Li Dongde, a school teacher, stands at the execution grounds where his father, Li Jingxi, was shot by militiamen in August 1967. “This is where he was killed and his body lined up with others,” he said quietly before standing for this portrait. “My father’s skull was smashed to a pulp by the fowling gun, and his clothes had been stripped off, leaving him naked except for his underpants. Some of the dead were dumped in the Yongming River because their families didn’t dare collect their bodies. Because of the overflow dams in the river, the bodies couldn’t float away, and they bobbed on the surface of the water like fried crullers, giving off an unbearable stench. Some corpses pushed up onto the dam, and some became caught in the branches of the willow trees along the river, rotting into piles of white bones.” His father had been accused of being a landlord, which in the Mao era was a nearly subhuman category of people who were regularly beaten, attacked, and demonized. Later, Li’s father was cleared of any wrongdoing but he has not received redress from the brutal injustices of the Cultural Revolution.
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Li Dongde, a school teacher, stands at the execution grounds where his father, Li Jingxi, was shot by militiamen in August 1967. “This is where he was killed and his body lined up with others,” he said quietly before standing for this portrait. “My father’s skull was smashed to a pulp by the fowling gun, and his clothes had been stripped off, leaving him naked except for his underpants. Some of the dead were dumped in the Yongming River because their families didn’t dare collect their bodies. Because of the overflow dams in the river, the bodies couldn’t float away, and they bobbed on the surface of the water like fried crullers, giving off an unbearable stench. Some corpses pushed up onto the dam, and some became caught in the branches of the willow trees along the river, rotting into piles of white bones.” His father had been accused of being a landlord, which in the Mao era was a nearly subhuman category of people who were regularly beaten, attacked, and demonized. Later, Li’s father was cleared of any wrongdoing but he has not received redress from the brutal injustices of the Cultural Revolution.