Another Communist Party princeling apologises for Cultural Revolution atrocities
Following a rare apology issued last year by Chen Xiaolu, the son of one of the Communist Party's founding generals, for his wrongdoings during the Cultural Revolution, the daughter of another Communist Party elder has also stepped up to express remorse for her connection to the death of her middle school principal 48 years ago.
Song’s father, Song Renqiong (1909-2005), was one of the Communist Party’s founding generals and a member of the "Eight Immortals", the most powerful elders in the Party's top echelon in the 1980s and 1990s.
The younger Song, who was studying at a high school attached to Beijing Normal University at the time, became a symbolic figure in the frantic and often violent Red Guard movement after a meeting with Mao Zedong on top of the Tiananmen Rostrum in August 1966, where Mao encouraged Red Guards from around the nation to resort to violence in their "continued revolution".
The inability to protect school leaders is my lifelong regret
A photo published on The Beijing News on Monday shows Song and some of her former fellow classmates bowing in front of a statue of Bian Zhongyun, the party secretary and vice principal of the school at the time who was persecuted and brutally beaten to death by students two weeks before Song's historic meeting with Mao. She was among the first of educators to be killed during the Cultural Revolution.