Final Exam Essay

Brookings Institution Press

Chapter Title: The Red Guard Generation: Manipulated Rebellion and Youth Violence

Book Title: Social Ethics in a Changing China Book Subtitle: Moral Decay or Ethical Awakening? Book Author(s): HE HUAIHONG and Cheng Li Published by: Brookings Institution Press. (2015) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7864/j.ctt7zsw42.11

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Everything that exists leaves its mark; the only question is what kind of mark. It is now forty-four years since the rise of the Red Guards, but the impact on both Chinese society and individual members has not yet died.1 I am inter- ested in particular in the historical fate of that generation. Of that genera- tion, the laboring majority are now mostly retired. But some of the minority— those who never did physical labor— now hold the reins of politi- cal power in this country.2 Others are in key positions in business and acade- mia. In this chapter, I sketch out some of the philosophy and characteristic behaviors of the Red Guards. Have we really left them behind, a relic of his- tory, as is so often thought? Some of the history and stories that I recount here emerged only long after the end of the Cultural Revolution, when I read documents that had later become available. But I have also included some of my own direct observations, from my perspective as a low-ranking Red

83

chapter six

This chapter is an edited version of an article first published in the Beijing Cultural Review, vol.1 (2011). 1. The Red Guard Movement (红卫兵运动) was a mass movement of young people

mobilized by Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in 1966 and 1967. The movement was made up of high school and college students, rallied under Mao’s instructions to revolt against the incumbent bureaucracy; they played an extremely destructive role in the Cul- tural Revolution period. 2. The two most powerful men in China today, President Xi Jinping and Premier Li

Keqiang, are part of this generation. It is sometimes referred to as the “educated youth generation.”

The Red Guard Generation: Manipulated Rebellion and Youth Violence

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Guard. I was one of the many students in Beijing who joined the movement but were outside the inner circle because they were not born in Beijing. The Red Guard generation can be defined as all children and students

who were between the ages of twelve (the first year of middle school) and twenty-two (the final year of university) in 1966, the year that the Cultural Revolution started— that is, everyone born between 1944 and 1954. For the most part, the real era of the Red Guards was limited to the first two years of the Cultural Revolution. That was when they seized the stage of history and for a moment seemed to be unstoppable. After 1968 the Red Guards were little more than a shadow of their former selves. By this definition, I was one of the very last of the Red Guard generation.

In 1966, when the Cultural Revolution started, I was twelve years old. I had just completed my elementary schooling in the county town of Nanchang, Jiangxi, and had been assigned to Liantang Middle School. I was just begin- ning to have an adult understanding of the world around me, but I was not yet of an age to be a direct participant in the movement. I was on its fringes, primarily an observer. In 1970–71 I also attended the only high school still operating in Nanchang— then a city of 1 million people. There I did experi- ence some of the “educational revolution” that was a part of the Red Guard mission to “struggle, criticize, and reform.”3 Still later I worked as a freight handler and spent time in the army. Thus I was able to witness the entire range of the Cultural Revolution experience. The Red Guard generation grew up “under the red flag.” The oldest of

them were only just starting elementary school in 1949, when the People’s Republic was founded. They received a “revolutionary education” from the start. In his song “Balls under the Red Flag,” the rock musician Cui Jian has referred to this generation as “eggs laid by the red flag.”4 (All of the phrases in italics below are from the lyrics to this song.)

84 the transformation of ethics and morality

3. “Struggle, Criticize, and Reform” (斗批改) refers to the initial goals of the Cultural Revolution, articulated by Mao Zedong during the early years of the movement. This slo- gan attempted to rationalize the movement by setting clear goals: struggling against intra- party capitalists, criticizing capitalist reactionary academic authorities, and reforming any antisocialist superstructure in the cultural and educational arenas. 4. Cui Jian (崔健, 1961– ), a native of Beijing, is a Chinese singer-songwriter and gui-

tarist. He is considered to be a pioneer in Chinese rock music and was one of the first Chinese artists to write rock songs. Accordingly, he is often called the father of Chinese rock music. Balls under the Red Flag (红旗下的蛋) is a rock album released by Cui Jian in 1994. The album was controversial because it expressed the awakening and confusion of the generation that grew up during the Cultural Revolution and later faced the tide of reform and opening up during the 1990s.

