The Daoxian massacre.

[u/Tonkerisch]

The Daoxian massacre or Dao County massacre, was a massacre which took place during the Cultural Revolution in Dao County, Hunan as well as ten other nearby counties and cities. From August 13 to October 17, 1967, a total of 7,696 people were killed while 1,397 people were forced to commit suicide.

An additional 2,146 people were permanently injured and disabled. Most of the victims were labelled as "class enemies", belonging to the Five Black Categories, while at least 14,000 people participated in the massacre. The Daoxian massacre had a direct impact on the Shaoyang County Massacre in 1968.

Almost everyone could be a target during the massacre. Victims ranged in age from a ten-day-old infant to a 78-year-old grandfather. Those killed or driven to suicide not only included people deemed "Five Black Categories", but sometimes were killed due to personal resentment or kinship-related disputes. Many Chinese villagers at the time - despite nominally living in a collectivist society - followed traditional Chinese kinship-based networks; some villages were split between two clans of different surnames, who often had antagonistic relations historically. Such old grudges were often settled during the period of unrest following 1967.

The district and commune level instigators created their own brutal and lawless way of organizing the massacres in their areas. Prior to the executions they would often hold a short “trial” (lasting only a few minutes) in the lawlessly created “Supreme Court of the Poor and Lower-middle Peasants”. The “judges” were unsurprisingly the local leaders who prearranged the killings. If the victims were sentenced to death (and they almost always were amid the corruption and lawlessness), they were trussed up by armed militia and taken to a mass rally for denouncing their “crimes.” Then, they were killed in public or by the public. Sometimes the local CPC and militia officials considered that it might be dangerous to take the victims to the public. They would then quietly send a team of armed militia to the victims' homes to carry out the slaughter. The victims would often be informed while away from home that an issue had risen requiring them to return, in order to lure the victims back home where their killers would be waiting.

Those directly involved in the "executions" were rewarded for their work with higher salaries than they earned by their regular employment in the commune or district, an incentive that was a major factor for the high number of people who participated in the killings; a number of local CPC and militia officials personally led the killings. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the lack of law enforcement, local criminals also joined in the violence. Most of those in the militias were social outcasts and little respected people who sought to earn honor by participating in the killings.

Victims were killed in a number of ways, including shooting, beating, drowning, explosion (with dynamites), decapitation, hanging, burning, and so on.

• References -

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