How many were executed?
One telegram from Mao set the kill ratio at one per thousand. Even the Party's own count recorded 712,000 executions.
One campaign. A fiftyfold gap.
Each row is one historian’s figure for deaths in suppressing counter-revolutionaries. 4 give a number. A bar is a range, a tick is a floor, a square is a single figure.
Every name opens the source: who they are, what the figure rests on, their affiliations and the published criticism of their work. Judge them yourself.
Here the gap is narrow because the state kept a ledger.
Unlike land reform, the campaign to suppress counter-revolutionaries was run by operational telegrams and population percentages. In February 1951 Mao set the baseline at one execution per thousand citizens, and provincial bureaus competed to exceed it.
In January 1954 the Ministry of Public Security reported 712,000 executions to Mao. Independent historians working from provincial reports find the true toll reached 753,275 or higher, because local cadres concealed above-quota killings behind labels of suicide and prison death.
Sources 来源
Every row is in the database. A link is the proof.- 1Xu Zirong and Luo RuiqingInternal report, January 1954, and campaign reports 1951712,000 executed (the Party's own count)No public copy
- 2Zhou Xun 周逊Violence in Revolutionary China: 1949-1963, in The Cambridge World History of Violence, vol. 4 (2020)712,000 executedOpen ↗
- 3Yang Kuisong 杨奎松Reconsidering the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, The China Quarterly 193, 2008higher than 712,000Open ↗
- 4Yinghong ChengQuota, Class, and Political Violence in Mao's China, Journal of Chinese History, Cambridge University Press753,275 by end 1953Open ↗