Official materials such as xianzhi offer little information regarding who committed the collective killings during China's Cultural Revolution; however, there is no similar dearth in the unpublished documents I have obtained. Published reports written by exiled dissidents including Zhang Cheng and Zheng Yi contain vivid accounts of the killings and, in some cases, confessions. In my interviews, I also probed into the question of who was immediately responsible. The survivors, victims' family members, and retired cadres consistently provided the same answer: local cadres and militia members. When the decision to kill and the scope of killings was agreed on, local leaders and militias rounded up members of Four-Type families, with the killings typically following a mass rally attended by the entire village.

I previously recounted an event in Sanjiang Commune, Quanzhou County in Guangxi Province, in which seventy-six Four-Type family members were killed by being pushed off a cliff. Both the xianzhi of the county and a provincial-level document recorded this event, identifying the organizer as Huang Tianhui, the commune's militia commander. Based on a county-level internal document, Zheng Yi detailed how the killings were deliberated and planned and who were involved: