Qinghua University middle school transported truckloads from 12 middle schools in Beijing to Qinghua campus, where they beat up administrators and professors.
The next major outburst of violence took place in 1968 during the "cleansing of the class ranks" campaign. Many teachers were detained on campus for months or years and some were again hauled out and beaten by students. Many committed suicide.
In late 1968, Mao expelled all 12 million urban youths in the three lao sanjie cohorts. Their parents had already disappeared and their children, who had been running wild, would remain in camps until the mid-1970s when Mao's grip in power slackened before his death in 1976.
Many have since made much of the hardships they suffered during the Cultural Revolution and their struggle to get an education. Song Yongyi observes that some who had been very violent during that Red August only escaped retribution through the influence of their parents. These include, he says, the children of Bo Yibo, one of the top power-brokers who backed Deng Xiaoping's reforms after he came to power in 1979. One of them, Bo Xilai, is now the governor of Liaoning province and tipped for still higher posts.
After 1979, the party was flooded with accusatory letters naming those who deserved punishment for their violent acts. "There were double standards. Those with the right family connections could escape," Song says. One of the party's kingmakers, Chen Yun, bluntly declared that the sons and daughters of the leadership had to be protected because they must become "our revolutionary successors".
The party's determination to bury the painful past leaves many as angry as ever. "First they deleted the names of the victims, then they downgraded the crimes so the perpetrators had no need to apologise," says Dr Wang.
Earlier this year, China imprisoned 70-year old Professor Wang Daqi for "inciting the overthrow of state power" for publishing, among other things, an article "On the 35th Anniversary of the Cultural Revolution".
The legacy of the Cultural Revolution is unlikely to haunt the new generation as the Tiananmen bloodshed in 1989 casts a shadow on the generation of leaders now bowing out.