Zhang Hongbing, Communist China Red Guard Soldier During Cultural Revolution, Denounced His Mother to Military Police. She Was Executed

Here's the classic story of leftist (communist) intolerance of dissent, at the Los Angeles Times, "In China, a son haunted by the Cultural Revolution." Zhang's mother, Fang Zhongmou, broke from the party line after her daughter died of meningitis after traveling to party rallies in Beijing:

Having suffered the loss of her daughter and years of violent criticism sessions, Fang Zhongmou finally snapped one evening in 1970.

"Why is Mao creating a cult of personality?" she asked her husband and son. She threatened to tear down portraits of Mao in their house, and she suggested that China should posthumously rehabilitate Liu Shaoqi, a leading politician whom Mao had imprisoned and who died in custody in 1969.

Zhang was horrified, as was his father.

"If you attack our dearest leader Mao Tse-tung, you'll get your dog's head crushed!" Zhang told his mother, according to testimony he filed to the military court investigating his mother, and retrieved from the Beijing National Library in 2009.

When his mother refused to take back her words, the young Zhang denounced her in a note he placed under the door of an army officer who lived nearby. Zhang's father, meanwhile, fetched the military police unit charged with law enforcement in Guzhen during the Cultural Revolution.

In fury, Fang locked herself in a room and set fire to a portrait of Mao. Her husband ordered her out of the room and instructed his son to beat her. Zhang complied, striking her on the back with his fists.

A soldier brought in by Zhang's father then struck her and took her away.

County records show that Zhang's mother was found guilty of "attacking Chairman Mao Tse-tung" and executed on April 11, 1970. Zhang watched her at a mass tribunal in town that day, but did not follow her to the firing squad two hundred yards away. His father had divorced her days before the execution.

Since then, Zhang says, he has suffered from depression and has been tormented by thoughts that he violated the ancient Chinese code of filial piety.

"I abandoned my family, I stomped on them!" Zhang said. "Killing or abusing a parent in the Tang Dynasty was called 'the heinous crime.' You'd be killed!"

Yet as time went on, the remnants of his mother's family slowly reconciled with Zhang and his father.

How many died during the Cultural Revolution? How many died during the Great Leap Forward before it? Tens of millions. But today's progressives don't care. Indeed, Chairman Mao's one of the greatest icons of popular culture and leftist indoctrination. See: "Department of Education website quotes Mao Zedong."

FLASHBACK: "Mao Tse Dunn: Another Communist at Obama White House."