During the Cultural Revolution’s bloodiest summer, military-led authorities in Guangdong province carried out mass killings and disposed of victims in the rivers feeding the Pearl River Delta. Between June and August 1968, the remains of hundreds of people washed into Hong Kong waters. When word reached Beijing, senior CCP leaders ordered propaganda cover stories and river barriers to prevent further bodies from reaching the sea. No one ordered the killing to stop.
In the summer of 1968, the Cultural Revolution entered its most violent phase in Guangdong province. Huang Yongsheng, a close ally of Lin Biao who chaired the Guangdong Provincial Revolutionary Committee, the military-dominated body governing the province, launched a campaign called “cleansing class ranks.” The name was a euphemism for the organized extermination of people the Party classified as political enemies.
Guangzhou had already descended into anarchy as rival Red Guard factions, the “Red Flag” and the “General” groups, fought open street battles. Across the province, in counties like Yangjiang and Yangchun, the violence escalated from factional brawling into systematic mass killing.
The victims were overwhelmingly drawn from the so-called “Five Black Categories,” a Maoist classification that marked landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, “bad elements,” and rightists for persecution, along with their children. Victims were bound together in groups, weighed down, and thrown into the East River and its tributaries. The methods were designed for speed and efficiency, not for any pretense of legal process.
Yang Jisheng, the dissident journalist and author of “The World Turned Upside Down: A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution” (first published in Hong Kong in 2016), documented the killing timeline in Yangjiang county in granular detail. On Jan. 5, 1968, a local Party branch secretary convened a mass rally, set up a kangaroo court, and sentenced two people to execution. Through the spring, killings spread across communes. On May 11, a regional conference in Haikang county issued orders to “direct the spearhead” at the Five Black Categories in rural areas.
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Commune-level revolutionary committee chairs returned from that conference and immediately convened cadre meetings to identify, classify, and target victims. By June 1, at least 178 people in Yangjiang county had been killed. A county-level conference of 2,800 cadres then escalated the campaign further, calling for “fierce attacks on class enemies.” By July 23, the death toll in Yangjiang alone had reached 573. Nearly half had been summarily executed. Roughly a hundred were driven to suicide.
Yang Jisheng’s research documented a wide range of killing methods, each more brutal than the last. The military command nominally ordered the killings to stop in late July, but in some areas the violence continued until January 1969. Across 13 months, at least 909 people were killed in Yangjiang county alone.
Between June and August 1968, the evidence of mass killing reached Hong Kong
Between June and August 1968, Hong Kong’s waters became the site of a grim discovery that shocked the world. The Hong Kong newspaper Kung Sheung Daily News reported that in just two weeks in late June, police recovered the remains of more than 60 people from Victoria Harbour, Lantau Island, and Deep Bay, the shallow inlet between the New Territories and Shenzhen. The total number of victims whose remains reached Hong Kong and Macau waters was estimated in the hundreds. Many more were lost at sea.
The condition of the recovered remains made clear these were not accidental drownings. There were unmistakable signs of restraint and execution. Among the dead were teenagers, some still in school uniforms.
The killing sites were spread across Guangdong’s East River and West River watersheds, concentrated around Yangjiang, Yangchun, and Guangzhou. Victims disposed of in groups flowed out through the Pearl River estuary. Some separated in the current. Others reached Hong Kong still bound together.
Fishermen near Lau Fau Shan, along the Deep Bay shoreline, were the first to make the discovery. Carried by tidal currents, the evidence of what had happened in Guangdong eventually reached Lantau Island and even Victoria Harbour itself, penetrating the commercial heart of Hong Kong and triggering citywide alarm.
The crisis shattered CCP propaganda in Hong Kong and reshaped the city’s identity
The arrival of the dead demolished the narrative promoted by pro-Beijing media in Hong Kong, which had been portraying conditions on the mainland as excellent. Hong Kong residents could see for themselves what the Communist revolution had produced.
Ming Juzheng, a professor and China affairs specialist, has argued that this event marked a turning point in Hong Kong’s collective psychology: the moment the city’s residents shifted from seeing themselves as temporary sojourners to developing a distinct local identity. Hong Kong people recognized that the China behind them had become a place of extraordinary violence, and that Hong Kong was their only refuge.
