Over 40 years after it happened, the Chinese government does not want to mark the occasion officially. One of the most horrific facts of history when in the name of cultural revolution, the Chinese government let loose the Red Guards on the perceived ?counter revolutionaries? killing millions of people in 1966. The purge continued for nearly 10 years. Under Mao Zedong'scircular (read order) teachers, doctors and other professionals were hacked, shot dead and beaten to death. But the entire blame for the killing, officially put at 700,000 (seven lakhs) was put on the Gang of Four, led by Mao'swife Jiang Qing. She was accused of being personally responsible for 35,000 killings. The biographers of Mao Jung Chang and Jon Halliday believe that three million (30 lakh) people were killed. When the trial of the Gang of Four was televised in the late eighties, they pruned whenever Mao'sname was mentioned. His name was unblemished only from the official point of view. The whole world knew. When his wife told the trial that she was ?Mao'sdog? and that she bit only at Mao'sorders they edited it. All the four were convicted and Jiang killed herself in 1991. Even today, anybody who loves life would not publicly link Mao with the massacre. There has been no legal or humanitarian relief to the victims of the cultural revolution. None of the politically sensitive cases in China are ever won against the state. Even a local level communist party worker can tell the judge what to do with the case. According to Zhang Sizhi, who has been a practicing defence lawyer for 50 years, most of the time instructions come on phone or face to face so that no one is accountable. Sizhi has not won a single case in this half a century. But he pursues, hopefully. In a book written by a Chinese woman, Xinran, she recounts as to how as a seven-year-old she came back home from school to find her home furniture in smoke in the street. She saw her doll also burn. She and her brother were taken under the care of the state and they were brought up with the ?teaching? that her father and grandfather were spies and devils. Her father was a multilingual professor and the grandfather worked for the GEC. They were sent to the camp. Her mother was also in the labour camp. The children were forced to visit them in the camp, to educate them on how they were being punished. ?In time I even started to believe that my grandfather used to drink people'sblood as if it were red wine,? she says in one of her books.
