Alongside the sending-down of urban youth, the Cultural Revolution produced several distinct forced movements and killings. In the 'Red August' of 1966, Beijing's authorities and Red Guards expelled 77,000 people of stigmatised class background from the capital and recorded 1,772 deaths in the city that month; similar expulsions took place in other cities. Cadres, academics and technical staff were dispersed to May Seventh Cadre Schools for manual labour. In the provinces, factional conflict and campaigns against alleged class enemies turned into organised killing: official Guangxi investigations after 1980 recorded 84,000-100,000 or more deaths in that province in 1967-68, an official inquiry in Dao County, Hunan, recorded 4,519 dead, and the campaign against the alleged Inner Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party produced official figures of 16,222 deaths and 87,180 people permanently injured, most of them Mongols, with unofficial estimates far higher. Estimates of total Cultural Revolution deaths range from about 750,000 in the rural-focused work of Andrew Walder and Su Yang to figures of several million in other reconstructions; the Sciences Po survey gives an average across six investigators of about 2.95 million. The Chinese Communist Party's 1981 resolution described the decade as a catastrophe caused by Mao's errors, but the underlying archives are largely closed.
Party organisations, Red Guards and local militias in China expelled 'bad class' households from the cities, sent officials to rural labour and carried out mass killings in several provinces
The 1964 census counted 694.6 million; official series put China at roughly 745 million in 1966. Within that, the 'sent-down youth' movement relocated some 16-17 million urban young people to the countryside, cadre schools and rural exile touched millions of officials and their families, and provincial gazetteers compiled in the 1980s record rural massacres in Guangxi, Guangdong, Hunan and elsewhere with death tolls estimated between several hundred thousand and 1.5-2 million nationwide.
The low figure is the estimate by Andrew Walder and Su Yang for rural killings, based on county gazetteers; the high figure is close to the average of six investigators' totals compiled by Sciences Po. Higher figures up to 7.7 million exist in some accounts. All rest on partial official compilations rather than complete records.
Post-1980 official Chinese investigations in Guangxi, Hunan and Inner Mongolia, compiled by researchers and summarised in the Sciences Po chronology, documented the killings, expulsions and forced labour.
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