Charitable organizations like Tung Wah Group of Hospitals were left to handle the unidentifiable remains, burying them at Sandy Ridge Cemetery near the Lok Ma Chau border crossing. The gravestones carry no names, only numbers and dates etched into small stone markers the size of roof tiles. Sandy Ridge, sometimes called Hong Kong’s “cemetery of the nameless,” became the final resting place for victims the Party refused to acknowledge.
Mao, Zhou Enlai, and Guangdong’s military commander all knew. None tried to stop the killing
For the CCP’s senior leadership, the thousands of dead were political arithmetic. Accounts drawn from Party insiders and unofficial records of closed-door meetings indicate the crisis reached Zhongnanhai, the walled compound in Beijing where China’s top leaders live and work. The response was concealment and narrative control, with no trace of remorse.
According to reported internal Party directives, the Guangdong Provincial Revolutionary Committee issued a “three prohibitions” order: families were forbidden from traveling to border waters to claim remains; no memorial activities could reference “East River” or “floating corpses”; and the dead were not to be acknowledged as Chinese citizens, instead designated officially as “persons of unknown origin.”
Huang Yongsheng reportedly annotated one internal report with this assessment: “Class enemies have exploited natural water currents to send criminals and armed-struggle casualties toward Hong Kong in an attempt to smear the great achievements of the Cultural Revolution.” When subordinates raised concerns that the situation was generating damaging international coverage, Huang reportedly dismissed the dead with open contempt, comparing them to animal waste and declaring that “class enemies” deserved whatever fate they met.
Zhou Enlai, the prime minister, was equally indifferent to the victims, merely more calculating about managing the fallout. When the British government lodged a diplomatic protest, Zhou instructed Guangdong authorities to “pay attention to the impact.” His concern was image management. His solution: install barriers in the rivers to prevent further remains from reaching Hong Kong.
Zhou reportedly contacted the Guangdong military district directly, ordering them to “handle the cleanup work and prevent the international impact from expanding further.” Internal communications indicate he also instructed the propaganda apparatus to unify its messaging, blaming events on “provocations by Kuomintang agents” or “accidental deaths caused by flooding.”
When the Central Cultural Revolution Group, the radical body driving the Cultural Revolution’s most extreme policies, briefed CCP Chairman Mao Zedong on the severity of armed clashes in Guangdong and Guangxi, including the evidence reaching Hong Kong, Mao reportedly responded with indifference. He characterized the violence as inevitable, described Guangdong and Guangxi as “front lines” where fierce struggle would leave “class enemies” with nowhere to hide, and suggested that what reached Hong Kong would show “the capitalists there” the power of the regime.
In July 1968, Mao personally authorized the “July 3 Notice” and the “July 24 Notice,” ostensibly ordering an end to armed clashes. In practice, these directives gave military commanders like Huang Yongsheng official sanction to kill. Given that Guangdong alone produced death tolls of this scale, Mao’s direct awareness and approval is beyond serious dispute.
The witnesses were silenced, and the architect was devoured by the system he served
Some of the personnel involved in disposing of victims were later eliminated during subsequent political campaigns, charged with “leaking secrets” or “dereliction of duty.” The purpose was to destroy direct witnesses to the organized killings.
Huang Yongsheng himself could not escape the CCP’s cycle of self-destruction. His role in Guangdong earned Lin Biao’s favor, and he was promoted to Beijing as Chief of the General Staff, entering the inner circle of power. When Lin Biao died in a plane crash in Mongolia in 1971, after a failed attempt to seize power from Mao, Huang was arrested immediately. As the most senior member of Lin Biao’s so-called “Four Great Generals,” he was convicted by a special tribunal in 1981 and sentenced to 18 years in prison. In 1983, he died of liver cancer in Qingdao, disgraced and abandoned.
The Party held no ceremony for him. The former general became what every CCP official eventually risks becoming: a discarded piece in the Party’s internal power game.
According to published memoirs, Huang’s final words to his family were: “In this life, I fought wars, killed people, rose through the ranks, and sat in prison. I did right by the Party. The Party did not do right by me.” Even at the end, he considered what happened in Guangdong to be his contribution to the cause.