{"id":11284,"date":"2024-10-05T17:18:38","date_gmt":"2024-10-05T17:18:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ireneeng.com\/?p=11284"},"modified":"2024-10-05T19:14:13","modified_gmt":"2024-10-05T19:14:13","slug":"song-binbin-chinas-most-famous-red-guard-dies-at-77","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ireneeng.com\/?p=11284","title":{"rendered":"Song Binbin, China\u2019s Most Famous Red Guard, Dies at 77"},"content":{"rendered":"

Song Binbin, China\u2019s Most Famous Red Guard, Dies at 77<\/em>, by Liyan Qi at liyan.qi@wsj.com Sept. 27, 2024<\/a> 12:00 pm ET<\/sup><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/sup>She epitomized the deadly fervor of the Cultural Revolution and later apologized for her actions. In the U.S., she was considered just a scientist.<\/span><\/p>\n

Song Binbin presented Mao Zedong with a red armband in 1966 in a famous photo. APIC\/GETTY IMAGES<\/sup><\/p>\n

A wave of violence
\nApologies from the Red Guard
\n\u2018An open wound\u2019<\/p>\n

In China, Song Binbin was the face of Cultural Revolution turmoil, the Red Guard who helped spark the deadly persecution of teachers and was given a nickname that means \u201cmilitant\u201d by Mao Zedong.<\/p>\n

In the U.S., Song, who died Sept. 16 at age 77, was a scientist who analyzed air quality for the commonwealth of Massachusetts.<\/p>\n

Her classmates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she earned a 1989 doctorate, knew almost nothing of her past in China, including that she was Communist Party royalty, the daughter of a general who was one of the People\u2019s Republic\u2019s founders known as the Eight Immortals.<\/p>\n

They knew even less of the 1966 events that defined her life.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Song was a leader of the Red Guards at her school in Beijing, pictured here in 2010. PHOTO: TOM LASSETER\/TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n

In June that year, Song was a leader of the Red Guards, a student movement fiercely devoted to Mao, at her girls school in Beijing. With two other students, she posted a handwritten denouncement of one of the school\u2019s officials, which set off a summer of riots, with students\u2019 persecuting of teachers and anyone they saw as betraying Mao\u2019s teachings.<\/p>\n

The riots culminated in the torture and fatal mob beating of school official Bian Zhongyun\u2014the woman Song and the other students had denounced. (Decades later, Song apologized for her role in the events but denied being involved in the beating or any violence.)<\/p>\n

Two weeks after the killing in August 1966, crowds gathered in Beijing\u2019s Tiananmen Square, where Mao spoke directly to tens of thousands of Red Guards as loudspeakers played the revolutionary song \u201cThe East Is Red.\u201d Mao saw the deeply loyal students as a weapon in an upheaval that he believed would save China from a rise in capitalist thinking.<\/p>\n

One of the young people invited onto the dais was Song, who pinned an armband on Mao in a moment captured in a well-known photo.<\/p>\n

After asking about her name, Mao suggested she should change her first name from Binbin, which means \u201ccivil,\u201d to Yaowu, which refers to someone who is militant. Song never adopted the moniker, though the People\u2019s Daily newspaper used it as the byline for what it claimed was a first-person essay by a Red Guard. Song denied she wrote it.<\/p>\n

A wave of violence<\/p>\n

Mao\u2019s embrace of the Red Guards in Tiananmen Square unleashed a wave of political violence. In the weeks after Bian\u2019s death, 1,772 people died in Beijing alone, according to the Beijing Daily, an official newspaper.<\/p>\n

The political turmoil consumed China for a decade and has sometimes been likened to a civil war. Political loyalties fluctuated during this time, and Song herself eventually joined the millions sent for rural \u201cre-education,\u201d ending up in Inner Mongolia.<\/p>\n

After the Cultural Revolution ended, Song and her husband joined the first wave of Chinese studying overseas in the 1980s, first earning a master\u2019s degree in geochemistry from Boston College. Her MIT dissertation was about volcanic rocks from the Bohai Basin in northern China.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The opening scene of the Netflix show \u20183 Body Problem\u2019 shows a \u2018struggle session\u2019 against a professor during the Cultural Revolution. Viewers of the show have drawn parallels between the Red Guard leading the session and Song Binbin. PHOTO: ED MILLER\/NETFLIX<\/p>\n

