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Rumors about cannibalistic practices began to surface shortly after the atrocities occurred, but they were squelched by the authorities. Zheng heard the first stories in 1968, when he was a Red Guard in Guilin, in northeastern Guangxi. He was skeptical, but 16 years later, established as a novelist, he asked Liu Binyan, a dissident journalist who now lives in the U.S., if the stories might be true. "Liu told me they were," Zheng recalls, "but he had not wanted to write about them because the subject was so nasty."
The exchange spurred Zheng to try to bring the sordid story to light. Visiting the county of Shanglin, north of Nanning, Zheng found that cannibalism was openly discussed years after the fact. An old man named Yi Wansheng told Zheng, "Yes, I confess everything," and proceeded to describe how he had killed one victim, a landlord's son. "I used a knife to cut him. The first knife was dull, so I threw it away. With another knife I was able to open his chest. But when I tried to pull out his heart and liver, the blood was too hot for my hand and I had to bring some water to cool it. When I took the organs out, I cut them to pieces and shared them with the people of the village."
In the two decades since the end of the Cultural Revolution, most of the great upheaval's excesses have been publicized as part of senior leader Deng Xiaoping's campaign to discredit Maoist orthodoxy. Why have the stories of cannibalism remained under wraps? "Many of the people involved are still in power in Guangxi," Zheng suggests. "Some of those people told me to beware or I might get myself killed." Equally important, he feels, any revelation of the atrocities would be profoundly embarrassing to the Beijing government. "Top leadership has known about it all along," Zheng charges, "but it has not wanted anyone else to know."