Cold Open

It’s August 5th, 1966, at Beijing Normal University Girls’ School in Beijing, China.

50-year-old Vice Principal Bian Zhongyun sits trembling behind a locked door as a mob of her own students pounds the walls with sticks and clubs. Just a few months ago, Zhongyun would have disciplined such misbehavior without hesitation. But not anymore—because in Chairman Mao’s China, power no longer resides with the teachers. It belongs to the students. Ever since Mao began what he calls a “Cultural Revolution”, once-respected educators are now seen as enemies of the people—symbols of an old society that must be torn down.

Knowing that the door won’t hold for long, Zhongyun slowly rises, resigned to her fate.

She opens the door, and the polite girls she once taught now seethe with fury. Before Zhongyun can say a word, they pounce.

The girls punch and kick and aim their clubs at Zhongyun’s face.

Zhongyun crumples to the floor. And as she goes down, hands grab her by the hair, and she’s dragged out down the hallway.

 She flails her legs and screams, trying to stop them. But the mob has her. And it won’t let go.

By the time a nearby hospital is alerted to the attack on Bian Zhongyun, it’s too late. Zhongyun will become the first known victim of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution—but far more violence and destruction will follow her death at the hands of her students on August 5th, 1966.

Introduction

From Noiser and Airship, I’m Lindsay Graham, and this is History Daily.

History is made every day. On this podcast—every day—we tell the true stories of the people and events that shaped our world.

Today is August 5th, 1966: The Murder of Vice Principal Bian Zhongyun.

Act One: A New Enemy

It’s June 2nd, 1966, at Beijing Normal University Girls’ School in Beijing, China, two months before Bian Zhongyun is beaten to death by her own students.

19-year-old Song Binbin strides into her chemistry class, a confident swagger in her step. Thanks to her family’s connections to the top of the Chinese Communist Party, Binbin is not just another student—she’s popular and well-respected. And today, she’s ready to become a leader.

In her hands, Binbin carries a large rolled-up piece of paper. She unfurls it at the front of the class to reveal a poster that calls on young loyal Communists to attack their counter-revolutionary teachers. The poster carries a slogan with a stark warning: “Behave! Or We Will Teach You How!” There’s no doubt who this message is aimed at. Beneath the words is a crude hand-drawn caricature of the school’s vice principal, Bian Zhongyun.

With help from two classmates, Binbin sticks the poster to the wall. Then, the girls take their seats and eagerly wait for their chemistry teacher to arrive.

Since Chairman Mao’s Communist Party took control of China in 1949, the country has been ruled as a one-party state. Any hint of rebellion has been met with violent retribution. But Mao’s repressive rule has not been without problems. A speedy push to transform China’s economy through industrialization has failed, and millions of people have died in the devastating famine that followed.

So to secure the loyalty of his unhappy nation, Chairman Mao began a new campaign that he called the Cultural Revolution. In May 1966, he summoned China’s youth to rise up and take violent action against the “Four Olds:” old customs, old thinking, old habits, and old culture. Mao wanted nothing more than the destruction of the former ruling classes and for China’s imperial cultural history to be erased.

For the thousands of young Chinese students who idolize Mao, the Cultural Revolution is the perfect opportunity to show their support. Many have flocked to join the Red Guards, a fanatical youth movement set up to promote Mao’s ideology. And at Beijing Normal University Girls’ School, one of the first students to sign up was Song Binbin. Now, she perches on her seat in her chemistry class and waits to see the result of her first protest.

A few moments later, Binbin’s chemistry teacher walks into the classroom and looks at her students. The atmosphere is electric. At first, the teacher does not notice the poster on the wall behind her. But she can feel the tension in the room—the ripple of mocking laughter and shared smirks. The teacher quickly realizes something is wrong.

It’s only then that she turns and notices the poster. The personal attack on the Vice Principal is inappropriate, so the teacher moves to take poster from the wall. But then, one of the girls in the class begins to hiss. Then another and another. The teacher freezes.

She knows the power the state has, and that they back the Red Guards. Fearing for her safety, the teacher backs away from the poster. Binbin smiles. She’s confident that her actions would make Chairman Mao proud.

But the poster is just the beginning of Binbin's campaign to cleanse the school of anti-revolutionary sentiment.

So within days, the protests escalate. Teachers face abuse in the hallways. The name-calling soon evolves into shoves. And then blows. Teachers who are accused of defying Mao or the Chinese Communist Party are beaten with sticks—and since anyone who tries to quell the disorder becomes a target themselves, the teachers are powerless to stop the violence.

Regular “criticism ceremonies” see humiliated teachers shackled and dragged onto a stage to confess their anti-revolutionary crimes. Abuse becomes a daily part of school life. So many teachers try to put up with the punishments, in hope that the Cultural Revolution will soon pass—or that the students will move on to another target.

Others seek help from outside authorities, but their pleas for help are ignored. The Chinese Communist Party not only supports the Red Guards and the rebellious students, it encourages the violence. So with no one intervening to stop them, the attacks become more and more vicious—and thanks to her position as vice principal, Bian Zhongyun faces more animosity than most. This hatred will make her life a living hell until the day it spills over into an act of irreversible violence.

Act Two: No Escape

It’s the evening of August 4th, 1966, in Beijing, China, two months after a student began an anti-capitalist campaign at a city middle school.

Vice Principal Bian Zhongyun sneaks into her home and rushes up the stairs. She manages to make it into the bathroom without her family seeing.

Turning on the light and looking into the mirror, Zhongyun sees a face she barely recognizes. Her lip is cut. Her eye is black and swollen. Her hair is matted with ink and blood, and large chunks are missing where she was attacked with scissors and pens.

