Although a complete and accurate assessment of the death toll from the Cultural Revolution is not possible until the Chinese government opens its archives, available publications and documents indicate unambiguously that there were extensive collective killings. In the years immediately after the Cultural Revolution, during a major political shift, local governments conducted extensive investigations of the atrocities. The reports were quickly locked up and classified due to a yet newer and more restrictive political climate, but not before statistics and event descriptions found their way into various official publications.

The most systematic among these publications are the county gazet-teers (xianzhi) and province gazetteers (shengzhi). These materials tend to be circumspect because they were highly censored. The compilers of these reports were given specific orders to record “sparsely” the “negative side” of past political campaigns, and for the most part they did so. However, the documents are nonetheless extremely valuable. The data, mainly gathered in the mid-1980s, cover almost all of China, and here I use statistics that were derived from these reports as the baseline estimate of the number of collective killings. There are more revealing documents but, unfortunately, they are not readily available to the public or academic institutions. However, some documents occasionally were leaked to researchers.

In this chapter, I establish the case of collective killings through these two types of written materials: local gazetteers and leaked documents.