I understand that during the Cultural Revolution it was common for officials and ordinary people with bad class backgrounds to be beaten or publicly humiliated, and that a great number of people were murdered by the red guards or by their neighbors who took the chance to settle old scores. That being said, the historical record and the popular memory of the Cultural Revolution counts many of the deaths as suicides. Why did so many victims of the Cultural Revolution commit suicide? Do historians think that the suicides were predominantly instances of internalized shame, or a type of political protest from the grave? Or was suicide really the only alternative to being murdered for many of these people?
Testimony from Yu Weichao, an archaeologist who was persecuted by Red Guards during this period, notes that he tried to commit suicide three times in a single day in his book What is Archaeology? (noted in an interview with him published in Archaeology in 2000). Why? From the verbal and physical abuse he suffered. Anne Thurston notes in her work Victims of China's Cultural Revolution: The Invisible Wounds that
everyone I interviewed lost through death a relative or friend-from torture, factional violence, suicide, or the refusal to provide medical care to those labelled "counterrevolutionary." The depth of these personal losses was compounded by the prohibition of traditional rituals of death and dying, and the inability of Chinese who were under attack to mourn their dead. Not only were victims frequently not allowed to be at the bedside of dying relatives, but those who died under a cloud of suspicion were denied the honor of a memorial service and the placement of their ashes in cemeteries. When a person took his own life, as many who were unable to withstand the attacks against them did, the traditional memorial service was sometimes replaced by a ''struggle session," in which the deceased was accused of having betrayed the revolution-and having confirmed his treachery by suicide.
(Emphasis mine.)
Further testimony by a man accused of being "a ringleader of the counterrevolutionaries" and imprisoned in solitary confinement for two months claims that
For about the first month in the cowpen, I think I was able to keep track of the days, of how many days I had been in there, maybe not completely accurately, but nearly so. Then, it became impossible to tell. I began to think I was going crazy, being shut up in that dark room all day, never knowing whether it was night or day. Often, I couldn't tell if I was dreaming or awake, and sometimes I thought that I wasn't even alive, that I had already died. In any case, I wanted to die, and certainly I never thought I would be alive today. I thought often of committing suicide. I wanted to commit suicide. I wanted a knife, but didn't have one, and there was no possibility of finding one. But then I thought about what would happen to my family if I were to commit suicide. Because besides thinking about committing suicide, the other thing I thought about was my family. I thought of myself as a little child, of my father and mother, of how they had raised me, brought me up. And I dreamed about my family and sometimes couldn't distinguish the dreams from what might be real. Sometimes I dreamed that my father had died, that it was because of me that my father had died. I dreamed that they had killed both of my parents, that I was all alone in the world. And when I tried to put the two things together, committing suicide and my family, I knew that it would be terrible trouble for my family if I were to commit suicide. They would be labelled a "counterrevolutionary family," and they-all of them-would suffer.
Many other men, also put into solitary confinement in pig-pens for being "capitalist roaders" (or people attempting to reassert bourgeoisie values and undo the Communist revolution, according to Mao), were also led to contemplate suicide. Many others actually did it, for the isolation was too much. People were socially stigmatized by the Red Guards, which effectively meant that associating with the stigmatized is political death. This further isolated people from social connections, which also led to insanity/suicide.
Clearly, not everyone would commit suicide. Many others would give out false confessions to avoid the stigma of being a counterrevolutionary capitalist roader, and still others would become insane from the pressure and the abuses during this time period. Suicide itself would lead to stigma; many people feared that if they committed suicide, that their families would be negatively affected.
However, it's very much clear that numerous people who would commit suicide did so due to the abuses heaped upon them. For many of these people, it was a way to escape the shame and the isolation imposed upon them by a society obsessed with class struggle.
Sources used (in order of appearance):
"Cultural Revolutionary"
Author(s): Erling Hoh
Source: Archaeology, Vol. 53, No. 5 (September/October 2000), pp. 34-38
http://www.jstor.org/stable/41779341
"Victims of China's Cultural Revolution: The Invisible Wounds: Part I"
Author(s): Anne F. Thurston
Source: Pacific Affairs, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Winter, 1984-1985), pp. 599-620
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2758711