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The Red Guard generation’s fathers were flag poles: they hoisted the red flag over China. The members of the Red Guard generation themselves were eggs laid by the red flag. The red flag’s still aflutter, But there’s no fixed direction, The revolution still continues, The old men have even more power. The Red Guard generation believed that they were in charge, but that was not the case. The lines that they loved to chant more than any others were written by the young Mao Zedong: “The world is ours! The nation is ours!” The response to “I ask, on this boundless land, who rules over man’s destiny?” was always a fervent, “We do! We do!” But in fact, they very soon fell out of favor. After a brief period as the anointed sons, they were tossed out like foundlings. Back at the bottom of the social heap, they found that reality is like a stone, spirit is like an egg. But, although stones are hard, eggs are life. Life, especially young life, is irrepressible, exuberant. It will always find a way to express itself. But today, money flutters in the air. . . . We are no longer pawns in a chess game, Following lines drawn by others, We try standing up ourselves, Get moving and take a look at everything. The most outstanding of the Red Guard generation became the key players in today’s society, and because of their age, they will dominate China over the next ten to twenty years. How were the members of the Red Guard generation able to mobilize so

quickly? How did they behave once mobilized? On examination, we find that their behavior was deeply conditioned by the social environment in which they lived. The cult of personality around one revolutionary leader, Mao, had begun in the 1940s. By the eve of the Cultural Revolution, it had reached a fever pitch. The Red Guard generation had grown up in an environment of class struggle, an environment that respected violence or at the very least had no hesitation about using violence. Red was the color of respect, the color of revolution, and it was also the color of blood. As the constitution of the Young Pioneers of China tells us: “The red scarf [worn by children who join the Young Pioneers] is a corner of the red flag; it is red with the blood of the revolutionary martyrs.” In one of the idealistic epic poems written for the Red Guards, the collective heroes believe in and fervently pray for a third world war that will finally bury the last shreds of the old world order; in the war, the Red Guards conquer Europe and America and finally raise the red flag over the White House. We can also see some striking characteristics when we look at the Red

Guards themselves. The first feature, of course, is their tendency to rebel. The very first Red Guard group, formed at Tsinghua University Middle School, announced itself with three posters inscribed “Long live the revolutionary rebel spirit of the proletariat!” The posters continued, “Revolution is rebellion;

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the spirit of Mao Zedong thought is rebellion. . . . Rebel! If not now, then when?” This logic was inculcated in them by Mao Zedong himself, who had written, “In the final analysis, all the truths of Marxism can be summed up in one sentence: To rebel is justified.” So, who had the right to rebel? Only a lim- ited group was granted the privilege of beginning a rebellion. Their class back- ground had to be one of the Five Red Categories (People’s Liberation Army, Communist Party, workers, rural laborers, or small farmers): “Only the Left will be allowed to rebel; the Right will not be allowed a counterrevolution.”5

Among the earliest Red Guards in Beijing, the rules were even stricter. The core members of these groups were the children of revolutionary cadres. But Mao himself expanded the movement to a broader slice of the student population by supporting the “rebel” faction of the Red Guards. At a stroke, a mass of ordinary, oppressed people— including some with politically impure family backgrounds— were licensed to rebel. (However, those with impure backgrounds would later face purges.) And who were they rebelling against? The most immediate targets of rebellion were figures of authority in their immediate ambit: teachers, school principals, foremen— anyone who managed and oppressed them. From there, their rebellion boiled over and swept into communities to which they were not personally connected. They rebelled against all old thinking, old culture, old customs, old habits—every- thing that represented the bad old ways. They wanted to create a break with China’s millennia-long history and culture and also with the history of the revolutionary party itself, with everything that happened before the founding of the People’s Republic of China, seventeen years earlier. One symbol of this rupture: Tan Houlan led the Beijing Normal University Red Guards to Qufu in Shandong, where they wrecked the temple and tomb of Confucius, who until then had always been a “model for the ages.”6 Another symbol: a poster entitled “The Hundred Uglies,” which included cartoons of almost every senior government and party leader, sparing just a select few.

