Endless Torture: Cultural Revolution (1966 to 1976): live human’s kidneys removed without anesthesia

Part I

Ant-nest stuffed inside a woman’s vagina, 1966

The event happened in front of the ancestral hall of a wealthy land owner who had previously owned several hundreds acres of land. The land owner and his family had all been executed and only one woman, a young woman who was sold as a bride to the wealthy landowner, had survived and was living in the house by herself. All the land as well all valuables of the house had already been confiscated by the Communists, and she was completely destitute.

But the red guards who had come to “struggle against” her felt she still had many more valuable items hidden somewhere, perhaps in some underground caves.

“To struggle against” during Cultural Revolution meant to use torture, humiliation, and other means to extract forced confessions, and struggle sessions are almost always carried out in front of entire crowds of people.

The young woman was very pretty and recently widowed, with long black hair, large round eyes, and ivory white skin. The red guards themselves were all proletarian peasants born under extreme poverty. They were filled with rage and jealousy, both at her and her deceased husband, and so in order to humiliate her, they stripped all her clothes in front of hundreds of people and tied her legs wide spread with bamboo sticks. They showed her exposed body and shouted for everyone to come to take a look. “Look at the wife of the wealthy land master! She is a shameless whore!”

Her hands were tied behind her back and she could do nothing to resist other than groan, cry, and beg for mercy.

The people gathered around her and they pelted rocks, sticks and clots of dirt on her body all while hurling insults such as “capitalist, right winger, American spy”, etc. The leaders among the red guards used leather belts to whip on her breasts, back, buttocks, and legs. As they did it they demanded that she “tell us where your money is hidden.”

She told them that everything her family owned had been confiscated already and she had nothing. “I’m a poor peasant just like you. I adore and worship Chairman Mao.”

But the red guards refused to believe her and told her that she “must not defile Chairman Mao’s name with your whorish mouth.”

At this point one of the red guards came up with a very “cool trick”. He went to the nearby mountain side and picked up an small mound containing a large colony of black ants. He carried it with his arms and went over to the woman. Crouching between her legs, he stuffed the entire black ant nest into her vagina. Because the mound was too large, he broke the mound up and slowly fed each smaller piece into her vagina. The black ants were crawling all over her body, her thighs, pubic mound, belly, chest, buttocks.

Her hands were tied behind her back, she could only scream and roll on the ground in great pain.

The red guards watched and burst out in laughter. Some ants were caught on the red guard’s arms and hands and they picked those ants up and stuffed them inside her mouth, ears, nostrils.

Later that night, unable to bear the humiliation, she hanged herself to death.

In the ten years from 1966 to 1976, endless events like those happened all across China. The current President of China, Xi Jinping, was one of those red guards during the Cultural Revolution.

Meng Shuang (孟爽)

In 1967, Ms. Meng was 19 yeas old, but she was already a very talented dancer. Her figure was graceful and elegant, and her temperament was soft and pure. She was the pride of her family and many young men wooed her and all the other girls envied her.

September 1966, she returned to her dormitory after a night of public performance. When she opened the door and pulled the light cord, there was a “bang” sound, and the light cord broke. So she had to move to the table in the dark to turn on the light. Unexpectedly, she hit the plaster statue of Chairman Mao on a table which then fell the ground and broke into many pieces.

During the Cultural Revolution, destroying the statue of the Great Leader Chairman Mao was considered a heinous crime, punishable by death.

Ms. Meng was frightened and she knew that if anyone found out, she would be subjected to hellish punishment and so she wrapped the pieces together using a towel, quietly stole under a poplar tree behind the building, dug a hole and buried the pieces with soil. After she buried it, she stomped on the soil. However, just as she was about to leave, a red guard caught her and asked “Hey! What are you doing!”

She said “Nothing! nothing!” but her faced blanched and she was trembling. The red guard pushed her away and dug out the broken statue of Chairman.

The entire art troupe where she worked exploded with anger. A special task force was set up. The small conference room on the first floor became an interrogation room. Interrogations were conducted all night. She was charged with “Having concealed deep class hatred for Chairman Mao,” “Smashing Chairman Mao to pieces,” and “Burying Chairman Mao”. Those were actual crimes.

Inside the interrogation room, three red guards pushed Ms. Meng to the ground and took turns kicking her, causing her to bleed from her nose and mouth. They forced her to admit that this incident was premeditated, but she refused to admit it, so they escalated the torture and started beating her with belts.

After whipping her with belts, they strung her up with ropes and continued to beat her with wooden sticks.

Each of them held a wooden stick in their hands and pointed it at her. She was beaten around her waist, abdomen and thighs. All her clothes were stripped off and one of her interrogator said: “How dare she step on the Great Leader with her feet. We should cripple her feet!”

They took turns stabbing her feet with metal pins. After a while, her feet, which were lily white, turned blood-red and swollen, but her interrogators didn’t think it was enough, so they burned her feet with lit cigarettes. Ms. Meng kept screaming, and in order to drown out her screams, they turned on the gramophone to the max.

