<P> Millions of people in China were violently persecuted during the Cultural Revolution . Those identified as spies, "running dogs", "revisionists", or coming from a suspect class (including those related to former landlords or rich peasants) were subject to beating, imprisonment, rape, torture, sustained and systematic harassment and abuse, seizure of property, denial of medical attention, and erasure of social identity . At least hundreds of thousands of people were murdered, starved, or worked to death . Millions more were forcibly displaced . Young people from the cities were forcibly moved to the countryside, where they were forced to abandon all forms of standard education in place of the propaganda teachings of the Communist Party of China . </P> <P> Some people were not able to stand the torture and, losing hope for the future, committed suicide . One of the most famous cases of attempted suicide due to political persecution involved Deng Xiaoping's son, Deng Pufang, who jumped (or was thrown) from a four - story building after being "interrogated" by Red Guards . Instead of dying, he became paraplegic . In the trial of the so - called Gang of Four, a Chinese court stated that 729,511 people had been persecuted, of whom 34,800 were said to have died . </P> <P> According to Mao: The Unknown Story, an estimated 100,000 people died in one of the worst factional struggles in Guangxi in January--April 1968, before Premier Zhou sent the PLA to intervene . Zheng Yi's Scarlet Memorial: Tales of Cannibalism in Modern China alleged "systematic killing and cannibalization of individuals in the name of political revolution and' class struggle"' among the Zhuang people in Wuxuan County, Guangxi, during that period . Zheng was criticized in China for reliance on unpublished interviews and for negative portrayal of a Chinese ethnic minority, although senior party historians corroborated allegations of cannibalism . Sinologist Gang Yue questioned how "systematic" the cannibalism could have been, given the inherent factionalism of the Cultural Revolution . In Mao's Last Revolution (2006), MacFarquhar and Schoenhals also dispute that it was communism that compelled the Zhuang in this area towards cannibalism, noting that similar incidents occurred under pressure from the Kuomintang secret police in the republican period . </P> <P> Estimates of the death toll, including civilians and Red Guards, vary greatly . They range upwards to several millions, but an estimate of around 400,000 deaths is a widely accepted minimum figure, according to Maurice Meisner . MacFarquhar and Schoenhals assert that in rural China alone some 36 million people were persecuted, of whom between 750,000 and 1.5 million were killed, with roughly the same number permanently injured . In Mao: The Unknown Story, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday claim that as many as 3 million people died in the violence of the Cultural Revolution . The Holocaust memorial museum puts the death toll between 5 and 10 million . The true figure of those who were persecuted or died during the Cultural Revolution however may never be known, since many deaths went unreported or were actively covered up by the police or local authorities . The state of Chinese demographics records at the time was also very poor, and the PRC has been hesitant to allow formal research into the period . </P>

What was an important event in the rise of the communist party in china