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5. The Five Red Categories (红五类) were classes of Chinese citizens based on their political identity during the Cultural Revolution. The Five Red Categories were consid- ered pro-revolutionary forces and included revolutionary military personnel, revolution- ary cadres, workers, peasants, and lower- or middle-class farmers. Members of the Five Red Categories and their offspring enjoyed a wide range of political, economic, and social privileges that were denied to members of the anti-revolutionary “Five Black Categories,” who were maligned and restricted from participation. 6. Tan Houlan (谭厚兰, 1940-1982), a native of Xiangtan, Hunan Province, was a

major leader of the Red Guard Movement during the Cultural Revolution. She was noto- rious for destroying the Confucian Temple in Qufu, Shandong Province, the hometown of Confucius. She was prosecuted in 1978 and died of cancer at the age of 42.

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In a very short time, with the active support of the country’s leaders, the existing management of almost every school in the country had been swept aside. The Red Guards started to move out of the schools and into the sur- rounding communities. They started to move across the country for political rallies and campaigns. For a period of one or two years, the country was in a state of virtual anarchy. This was the height of the Red Guard Movement. The first time I saw a Red Guard in Nanchang was in August 1966. At

first, just a few schoolchildren began wearing red armbands, then some trav- eled to Beijing to see Mao Zedong’s great Red Guard parade and brought back a red flag. We all were waiting at the railway station to greet them. Until that day, Beijing had been a distant legend to us. No one quite believed that it was possible to actually travel there and see Mao Zedong. But suddenly we found that it was. Suddenly we found that many things were possible. We could travel on

buses and trains without paying; our food was free. The young leaders began to feel that anything was possible. Encouraged by the spirit of rebellion, young people were free to doubt everything, to reject everything, to over- throw everything— with the exception of one sacred image, of course. Posters appeared everywhere with Mao’s slogan “Bombard the headquarters, burn XXX!” In those posters, XXX could be literally any local leader or local organ- ization. Perhaps young people are naturally inclined to kick off all constraints imposed on them. In 1966, Chinese youth were given a once-in-a-millen- nium opportunity to rebel. But right from the start, their rebellion was commanded, or manipulated,

by Mao, because the second key characteristic of the Red Guards was their loyalty. They were loyal not to a set of beliefs or to any ideal but to one person— Mao, a living man, though he was seen by many as a god (which explained his mercurial changes and his ineffability). The Red Guards were called “guards” because they swore to protect Chairman Mao; he needed pro- tection because “China’s Khrushchev” could be “sleeping in our very beds”— a possibility that showed Mao’s fear of conspiracy. “Chairman Mao is our red commander,” the Red Guards shouted. “We are Chairman Mao’s red sol- diers! We will break the head of any dog who opposes Chairman Mao!” Many of China’s young people were ready to devote their lives and even to spill their own blood for this cause. So the rebellion of the Red Guards was not natural. At the very least, its

organization and its unfolding were not natural. The course of the rebellion was not directed by the will of the rebels. From the beginning, it was a “com- manded rebellion” or a “rebellion to order,” and throughout its course it was

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a manipulated rebellion. When it ended, finally, it was because a stop order was given. This marked a fundamental difference between the Red Guards and the youth rebellions in 1960s France, the United States, and other West- ern nations. The Red Guards can be seen as the earliest of the 1960s youth movements, but they were also an outlier among those movements. They also were different from participants in the May Fourth Movement or the “right-wing youths” of 1957. The students who were labeled “right wing” in 1957, though still basically aligned with socialism, had wanted to further some of their own ideals of freedom and democracy. But the Red Guard organizations were devoted only to being left wing, red, and loyal to Chair- man Mao. They never really had any independent agency, at least none with any stability. All of their actions strictly followed the orders and strategies of Chairman Mao. They carried Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book (Quotations from Chairman Mao) with them at all times, and they became skilled at debating by lobbing quotations at one another.7