The torment continued until 2 or 3 in the morning, and the gramophone was still playing. Realizing that everyone else had gone back to the dormitory, the three men started taking turns raping her. After raping her, they also went back to sleep and left her hanging.

This continued non stop for seven days and seven nights. Ms. Meng still refused to confess her crimes. Because she knew if she admitted that it was intentional, she would be given the death sentence.

For 7 days and 7 nights, they tried every means imaginable to pry open her mouth. They made her run around the table holding a chair without stopping until she was so tired that she passed out. One of them grabbed her head and the other grabbed her feet and twisted her like a washed sheet, causing Meng to faint from the pain several times.

They also used the “starvation attack method”, which was to let her drink only a small bowl of porridge a day. She was so hungry that she took out the straw from the straw mat, stuffed it in her mouth, chewed it, and swallowed it hard.

In addition to the three interrogators, more red guards, all male, started to come in to take turns “interrogating” her, by taking turns having sexual intercourse with her. Meng was a very pretty woman and over the course of several weeks, no less than a few hundred men had taken their turns interrogating her inside the interrogation room.

A few weeks later, Meng was tortured so much that she had completely lost her human form—she looked like a ghost, her eye sockets sunk in like guttered candles, her cheeks sallow and caved inward like she was puckering, the bones under her skin protruded in every part of her body like a skeleton, her hair looked like dry grass, and her entire body was covered with blue and purple bruises, but even in this condition, she still refused to admit her guilt.

So one day the task force brought a bucket full of feces and urine. Four people came up and pushed her to the ground, each holding a large iron spoon and dipped the spoon into the bucket full of urine and feces and poured into her mouth. Meng desperately tried to keep her mouth closed so the urine and feces flowed down her cheeks and chin instead.

“Pinch her nose,” a guy shouted.

Her nose was pinched, and after a while, Meng, whose face turned purple from holding in, opened her mouth to breathe, but with every breathe, a mouthful of urine and feces was poured inside her.

Twenty minutes later, her stomach was bulging and she fainted.

While shouting obscene words, the guys stepped on her belly with their feet. With a loud “plop” sound, a mouthful of feces and urine spurted out of her mouth and spurted nearly two meters away. The guys all laughed and clapped their hands happily like they were children.

One night after Meng was confined inside the interrogation room for 42 days, while the guards were not paying attention, she committed suicide by smashing her head open with a brick that had been placed at the leg of her bed made out of straw mats.

Li Xiangzhi 李香芝

Born in 1930 in Yangxin, Shandong Province, Li was a beautiful actress from the Jiangsu Provincial Song and Dance Troupe. She wrote an opinion letter to the Central Government leaders not to take the lead in finding actresses to dance with:

“Our Jiangsu Song and Dance Troupe has not been doing its job properly for a long time because most of the time our female comrades have been engaged in ballroom dancing. And for ballroom dancing, we spent 60,000 yuan on clothes and 100,000 yuan on buying Western musical instruments. We also held training classes at Jiangsu Hotel, and everyone had to go through. … I hope our leaders will treat our female comrades as dancers [instead of being treated as concubines].”

She also wrote an open letter to Chairman Mao openly calling for him not to take the lead in taking female comrades for ballroom dancing.

Ballroom dancing existed solely for the purpose for the top cadres within the Chinese Communist Party to select attractive females for sexual intercourse, as documented in the Private Life of Chairman Mao by Li Zhisui.

She was imprisoned for two years and was subject to threats to her families, beatings, starvation, and loud noise torture, and gang rape. She was eventually driven to madness.

On September 2, 1971, she was taken to the provincial Peking Opera Troupe to participate in a public sentencing meeting, and was executed on the same day. Before she was executed, her interrogators had pierced her tongue and lower chin with a bamboo stick to stop her from talking.

Zhong Haiyuan 钟海源

Born in 1946 in Jiangxi province, Zhong worked as an elementary school teacher. In her private letters to a friend, she had expressed sympathy for Lin Biao, Liu Shaoqi, and other political leaders who were purged during the height of Cultural Revolution. The friend to whom she had written reported her to the red guards. After which, she was arrested, imprisoned and executed.

December 14, 1977:

When Zhong Haiyuan was about to be executed, the son of a high-ranking Communist cadre living in the 92 Field Hospital in Nanchang had suffered from renal failure and was in urgent need of a kidney transplant. Mrs. Zhong Haiyuan was determined to be the right donor for this high ranking official’s son, and therefore, before her execution, she was taken to the 92 Filed Hospital for doctors to examine her. Her kidney was then removed inside a prison car, while she was alive, and without anesthesia. Four military doctors pressed her against the wall of the car, strapped her down, and then pulled up her clothes. A sharp scalpel was placed on her right waist. A half-foot-gash was opened, and a bloody kidney was removed from the inside.

The doctors did not bother to suture the opening. Blood was still gushing out of her right waist as she was taken to the execution ground. She was shot in the back of the head as blood continued to ooze out of the half foot gash on her right waist.