On a wintry day in February 1952, two victims, their hands tied behind their backs, were marched off to the execution grounds of Baoding, the provincial capital of Hebei, just south of Beijing. They were shot in the heart rather than in the head.
Hundreds of thousands of enemies of the regime had faced the firing squad since the red flag was hoist above Tiananmen Square in October 1949 but this case was different. Both victims were central actors in the local party hierarchy. It was the defining moment of a campaign against corruption Mao Zedong had unleashed against the party itself. There were mere “flies” who needed to be swatted, the chairman explained, and there were “tigers”. Everywhere tiger-hunting teams tried to outdo each other, encouraged from above by Mao.
In the country’s northwest, 340,000 cases of corruption were uncovered, although Xi Zhongxun, the man in charge of the region, said that in reality there could well be three times as many culprits.