Scarlet Memorial: Tales Of Cannibalism In Modern China

by Zheng Yi, T. P. Sym (Editor)

This compelling book provides a meticulously documented account of officially sanctioned cannibalism in the southwestern province of Guangxi during the Cultural Revolution. Drawing on his unique access to local archives of the Chinese Communist Party and on extensive interviews with party officials, the victims’ relatives, and the murderers themselves, Zheng Yi paints a disturbing picture of official compliance in the systematic killing and cannibalization of individuals in the name of political revolution and “class struggle.”The treasure-trove of evidence Zheng Yi has unearthed offers unprecedented insights into the way the internecine, factional struggles of the Cultural Revolution reached a horrifying level of insanity and frenzy among the ethnic Zhuang people of Guangxi. Profoundly moving, acutely observed, and unflinchingly graphic, Scarlet Memorial is a shining example of a genre of investigative reporting that courageously and independently records obscure and officially censored historical events, revealing hidden dimensions of modern Chinese history and politics.

Genres: History, China, Nonfiction, Politics

224 pages, Paperback

First published May 23, 1996

Reviews

[Christopher Roth · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a lot of mixed feelings about this book. First of all, I have tremendous admiration for its author. Yi Zheng, an alumnus of the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising now living in exile in the U.S., was investigating and exposing the excesses of the Cultural Revolution in the 1980s, during what seems to have been a brief Prague Spring of glasnost and self-examination (of what in this context are called the Cultural Revolution's "leftover cases"—a rather unfortunate locution given the larger theme of the book), and he did not flinch from going straight into the "heart of darkness" of that terrible era. He pays particular attention to the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region (an area where I have visited and have ties) and chases down lurid reports of cannibalism used as political violence. The book is presented in the form of a narration of his interviewing and his travels and his encounters with red tape and his own soul-searching—perhaps because the material itself is so difficult to organize. In particular, it is difficult to arrange the data, such as they are, on a spectrum from more to less reliable, and that makes an objective (or objective-style) historiographic narrative structure hard to achieve. In fact, it is harder even than he thinks it is, and this is the main problem with the book. Yi Zheng is quite prepared to believe the worst about the Cultural Revolution. Yes, yes, I realize: this seems an odd way for me to talk about what is possibly the most horrific paroxysm of brutal violence in the history of the world—certainly in the history of Asia. Yi Zheng has in one sense a right to take that approach, but he seems not to grasp that even, or especially, in the midst of such horrors there are also going to be wild tales spun which exaggerate even the horrors that there were, and he seems a little too close to his material to tell the two apart, even though that is his goal. To be more specific: the book does recognize, though not as clearly or as often as he might, that traditionally the Zhuang (a.k.a. Northern Tai, China's largest minority, which shares culture and language with tribal peoples in northern Vietnam and Laos) practiced ritual cannibalism; so many of the most verifiable and reliably reported cases in the book describe political "enemies" being killed and then their livers being removed and then taken away to be eaten ritually. But the more a report of cannibalism veers from this template, the less reliable—the more removed from a first-hand account—it tends to be. I speak here of cases where a group of villagers falls upon a recently or still-only-half killed person and start devouring every part of him—chewing off his still-quivering feet etc. etc. Or the alleged or apocryphal old woman who was known throughout the area for her insatiable appetite for severed human penises. The fact that the more lurid and, frankly, folkloristic-sounding accounts are the least well sourced or verified is something that Yi Zheng does not seem to notice as much as his readers mostly surely do. A problem here is that there is almost no ethnographic literature on ritual Zhuang cannibalism, except probably condescending, ideologically correct crap from the Maoist era, which is almost worse than no ethnographic literature at all. If Zhuang believe human livers have medicinal properties, then it makes sense perhaps in that culture never to waste one, especially if someone dies healthy (i.e. being killed). This in itself would not be unusual but not incomprehensible given what we know about the variety of human cultures. Perhaps there was more to it than that. Perhaps not. Perhaps there was also a Zhuang practice analogous to the prehistoric Southwestern U.S. practice of cannibalizing suspected witches, or of the Melanesian practice of ritual consumption of a killed enemy, or the West African practice of devouring the brains of a chief to acquire his essence and power. If so—or rather if we had answers to those questions at all—then it would be easier to make sense of what happened during the Cultural Revolution in Guangxi. Unfortunately, Yi Zheng does not seem to have been even curious enough to go to the library and check out even some rather popularly-written books which relate what anthropologists have found about why cannibalism occurs, which for someone writing a whole book about cannibalism, and taking more than a decade to do it, is a curious omission. Instead, he tells us with a straight face that traditional Zhuang cannibalism is entirely a response to hunger and privation (actually, I take it back; maybe he did go and read the crap by Marvin Harris, which would be unfortunate). The hunger explanation (which Harris is associated with) is no explanation at all, because it doesn't tell us why some societies resort to this in times of famine and others don't, why some people or some organs are eaten and others aren't, why Zhuang were also doing it when they were NOT hungry or deprived, or how Zhuang conceived of all of this. So what Yi Zheng ends up deciding is that the Zhuang used to, or recently did, practice cannibalism out of sheer hunger and that the (mostly Han) evil ideologues of the Cultural Revolution (and they were evil ideologues, don't get me wrong) deftly manipulated this aspect of Zhuang experience into a political weapon. He blames it all on the Party (or on lower Party officials) and none of it on the traditional Zhuang—innocent folk who were, in his view, only hungry—but most of the time only for livers, oddly enough. He sees it as a political phenomenon riffing off of a biological phenomenon, when it seems to me that the whole thing is mainly an interesting *cultural* story. I didn't expect a thoughtful anthropological dissertation on cannibalism, but I expected more than what Yi Zheng offers. A vivid, and very valuable, description near the end of the book of the author's encounter with young Zhuang who practice trance states and shamanic travel to the land of the dead is just a hint of the kind of research that *could* be done to understand better why the Cultural Revolution played out in this culture in the way that it did. And then when he DOES talk about the difference between Zhuang and Han culture, he does so with the terminology of the Maoist view of the stages of economic development, which is really just warmed-over Friedrich Engels. I don't think Yi Zheng realizes, so focused is he on exposing political crimes (which need to be exposed, mind you), that he needs to work harder to think outside those parts of Maoist social theory which are—or have become—a figleaf for Han internal colonialism. Alas, one can't do everything in every book, and I feel bad criticizing someone who risked his life to try to bring justice to one of the worst things that ever happened to innocent people and who has, with great intellectual and moral courage, emerged with astounding intellectual curiosity and integrity from a totalitarian society which attempts to crush people's spirit with mindless doublethink. Let's hope that soon China will become a free society not only where surviving perpetrators of the Cultural Revolution's horrors can be brought to justice and their victims properly memorialized and honored but where, among other things, scholars can work to try to understand the Guangxi cannibalism epidemic, such as it was, which is surely one of the most fascinating instances of this global practice. When that day comes, Yi Zheng's book will be a crucial part of that understanding, but it is only a beginning.

[Stephen Rowland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even words like "brutal" and "harrowing" don't seem strong enough to describe this monumentally unpleasant book. Zheng Yi's investigation into cannibalism during the Cultural Revolution (mostly in Gaungxi) seems to me to be solid and well-documented, even if, as a writer, he tends to shriek loudly and veer off into polemics. The final section of the book is unrelated and unnecessary, which is why I'm not giving it a perfect rating.

[Federico Arcuri · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of tales is as interesting as disturbing, displaying several extremely detailed accounts of cases of cannibalism in modern China. I read half of the tales, but i could not get through all of them. I think that reading a selection of cases from the collection is enough to understand the horrible reality that people in rural China had to endure in every day life in the 1960s. I hope that more and more people, in particular Chinese people, will read this book, so that the victims of the communist dystopia will be remembered.

"If someday a scholar were to compile a complete version of the Chinese Civil Punishment, we would surely discover that China's methods have been the most sophisticated and cruel in the world [...] The Chinese have yet to distinguish the practice of humanism towards criminals... as for the abolition of capital punishment, this is nothing but a farce in China".

Interesting paragraph by the author, who explains his (highly controversial, I'd say) opinion about Communism:
"Equilibrium is the necessary condition for things to exist, humankind must cautiosly maintain the balance of the things they need. .... Humanking has often tried its best to destroy the internal balance and that, in turn, has led to self-destruction. The socialist revolution advocated by Marxism called for the elimination of the bourgeios class, thereby causing a serious imbalance of classes and politics; to eliminate private ownership thereby upsets the balance between the forces and the relations of production; such disorder produces more disorder, which eventually leads to a vicious cycle. This is also revealed by Mao Zedong's pitiful quote 'class struggle must occurr every seven or eight years'. Communism itself is the self-destruction of human society."

