Daoxian massacre

[5][8][9][10] Several leaders of the massacre were either expelled from the CCP or received various terms of imprisonment; in Dao County itself, only 11 people were prosecuted, and were sentenced to 3–10 years in prison, respectively.

[5][10] The mild punishments for the perpetrators sparked public outrage in the 1980s, with many local residents visiting Beijing in person, petitioning for justice.

Local Red Guards attacked anyone who they believed lacked revolutionary credentials, and then eventually turned on those who simply failed to wholeheartedly support their efforts and intentions.

[13] Despite official directives and encouragement from the Party leadership, local forces were left to act according to their own definitions of the Revolution's goals, and many of them ended up inflicting violence upon their communities and clashing with each other.

[14] At two countywide meetings on August 5 and August 11, Liu Shibing, the Political Commissar of the county's militia headquarters, spread a conspiracy rumor: Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist troops were going to attack mainland China, and the county's class enemies, particularly the Five Black Categories, planned to rise in rebellion in cooperation with Chiang's war plan.

Liu Shibing, along with Xiong Binen, Deputy-Secretariat of the Dao County CCP Committee, ordered all levels of militia personnel and security officers to start an urgent preemptive attack against the class enemies.

Prior to the executions they would often hold a short "trial" (lasting only a few minutes) in the lawlessly created "Supreme Court of the Poor and Lower-middle Peasants".

[14] Victims were killed in a number of ways, including shooting, beating, drowning, explosion (with dynamites), decapitation, hanging, burning, and so on.

[1][16] The episode of mass violence in Daoxian eventually spread to other counties in Hunan province as other groups wanted to cleanse their own areas of "counter-revolutionaries".

[5] During the "Boluan Fanzheng" period, CCP leaders such as Hu Yaobang and Jiang Hua visited the region from 1980 to 1982, instructing local officials to take this incident seriously and impose harsh punishments on perpetrators.