Red Guards (China)
홍위병
The mass organisations of secondary-school and university students in the first phase of the Cultural Revolution. Begun at the middle school attached to Tsinghua University in May 1966, they spread nationwide after Mao received the Red Guards at Tiananmen in August and urged them to “bombard the headquarters”. In the name of “destroying the Four Olds” they beat teachers, intellectuals and people of “bad class origin” and destroyed cultural relics, then split into factions that fought armed battles. In summer 1968 Mao sent in worker propaganda teams to disband them, and millions were sent to the countryside.
In depth
The first generation were the “old Red Guards”, mostly children of cadres and soldiers, who used the “bloodline theory” to exclude students of bad class origin. The “Red August” of 1966, in which thousands were beaten to death in Beijing alone, belongs to this phase, and Red Guards from across the country travelled free by rail to attend eight receptions at Tiananmen.
From late 1966 “rebel” Red Guards emerged and attacked both the old Red Guards and party organisations; in 1967 every school and city had two or three factions branding each other “conservatives”. Weapons leaked out everywhere and large armed clashes took place in Chongqing, Wuhan and elsewhere, while massacres and even cannibalism were reported in Guangxi.
In July 1968 Mao summoned the faction leaders of Tsinghua and told them “you have let me down”; worker and army propaganda teams took over the schools. The order that “educated youth go to the countryside” then sent some seventeen million down to the villages. The Red Guard generation’s experience later found expression in “scar literature” and the Democracy Wall movement.