[Aidan Wong · Rating 4 out of 5]

Man... I really admire Zheng Yi for delving into such an unfathomably dark subject, and making it back unbroken. But sometimes he undermines his own arguments a bit.

[Andre · Rating 3 out of 5]

No wonder this book pissed off people in China. No one wants to read about cannibalism in one's own country, especially not on such a scale as presented in this book. What the author suggests here is something systemic and not just some freak phenomenon.
And in fact the reports of people eating the livers of others for their alleged tonic properties reminds me of what I read in a book about Shanghai. It talked about the belief among Chinese that catholic nuns were making medicine out of children and the book stated that the chinese practice of using human fluids to make medicine made this belief seem more reasonable. And what if this liver-eating is a logical extension? And there are/have been magical traditions that also used human body parts, so is this here really so far off?
I had also thought that the man in the cover is the author, but its actually Yi Wansheng, one of the murderers/cannibals (he ate pieces of the liver) who was never held responsible for it. And its not just adults who were killed and eaten, or did the killing and eating, we had kids in the same situation. And Wuxuan was the worst by far. And I think it is clear that several of these cannibalism cases do have a cultural component. After all, many have only certain organs stolen from the victims, mostly the liver, so if it is just about destroying the class enemies, why stick with only one part? The almost complete consumption of the victims did exist but it would be there all the time if it were simply about destroying class enemies.
I better not tell you what was all presented. I have no idea what age range my followers are and some of this stuff would fit horror movies of the highest caliber.

After the author is done with covering the cases he tries to explain it. Well, that could have been interesting, but I was wondering what he was doing there. What was the significance of the creation story and certain rites of the Zhuang people? And I can't help but wonder why he makes this journey into witchcraft and creation myth. I can see the relevance in regards to the stories about past cannibalism, but why all of the other things?
And I don't get the significance of showing the torture methods used, like riding the wooden donkey, castration, sudden blow to the stomach so that the womb descends in such a way that her vagina is permanently blocked or inserting boiling hot eggs into the vagina. Just like with all those stories of ridiculous accusations and cruel punishments, I had no ideas why they are here when they had nothing to do with the topic of cannibalism. How crazy and non-effective the CCP punishment was, or how crazy the accusations, was already clear from prior chapters.

So the first half of the book is its strongest part, but the second is rather odd.

[Alicia Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you think that desperate, ignorant, miserable people won't lash out in any way that they can--even in service to their oppressors--this book should change your mind.

Scarlet Memorial broadly covers the injustices of China's Cultural Revolution. Specifically, it focuses on cannibalism in southern China (mostly in Guangxi) during this period.

I give this book four stars instead of three because, well, you try writing a book critical of the Chinese government while living in China, then let me know how it turns out. My low rating is due to the anthropological stuff which seems scattered. I understand Zheng Yi's desire to explain why cannibalism was unleashed in certain areas, but this part is still placed oddly in the text. Then again, since I've encountered "weird" organization in other Chinese books, maybe I'm simply accustomed to a standard Western historical writing format, and reacting against what to me seems weird, but is just the way Chinese writers operate. Whatever.

All the same, this is a good, if terribly depressing, book.

[Maureen Finucane]

Chilling and stomach churning

If anybody has any doubts about the mind numbing depravity of Communism, this book is for you. Unfortunately, it appears we are destined to repeat the same mistakes, as Communism and Marxism is still being touted as the next big thing.

[Lindsey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a grim overview of cannibalism in China during the Cultural Revolution. I wish there was more insight into the government systems and influences of the time, but I understand the constraints the author faced. Overall, a good historical recounting.

[Vandbøfler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Insightful. especially with details from many different sources and individuals along with the viewpoint from the writer giving a seemingly almost outside perspective. I understand how he wrote aspects of this book based on the constraints he had.

[Dahoon · Rating 1 out of 5]

Myth, folklore, lies and facts nixed together. It is also always a bad idea to trust someone writing about a place he fled from. No-one does that and stays unbiased.