Tanya Furman, a professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania State University who was a graduate student at MIT with Song, described her as a loving, hardworking and private person. She said that even though Song was balancing an intense workload with caring for her son, she would fill in for other students for duties such as monitoring irradiated rock samples late at night.<\/p>\n

Daniel Tormey, another graduate student who worked closely with Song, recalls how the graduation ceremonies to receive their doctorate degrees came just after Beijing\u2019s violent crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a time of uncertainty and worry for the Chinese students at MIT, and I remember her concern both for herself and her family in China,\u201d Tormey said in an email.<\/p>\n

After graduating, Song worked for the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, contributing to reports about air quality as an environmental analysis officer until 2003.<\/p>\n

That year, she moved back to China to care for her aging parents. Song\u2019s father, the general, died in 2005 at the age of 96. Song\u2019s husband died in Beijing in 2011.<\/p>\n

Apologies from the Red Guard<\/p>\n

In the following years, reflections and apologies from former Red Guard members over Cultural Revolution acts became common.<\/p>\n

In 2012, Song wrote an essay in Remembrance, an underground journal for discussion about historical issues that are often suppressed by the Communist Party, such as the Cultural Revolution, saying that the handwritten poster denouncing the official at her school had served as a prelude to the 1966 turmoil. \u201cI participated in writing [it], so I should take responsibility,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n

In 2014, Song joined other former Red Guards in a visit to their former school to express \u201ceternal regret and sorrow\u201d for their actions. A photo in the Beijing News newspaper showed them bowing in front of a bust of Bian.<\/p>\n

Bian, the daughter of a banker, was an easy target for persecution. As the vice principal of the girls school handling discipline, Bian was tough and formidable, Tania Branigan wrote in her 2023 book \u201cRed Memory: The Afterlives of China\u2019s Cultural Revolution.\u201d<\/p>\n

She and others documented how Bian was dragged onto a stage, beaten with nailed sticks, belts with metal buckles and left unconscious.<\/p>\n

Bian\u2019s husband, Wang Jingyao, didn\u2019t accept the former Red Guards\u2019 apology. \u201cThe red armband pinned by Song Binbin\u2026was full of the blood of comrade Bian Zhongyun,\u201d he said in a statement at the time. Wang died in 2021 at the age of 100.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Mao Zedong saw students such as Song as weapons in an upheaval that he believed would save China from a rise in capitalist thinking. PHOTO: GOH CHAI HIN\/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE\/GETTY IMAGES
\n\u2018An open wound\u2019<\/p>\n

The culpability of young people at the time needs to be seen in their political context, said Branigan.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Cultural Revolution wasn\u2019t just about young people doing terrible things, although of course many did. It was about Chairman Mao directing the emotions of the masses, and particularly children and youths, for his own political purposes,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Part of the controversy around Song is due to the lack of open discussions about the Cultural Revolution in China, researchers say. Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, a professor of Chinese studies at the University of Vienna, called it \u201can open wound in people\u2019s heart\u201d that has never been properly addressed.<\/p>\n

On the 120th anniversary of Mao\u2019s birth in 2013, Chinese leader Xi Jinping spoke of Mao\u2019s conflicting legacy. \u201cWe cannot simply credit an individual for success in favorable historical circumstances, and we cannot simply blame an individual for mistakes in adverse circumstances,\u201d Xi said.<\/p>\n

The violent image of the Red Guards endures. Some viewers of the Netflix show \u201c3 Body Problem\u201d have drawn parallels between Song and a Red Guard in the opening scene, in which a professor is beaten to death by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. The historical echo is intentional in the book that inspired the series, the author has said. Netflix had no comment.<\/p>\n

Song herself wrote in her 2012 Remembrance essay that when the Cultural Revolution ended, she was looking ahead. \u201cI will not mention the past or my family background. I just want to stay away from the hustle and bustle, study and work hard,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n

Song is survived by her son.<\/p>\n

Her family, in a statement to The Wall Street Journal, didn\u2019t address her past. \u201cShe dedicated her life to serving as a loving mother, daughter and wife,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Song Binbin, China\u2019s Most Famous Red Guard, Dies at 77, by Liyan Qi at liyan.qi@wsj.com Sept. 27, 2024 12:00 pm ET She epitomized the deadly…<\/p>\n

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