This Week in China's History | The Shadian Massacre

July 29, 1975

Listen to my narration in the embedded audio player above!

The Grand Mosque of Shadian (Yunnan) today

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One of the words most commonly applied to China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is “chaos.” “Ten years of chaos” — 十年动乱 — is one of the semi-official names for the period. The label can encourage laziness: any time events seem to defy easy understanding or confound attempts at analysis, “chaos” is a convenient explanation (without actually explaining anything). And how can we resist the label when confronted with some of the shocking violence that wracked China between 1966 and 1976, several examples of which this column has covered before.

Part of the reason “chaos” is so appealing is that the Cultural Revolution laid its own complex patterns and motivations onto existing ones. Explaining the Cultural Revolution through conventional terms — of class conflict, Mao’s cult of personality, political fractiousness within the Party, and attempts to eradicate tradition (to use just a few examples) — is hard enough. These are all complex dynamics. But the addition of those new forces didn’t erase what had been there before. Often, instead, those new forces made existing challenges even more confused and, often, violent. So it was in July 1975, in Yunnan province, in and around the town of Shadian.

On the night of July 29, 1975, some 10,000 PLA soldiers entered Shadian, south of Kunming and not far from the Vietnamese border. They had been kept at bay for almost a month while local militia resisted their entry, but they were now ordered to end the resistance once and for all. As recorded by historian Wang Xian in her 2023