On Song Binbin

China's Cultural Revolution, one of the 20th centuries greatest catostrophes, began in the late spring and summer of 1966. When Chairman Mao had the arm band of the Red Guards pinned on his arm at the first Red Guard rally in Tiananmen Square he symbolically conferred his imprimatur to the purges and violence that had just begun and would sweep the country for the next ten years until his death.

The photograph of that moment is the iconic image of the Cultural Revolution. The honor of pinning Mao was bestowed on a fervent Red Guard member, a pretty nineteen year old student and daughter of a prominent Party offical with the beautiful name of Song Binbin. Mao asked the girl the meaning of her name and when told it meant "gentle and polite" the forward-looking Mao suggested that she change it to something "more martial." So the girl did, to Song Yaowu ("want violence"). An idolatrous, impressionable young woman had been made cruelly an unknowing pawn in an enveloping catastrophe.

Or at least that's her story and she's sticking to it. Song has kept an extremely low profile since August 18, 1966. In 2004 an acclaimed documentary on the Cultural Revolution, Morning Sung, was filmed. In a "rare," perhaps unique, brief interview for the film Song emotionally related how she had quickly grown disillusioned with the carnage that she unwittingly had helped unleash and changed her name back to "gentle and polite." Curiously, and irksomely to some since she certainly had nothing to fear from the Chinese authorities at that late date she refused to have her face shown on the film.

Millions of Chinese were destroyed professionally, beaten, killed, or driven to suicide during the Cultural Revolution. Fortunately, Song escaped all of that. Although grown disillusioned she remained in China throughout and beyond the end of the Cultural Revolution. After Mao Zedong's death in 1976, the Cultural Revolution ended. Immediately the Old Guard began consolidating power and isolating those responsible for the catastrophe of the preceeding ten years. The Red Guards were turned on, disbanded purged, and in many cases killed. Luckily, Song, the very symbol of the Cultural Revolution, escaped unscathed. In October 1980 Premier Hua Guofong and other Central Committee members staged a military coup and arrested the "Gang of Four" officials who had been instrumental (with Mao's encouragement) for the start and continuation of the Cultural Revolution.

Continuing her seeming divine fortune Song emigrated to the United States at just this time. Here she made a new, and quite successful, life. She earned a PhD in geology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The last we have been able to trace her she is living in Boston and working as an enviornmental engineer, possibly for the Commonwealth. Such an amazing success story.

It does not take the rabidity of a Kenneth Starr however to look with jaundiced eye on Song's spectacular story.


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