In Communist Massacre, the Elderly and Infants Weren’t Spared

On one night in 1966, gangs of communist Red Guards armed with crude implements beat and strangled to death hundreds villagers just outside of Beijing

A small group of Chinese youths walk past several dazibaos, the revolutionary placards, in February 1967 in downtown Beijing, during the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution." Since the the cultural revolution was launched in May 1966 at Beijing University, Mao's aim was to recapture power after the failure of the "Great Leap Forward". JEAN VINCENT/AFP/Getty Images

In a few months, it will be the 100th anniversary of the communist Bolshevik Revolution in Russia—and it’s worth revisiting one incident that occurred decades later in communist-ruled China during the Cultural Revolution.

On one night in 1966, right after the Cultural Revolution was launched, gangs of communist Red Guards armed with clubs and other crude implements beat and strangled to death hundreds villagers just outside of Beijing. The Cultural Revolution, lasting from 1966 until 1976—when then-leader Mao Zedong died—claimed the lives of millions of people through mass murders and, according to Hu Yaobang, the former general party secretary, “Nearly 100 million people were implicated, which was one tenth of the Chinese population.”