Struggle session; "jetplaning."
Bian Zhongyun was the respected assistant principal at the most prestigious girls middle school in Beijing. Among its pupils were the daughters of President Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping.
Bian was a wife, mother of four, a good communist, and was well-liked by her students.
Teacher Bian was beaten and tortured for several hours on August 5, 1966 before she collapsed and died. Her tormentors were her female students. Dozens more of Bian's students witnessed her passion and did nothing.
Bian knew that she was going to be murdered at the school by her girls that day, yet she willingly went to work. She had been "struggled" in June of 1966, and again on August 4. That night she washed herself so that her corpse would be clean. When she left her flat the morning of August 5 she and her husband, Wang Jinyao, shook hands in farewell. Wang watched as she walked to the school, turning back only when Bian disappeared around a corner.
The "Beijing, November 2008" articles here examined the individual behavior of the above actors--Bian herself, her husband, the perpetrators, and the student onlookers--in the peculiar context of Beijing that summer.
The present series will focus on just one aspect of that context but consider it in a broader swath of Chinese history and culture.
Bian Zhongyun had been beaten on two occasions prior to August 5, as mentioned above. However Chinese use the word "struggled" instead of beaten and "struggle sessions" were ubiquitous during the Cultural Revolution.
The struggle sessions followed a pattern, it may be no exaggeration to think of them as ritualized. They were public occurrences where the victim was abused before an audience. Struggle sessions were sometimes held in stadia with tens of thousands of onlookers--doing nothing to help, certainly--hurling invective and missiles if anything. The victim often had ink splashed on his or her face, the hair was often cut, signs were hung around the neck. The head was always forced up so that the face was visible. The victim was held by the leaders of the struggle session in a specific manner. The arms were drawn behind the back and painfully upward. A new term, "jetplaning" was created for this action.
One man's struggle session was set for a specific day and time. The man walked up to the entrance to the arena. The audience was already inside. Hot-blooded guards demanded to know what he wanted. The man asked if a struggle session was not about to occur. The guards barked affirmation. And isn't so-and-so being struggled today? YES, what of it? Well, I am Mr. so-and-so, you can't have the struggle session without me, can you?
The man had casually walked to the place of his beating to receive his beating. Bian knowingly walked to her death. Liu Shaoqi walked out of his quarters in Zhongnanhai and into a mob of Red Guards who pelted him to the ground with their Little Red Books. It is not to minimize the suffering of those struggled to, in these circumstances, consider objectively whether the word "victim" is an appropriate term here.
Signs around the neck, heads shorn, ink splashed on faces, jetplaning, mass audiences--no, no, no, there is something more going on here than individual violence and individual culpability.
The Cultural Revolution has been written about from the political perspective, from the historical perspective, the legal, the philosophical, and from the perspective of the arts; it has been written about in first-person memoirs, and in the case-study method, but it is still very early in Cultural Revolution scholarship. I suggest considering the behavior of Chinese during the Cultural Revolution from a consciously anthropological perspective.
