From: underdog@leland.Stanford.EDU (Dwight Joe)
Subject: Chinese-cu Cannabalism (Re: Why are we different?)
Organization: Miners for a Heart of Gold
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 93 01:58:21 GMT

In article <43069@sdcc12.ucsd.edu> ee52fbc@sdcc15.ucsd.edu (Maiko Covington)
writes:
>Maiko does NOT. I fail to see you giving any hard evidence at all
>for your claims.

Well, I will back up 1 claim:  Chinese-cu atrocities have been at least
as heinous and digusting  as Japanese-cu atrocities, but the Chinese-cu
never talk about what Chinese-ge did to scores of people--in Taiwan, China,
etc.  However, Chinese-cu chomp at the bit to demand an apology
(which was already given) from the Japanese-ge for things that certain
other Japanese-ge did.

I post the following without comment (This is 1 of those rare moments
when I break my own rule of not posting references.).  Note that many
Chinese-cu volunteered to participate in cannabalism and were not forced
by their gov't to do so.

Chinese records add cannibalism to 1960s horrors
By Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times

San Jose Mercury News, January 6, 1993, pages 1A and 5A

Beijing--Newly disclosed confidential government documents show that China's
Cultural Revolution plumbed previously unreported depths of savagery.
                                                            ********
     The documents, prepared by local government offices in the 1980's, two
decades after the events they describe, offer a record of how Red Guards and
Communist Party officials in one province not only tortured their victims to
death but also ate their flesh.
     At some high schools, students killed their principals in the school
courtyard and then cooked and ate the bodies to celebrate a triumph over
"counter-revolutionaries," the documents report.  Government-run cafeterias
are said to have displayed bodies dangling on meat hooks and to have served
human flesh to employees.
     "There are many varieties of cannibalism," declares one report, "and
among them are these:  killing someone and making a late dinner of it,
slicing off the meat and having a big party, dividing up the flesh so each
person takes a large chunk huome to boil, roasting the liver and eating
it for its medicinal properties, and so on."
     Copies of the documents have been smuggled out of China by Zheng Yi,
a prominent writer wanted by the Chinese authorities for his work for the
democracy movement at Tiananmen Square in 1989.  After 3.5 years as a
fugitive, Zheng is to arrive in New York today.
     The documents suggest that at least 137 people, and probably hundreds
more, were eaten in Guangxi province in southern China in the late 1960s.
In most cases, many people ate the flesh of one corpse, so the number of
cannibals may have numbered in the thousands.
     The cannibalism was apparently confined to parts of Guangxi province,
a relatively remote area, and was subsequently kept quiet.  There is no
evidence that anyone in the national Communist Party leadership endorsed it
or even knew of it.
     The documents are stamped with official seals, and there is no indication
of any tampering.  A spokesman for the Guangxi Region Foreign Affairs Office
said he could not comment on whether there had been cannabalism and could
not allow a reporter to visit the area and investigate directly.
     The incidents reported from Guangxi were apparently the most extensive
episodes of cannibalism in the world in the past century or more.  They were
also different from any others in that those who took part were not motivated
by hunger or psychopathic illness.

Proving revolutionary ardor
     Instead, the actions appeared to be ideological:  the cannibalism, which
took place in public, was often organized by local Communish Party officials,
and people apparently took part together to prove their revolutionary ardor.
     In an interview after he left China and was waiting for his U.S. visa,
Zheng cited one example from his own research in Guangxi:  The first person
to strip meat from the body of one school principal was the former girlfriend
of the man's son; she wanted to show that she had no sympathy for him and
was just as "red" as anybody else.
     "These are the most gruesome and shocking revelations to date on the
Cultural Revolution," said Robin Munro, an Asia Watch specialist on China
and one of the few people who have examined the documents.  "This evidence
reveals horrors from the Cultural Revolution that rival in character
if not in scope the worst excesses of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia."
     Zheng said he secretly photographed the documents on trips to Guangxi in
1986 and 1988, using a false letter of introduction to win cooperation from
the authorities.
     Even by the standards of the period, the horrors reported from Guangxi
extend into previously unknown territory.  Zheng cites an example from the
documents of a woman who was forced to identify and denounce the mutilated
corpse of her husband, who had been killed, stripped of his flesh and mostly
eaten.  As punishment for having loved a "counterrevolutionary," she was then
forced to sleep with his head beside her.
     Some of those reportedly involved in the cannibalism received minor
punishments when the Cultural Revolution ended after Mao's death in 1976.
     Wuxan County expelled 91 people from the Communist Party for having
eaten human flesh, and it demoted or cut the wages of 39 non-members of the
party, but apparently no one faced criminal prosecution.
     ...

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