Zhongyun fills the sink with warm water. She does her best to gently wash out the ink and fix her hair. She dabs at her lip, but there is little she can do about the swollen eye.

There’s a soft knock on the bathroom door. And in a sympathetic voice, Zhongyun’s husband tells her that dinner is ready, but to only come when she is ready. Zhongyun croaks out a reply, telling him that she'll be out soon.

Zhongyun once considered herself an ardent supporter of the Chinese Communist Party. She joined the movement in 1941 and celebrated when it seized power eight years later. But Zhongyun’s faith in Chairman Mao and the Communist Party’s vision for the future has faded in recent years. The launch of the Cultural Revolution has only deepened her doubts.

But Zhongyun thought she had kept her growing skepticism hidden. But a slip-up in class gave her away. A student asked whether they should save the school’s portrait of Chairman Mao in the event of a fire. Zhongyun answered that they should simply get out of the building as quickly as possible. The implication, however slight, was that Zhongyun was not a true believer in Chairman Mao.

This was enough for students to label Zhongyun a counter-revolutionary. And almost immediately, they began verbally and then physically abusing her. She has written to local authorities asking for help. But her letters have gone unanswered. Then, earlier today, Zhongyun faced her worst beating yet. And the girls warned her that worse was to come unless she confesses to being a "counter-revolutionary revisionist".

Finally, Zhongyun switches off the bathroom light and goes downstairs to join her husband. A part of her understands that these attacks cannot go on like this forever. It’s like her students are suffering from a collective fever. Eventually, it will break. But she fears that the violence won’t stop before someone takes things too far.

Across the dinner table, Zhongyun’s husband watches her with concern. He offers food and drink and tries to make cheery small talk. But Zhongyun says little in response. When the meal ends, she goes to bed early. The next day, she bids her husband goodbye with an unemotional handshake, racked with worry about the day ahead.

When she arrives at school, it doesn’t take long for a group of students to come for her. They start beating on her office door. At first, Zhongyun ignores them. But her silence is taken as defiance, and that only makes the girls angrier. Knowing that they will break in eventually, Zhongyun decides she must face them and try to defuse the situation. But as soon as she unlocks the door, she is attacked.

Zhongyun is dragged into the playground so the entire school can witness her punishment. She’s told that her crimes mean she has condemned to death and ordered to admit that she is a counter-revolutionary revisionist before her execution.

But Zhongyun won’t give the students the confession they want. Once the girls realize this, their fury reaches a new height. One of them grabs a mop bucket and forces its dirty contents down Zhongyun’s throat. They punch her, and kick her, and beat her with nail-studded clubs. And even when Zhongyun loses consciousness, the blows don’t stop. Eventually, she is left to die in the hot sun.

Zhongyun’s husband will only be notified of his wife’s death hours later. Understanding that he has no way to seek justice, he will instead gather as much evidence as he can and save it for a later date. He will remove the bloody clothes from Zhongyun’s body. And he will take one final family photo with his wife’s corpse positioned in front of their four children. Bian Zhongyun’s husband will hide all this evidence away, waiting for the madness of the Cultural Revolution to pass and the opportunity to finally come when he can show the world what was done to his wife.

Act Three: Delayed Remorse

It’s January 12th, 2014, at Beijing Normal University Girls’ School in Beijing, China, nearly a half-century after Bian Zhongyun was killed by her students.

Now in her mid-60s, Song Binbin is in the hallway where Zhongyun was attacked, standing before a memorial dedicated to the murdered teacher. Alongside four other former students of the school, Binbin bows her head, then, after a moment’s silence, reads from a prepared statement. She labels the Cultural Revolution a “calamity” and expresses remorse for her part in it. Binbin doesn’t go as far to admit she was the one who attacked Zhongyun —but she does apologize for not doing more to protect her teacher.

Bian Zhongyun's murder was not an isolated incident. During the so-called Red August of 1966, hundreds of teachers were killed in similar ways as violence swept through China. Thousands of others took their own lives to avoid the brutal punishments dished out by the Red Guards. But that was still just the beginning of the terror of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Over the next decade, around two million so-called “class enemies” were killed or forced into suicide. The chaos and violence only came to an end after Mao’s death in 1976.

Years later, Song Binbin’s expression of regret makes national headlines in China. But the words mean little to Zhongyun’s 92-year-old widower. He doesn’t just hold the Red Guard students responsible for his wife's murder. Their actions were evil—but they were brainwashed by Mao and the Chinese Communist Party. In his view, until the government officially apologizes, justice will never be served. But although he has shared the evidence he gathered back in 1966, the government has never been willing to look into his wife’s murder too deeply.

It’s part of a wider pattern. Although the ruling party has officially declared that the Cultural Revolution was a “severe setback”, officials have been reluctant to discuss the regime’s historic mistakes, let alone pursue justice for those killed. Even the memorial to Bian Zhongyun is evasive. Although the memorial records her name and the date of her death, there is no mention of the manner in which she died, or that she was the first victim of one of the bloodiest periods in Chinese history, one that began with the whim of a dictator and burst into murderous violence on August 5th, 1966.

Outro

Next on History Daily. August 6th, 1991. A British computer programmer changes the world forever when he uploads the first site to the World Wide Web.

From Noiser and Airship, this is History Daily, hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham.

Audio editing by Muhammad Shahzaib.

Sound design by Mollie Baack.

Supervising Sound Designer Matthew Filler.

Music by Thrumm.

This episode is written and researched by Owen Paul Nicholls.

Edited by Scott Reeves.

Managing producer Emily Burke.

Executive Producers are William Simpson for Airship and Pascal Hughes for Noiser.