Song Binbin, perhaps the most infamous “Red Guard” of the Cultural Revolution, died at the age of 77 on Monday, September 16. Song, the daughter of one of the Party’s powerful “Eight Immortals,” was the leader of a Red Guard faction at her elite girls’ school in the summer of 1966, the advent of the Cultural Revolution. In early August of that year, a group of students beat the school’s vice-principal, Bian Zhongyun, to death. Less than two weeks later, Song became famous all across China after state media published a photograph of her affixing a Red Guard armband around Mao’s arm during a mass rally held in Tiananmen Square. Mao suggested that Song change her name to “Be Martial,” implicitly offering his endorsement of the violence that became a hallmark of the Cultural Revolution. In the space of two months, during the “Red August” and September of 1966, nearly 2,000 people were killed in Beijing alone.
Song’s later participation in the Cultural Revolution was limited. By 1968, she had been placed under house arrest in Shenyang after her father, Song Renqiong, was purged from the Party. She was later sent down to the countryside. In 1980, Song moved to the United States. She returned to China in 2003, at which point she again became the face of the Red Guards, this time as an avatar for the debate regarding accountability for the Cultural Revolution: were individuals to be held responsible for their actions? Or is there only a collective guilt, borne mostly by the Party that set it in motion? The historian Wang Youqin, a fellow alumna of Song’s elite Beijing school, had at that time begun publishing research into individual victims of the Cultural Revolution—research that tied Song to Bian Zhongyun’s death. In an extraordinary article in the dissident historical journal Remembrance, published in 2012, Song apologized to Bian Zhongyun’s husband and other victims for not doing enough to stop the violence, without admitting participation in the fatal beating. In 2014, Song again made international headlines when she tearfully bowed in front of a bust of Bian situated on her alma mater’s campus and read a statement calling for other perpetrators to do the same: “I hope that all those who did wrong in the Cultural Revolution and hurt teachers and classmates will face up to themselves, reflect on the Cultural Revolution, seek forgiveness, and achieve reconciliation.” The apology earned mixed reviews and was famously lampooned by the cartoonist Badiucao and others as insincere. Afterward, Song receded from public view for a decade.
On Weibo, Song’s recent death has reopened discussion of the Cultural Revolution and responsibility. Below is a translated selection of some recent Weibo comments on the topic:
@大海之旅：So did she murder her or not? Now it’ll be even more impossible to prove either way.
@汉安箫鸣： Rest in peace, Teacher Zhongyun.@秋窗烹雨噏：The kids who personally committed those evil deeds are, of course, responsible for their actions, but the chief culprits are the ones who deceived, incited, and exploited them.
@美格服务：It’s not her fault alone. It’s the fault of those in power at the time. If there hadn’t been a “Be Martial” Song, there would have been a “Be Martial” Li or a “Be Martial” Zhang. And not that many people were actually beaten to death during the Cultural Revolution. If power isn’t kept in its cage, everything becomes a crapshoot.
@东方新无忌：[She] never reflected and never repented.
The conversations on Weibo touch on a recent interview with an accused Tiananmen informer, who allegedly betrayed his best friend to the Chinese authorities back in 1989. (CDT published a full translation of the interview.) Both that betrayal and Song’s involvement in Cultural Revolution-era violence illustrate the prevalence of “public secrecy,” Margaret Hillenbrand’s term for the conspiratorial silence of the past designed to protect perpetrators. As Hillenbrand told CDT in an interview earlier this year, Song’s apology “cracked the ice” of silence around Red Guards, even if it was incomplete:
Hillenbrand: The main thing about Bian Zhongyun’s murder was the status of the school she was at. That’s why the ice begins to form. The school was attended by girls from some of China’s most elite political families. I think it’s Wang Youqin who says that by the mid-1960s, about half the pupils were the offspring of top cadres, including the daughters of Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi. When Bian Zhongyun was murdered on August 5, 1966, from that very instant onwards her murder was veiled in secrecy. The identity of the perpetrators was so incendiary that Bian’s husband was stonewalled at every attempt he made to bring them to justice. The ice seemed completely impermeable, even though he himself had very little doubt that Red Guard leader Song Binbin, daughter of Song Renqiong (one of the eight elders of the Chinese Communist Party), had had a hand in the violence. This state of frozenness went on for years until the early 2000s, when a photographic portrait of Bian Zhongyun appeared in an online memorial of Cultural Revolution victims.
From there, in a process that I’ve already kind of alluded to, that image was remediated again and again and again in a documentary film, cartoons, and a vast photo-realist portrait. Finally—this is where it gets really interesting—it was remediated as a statue, as a bronze bust, which was crowdfunded by [Bian’s] former pupils at the school and then erected in her former place of work. It was at this point that Song Binbin made her extraordinary pilgrimage to the school and made this extraordinary bow. That apology hit global news feeds—it was a big story. But not everyone, of course, was satisfied by it. Wang Jingyao thought it was phony and cynical and self-serving. It’s not hard to understand his misgivings. But I think the apology did do something. I think it cracked the ice, a bit, around the secrecy that surrounds particularly the Red Guard legacy within Cultural Revolution memory, for the simple reason that it was a significant speech-act about an event that’s been confined to really unnatural silence for nearly 50 years. So even though the words struck a jarring note for some people, they still created ripples of sound—or cracks in the ice.
But the thing is, I wrote this chapter in 2017. That was at a time when the echoes of the apology still resonated. It seemed like the cracks might spread at that point. But in the years since, as Xi Jinping has doubled down on so-called historical nihilism and has locked the Cultural Revolution down in an even tighter silence, I’m not sure you can say that anymore. By the time conditions ease again—if they do ease—the people who remember Red August, the month of mayhem in which Bian Zhongyun lost her life, probably won’t be with us anymore. In that sense, the ice will have frozen over again. [Source]
