Guangxi Massacre

Between 1967 and 1968, during the Cultural Revolution launched by Mao Zedong in May 1966, the Chinese province of Guangxi experienced a series of massacres and lynchings now referred to as the Guangxi Massacre. The violence emerged from a factional split between the "United Headquarters," which backed regional CCP leader Wei Guoqing, and the rebel "4.22" faction. Despite receiving endorsement from Premier Zhou Enlai in 1967, the "4.22" faction was suppressed by local military leaders, and in 1968 the Guangzhou Military Region, under Huang Yongsheng, declared it a "reactionary organization" and launched large-scale repression.

According to Yan Lebin, a Ministry of Public Security official who took part in later investigations, the killings unfolded in three stages: rural violence against the "Five Black Categories" and "4.22" supporters in late 1967 and early 1968; organized killings by newly formed revolutionary committees and local militia in spring and summer 1968; and, by July–August 1968, large-scale military and militia attacks on cities such as Nanning and Guilin. Methods of killing documented in official records included beheading, beating, live burial, stoning, drowning, boiling, disembowelment, and other forms of mutilation.

Official investigations launched in the early 1980s, involving senior CCP figures including Hu Yaobang and Xi Zhongxun, produced two major inquiries. The first, in 1981, found a death toll exceeding 100,000, though some officials and civilians privately cited figures as high as 500,000. A second investigation, completed in January 1984, documented 89,810 "abnormal deaths" and estimated that, accounting for nearly 20,000 missing persons, the actual toll exceeded 100,000. In Nanning alone, eight of fourteen counties recorded more than 1,000 deaths each, with Binyang County losing 3,777 people.

The massacre was also marked by extensive human cannibalism, occurring even though no famine existed. Official archives published in 2016 and 2017 documented at least 302 victims eaten, while independent researchers have identified 421 named individuals, with cannibalism reported across roughly two-thirds of Guangxi's counties. Acts included consuming hearts, livers, and flesh, sometimes prepared as meals for local officials. Scholars, including Song Yongyi and Ding Xueliang, have argued the practice was driven by political ideology and class-struggle rhetoric rather than economic necessity, while historian Frank Dikötter has described a documented hierarchy in which local leaders consumed organs and ordinary participants ate other body parts.

In the aftermath, during China's Boluan Fanzheng period, some perpetrators faced legal consequences: in Wuxuan County, fifteen people were prosecuted with sentences of up to 14 years, ninety-one Communist Party members were expelled, and thirty-nine non-party officials were demoted or had pay reduced. Contemporary reporting by international outlets, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, later described the Guangxi cannibalism cases as among the most extensively documented episodes of politically motivated cannibalism reported in the 20th century.