“During China’s traditional festival for honoring the dead, Zheng Zhisheng usually visit

“During China’s traditional festival for honoring the dead, Zheng Zhisheng usually visits a vine-draped cemetery where pillars declare the dead’s eternal loyalty to Mao Zedong. He walks among the mass graves, sharing memories, and sometimes tears, with mourners who greet him as their ‘corpse commander.’ They are veterans of the Cultural Revolution and their kin, who at the Qingming festival each year gather at the graves of family and friends killed in the convulsive movement that Mao unleashed upon China. Cities and regions became battle zones between rival Red Guards — militant student groups that attacked intellectuals, officials and others — and up to 1.5 million people died nationwide, according to one recent estimate. Yet this cemetery in Chongqing, an industrial city on the Yangtze River, is the only sizable one left solely for those killed then. Mr. Zheng, 73, is one of the aging custodians of their harrowing stories. He buried many of the 400 to 500 bodies here, on the edge of a park in the Shapingba district.”For more, see Chris Buckley, “Chaos of China’s Cultural Revolution Echoes at a Lonely Cemetery, 50 Years Later,” The New York Times (4 April 2016)Image: Gilles Sabrie / The New York Times -- source link

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