Red Guard remorse stirs ex-offical to seek apology from his attackers

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Chinese tourists walk past a rusted 1970's Cultural Revolution era statue showing Red Guards chanting political slogans in Shanghai. Photo: AFP

Published: 1:04pm, 3 Jul 2013Updated: 3:38pm, 14 May 2016

A former education official has demanded an apology from his attackers during the Cultural Revolution after reports of a rare message of contrition from a Red Guard emerged last month.

The 70-something retired official from the Inner Mongolia autonomous region said he was beaten during the tumultuous period from 1966 to 1976. In a letter to the editor in liberal newspaper Southern Weekly, Liu Guoren said one of his attackers had asked him not to seek revenge.

“[During] the 10 years of the Cultural Revolution, I was publicly denounced and humiliated over 100 times, not to mention the countless beatings," Liu wrote. "But I still have yet to receive anyone’s apologies.”

“I have participated in nearly all political movements as early as the 1950s but rarely have I heard of apologies made to victims whose families were broken up from violence,” he said. “After I was vindicated, the person who once treated me the worst only pleaded that I don't seek vengeance. So, it seems to me, the idea of an apology had never occurred to him.”

Liu’s letter came just weeks after a former Red Guard disregarded family pressure to issue a rare public apology for his conduct during the Cultural Revolution. Liu Boqin, a retired official in Jinan, Shandong province, confessed in a liberal monthly magazine to committing violence on teachers and classmates when he was only 14. Red Guards were youths mobilised and sent forth to implement Mao Zedong's ideals.

The apology letter has been widely praised online, with many internet users urging that more former Red Guards step forward and apologise. It also led people to reflect on the social turmoil more than 40 years ago, a sensitive subject in China even though it was officially denounced in 1981 by the Communist Party.