A fugitive Chinese writer has turned up in the United States with documents detailing cases of cannibalism during the political fervor of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.
Zheng Yi, 45, who had been in hiding since China's student-led democracy movement was crushed in June 1989, arrived here Wednesday night from Hong Kong.Zheng smuggled documents out of China that disclose cases of cannibalism in southern Guangxi Province in the late 1960s. "If we didn't come out, people wouldn't believe," he said at a news conference.
Although much has been written about the suffering that millions of Chinese experienced during the Cultural Revolution, the reports of cannibalism are new and full of "sheer horror," said Perry Link, a professor and translator of Chinese literature at Princeton.
Link read some of Zheng's reports in the Hong Kong magazine Kai-fang.
"The cannibalism was not driven by hunger," Link said in an interview. "It wasn't even driven by mental illness. It was this political fervor that was whipped up so strongly that people did it really without examining themselves, or felt obliged to go along."
The documents, prepared by Chinese local government offices in the 1980s, report such cases as students killing principals and eating their bodies to celebrate a triumph over "coun-ter-rev-o-lu-tion-aries," and government-run cafeterias serving human flesh, The New York Times reported Wednesday.
It said the cannibalism took place in remote areas, and there was no evidence anyone in the national Communist Party leadership was aware of it.
Zheng helped organize writers to support the student-led protest in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.