Wang Jingyao

Wang Jingyao is the husband of Bian Zhongyun – the first educator in Beijing to become a victim of the Cultural Revolution. In 1945, together with Bian, Wang moved to the Liberation Area and joined the Chinese liberation mission led by the Communist Party of China. When Bian died, Wang was working in the Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences, Institute of Modern History at Chinese Academy of Sciences.
On the evening of August 5th, 1966, Wang was called to the Affiliated Girls High School of Beijing Normal University where his wife had worked in. The leader of the Red Guards informed him of his wife’s death. Not knowing these Red Guards, Wang requested them to write down their names. He kept the scrap of paper where 7 names were noted. Among the seven people, six of them were Red Guards students.
Wang had firmly refused an autopsy proposal made by these Red Guards on August 5th. On the second day, Wang bought a camera in Xidan. He recorded the last look of his wife in mortuary. In the black and white photos, blood stains and wounds on Bian’s body was easily visible. He also took photos of the four sorrow children, who surrounded their mother’s body, and photos showing a string of smoke rising from the chimney of the crematorium. He has kept all these photos until today.
Wang not only took photos, he also kept all the things left behind by Bian including a white short-sleeve blood-soaked blouse on which Chinese characters of “crack down” was written in black ink; some wound dressings and handkerchiefs which were used to clean the body; a pair of trousers stained with urine and excrement (Bian had lost bladder and bowel control when she was beaten). Everything he collected was put into plastic bags and kept in a suitcase. In the suitcase, Bian’s watch is well kept. Being seriously beaten, the steel strap of the watch was deformed. The watch stopped forever at 3:40pm, August 5th, 1966.
During the Cultural Revolution, Wang secretly set up a memorial for his wife in a cupboard at home. The doors of the cupboard were always closed. Bian’s photo was taped inside of the cupboard door and a flower was laid in front of the photo.
After the Cultural Revolution, Wang had tried to take Bian’s case to the court. From 1978 to 1989, he took the case from Xicheng District Court in Beijing up to the Supreme Court of China. But no progress has been made.
In 2006, Wang gave interviews with Hu Jie, an independent film producer. Based on the interviews, Hu made a documentary entitled “Though I was Dead”, which carried Wang’s wish to include all the evidence, photos, testimony, his thoughts and reflections over Bian’s death and the sins of the Cultural Revolution. Lin Mang, the person who carried Bian’s body to the hospital after Bian was beaten to death, also provided his testimony in the documentary.
According to Wang’s children, Wang fell into a deep sorrow after their mother’s death. For many nights, he could only hold his weeping and muffle his crying by biting the straw mat. The sorrow has seen a big hole in the mat.
Today, Wang, a 90-year-old man, indicates that making the story public is the only purpose of his life. “For the last forty years, I have been carrying a cross for our country, and I am still carrying it. I have the responsibility of voicing out the occurrence. And I am the only one in the family who can do it right. None of my children share the same feeling and understanding of mine. As I lived through that experience, my life is not worth living if I don’t say anything. This is an inescapable duty of mine”, said Wang.

(the text is an excerpt from Wang Youqin’s “A difficult Complaint”, “Beijing’s First Principal Beaten to Death” etc.)