Appendix: Methodological Issues and Statistical Analyses

In this appendix, I provide greater detail regarding the quantitative analyses of collective killings across counties in Guangxi and Guangdong Provinces, as analyzed in Chapter 8. I use two dependent variables: that is, whether the county had collective killings (used in the bivariate analysis in Tables 8.3 and 8.4) and the number of deaths caused by collective killings (used in the Poisson regression models in Table 8.5 and Table A3 herein). The source for the first variable is described in Chapter 2. I read the narratives in the xianzhi (i.e., county gazetteers) and decided whether there were collective-killing events in a county based on the number of deaths (i.e., ten or more in a given event) and the manner of killings. To compute the number of collective-killing deaths, I first obtained the total number of deaths during the entire Cultural Revolution. I then subtracted the deaths caused by the earlier persecutions and those caused by armed battles.