They also were ready to accept new “supreme” commands or the “latest orders” at any moment. The reason that they were able to instantly organize and rebel was because they had the support of Mao, the supreme leader, whose power and status at that moment was unprecedented in history. The Red Guards were considered the vanguard of the Cultural Revolution, but perhaps they were in fact its cannon fodder. The driving force behind the Cultural Revolution was not the Chinese Communist Party, but the party’s highest leader, who was circumventing his own party. He made use of his own limitless political power and personal charisma to propel the movement. Mao Zedong held eight rallies, in which he stood face to face with 12 million Red Guards, brought in from all over the country. He put on a red arm band himself, telling the assembled crowds, “We must use force!” From that point, the Red Guards carried the fire of revolution out into the streets and even into the smallest and remotest farming villages. Many of the Red Guards wanted to model themselves after Chairman

Mao, particularly the young Mao (“Young we were, schoolmates, At life’s full flowering”).8 But the world that they inhabited was very different from the China of the May Fourth Movement. They never realized that the “Chair-

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7. The Little Red Book (小红书) refers to a red booklet formally known as Quotations from Chairman Mao. The booklet is a collection of selected statements from speeches and writings by Mao Zedong. It was widely distributed during the Cultural Revolution, mak- ing it one of the most printed books in history. 8. “Changsha,” Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (www.marxists.org/reference/archive/

mao/selected-works/poems/poems01.htm).

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man Mao” that they saw had made it impossible for them to do as young Mao Runzhi— the youth who would become Mao Zedong— did.9 They believed that they were “criticizing the very rivers and mountains, setting people afire with our words.” In fact, it was not they who “ruled over man’s destiny” in the “boundless land” of China. It was still Chairman Mao. As has been observed by many before, the spark that started the prairie fire of the Red Guard Movement was a letter of support from Mao Zedong on August 1, 1966, and the movement came to a sudden halt on July 28, 1968, after Mao called a meeting of five Red Guard leaders. This direct link clearly shows how the Red Guards were Mao’s creation. But even if the Red Guards were manipulated, what was their subjective

experience? Did they believe that they were free? Even that they were lucky? I believe that they did. As I noted above, for a period at least, they felt that they could do whatever they wanted, even that they were omnipotent. That feeling was related to the third key feature of the Red Guards: the movement was an expression of youthful exuberance and release. To rebel against authority is perhaps an instinct that every young person

possesses. Youth are full of energy and life, and they react against everything around them that represses and restricts, sometimes to the point of violent rejection. Even though in retrospect the Red Guards were clearly engaged in a manipulated rebellion, that was not at all how they felt at the time. And in the process of their rebellion, they displayed all the passion, courage, and intelligence of youth. I remember that all of the “conservative organizations” of Jiangxi Province had the name plaques next to their doors ripped off and smashed, and afterward the Red Guards and various other rebel groups put sarcastic mock plaques in their place. They used whatever materials came to hand, producing reams of fake couplets that hung on either side of the doors, some mocking the institutions, some sarcastically “eulogizing” their demise. These verbal rockets were the first examples I had seen of knowledge of the classics put to modern use on a large scale. Another night, I accompanied a group to the main square in our provin-

cial capital to take part in a Red Guard rally. Tens of thousands of people were there. Though the atmosphere was a little muted because of factional- ism within the movement (the government had not yet come out in support of one faction or another), it was a still a stirring scene, and the celebratory energy was irrepressible. Red Guards around me were dancing and singing:

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9. Mao Runzhi (毛润之, 1893–1976) is the courtesy name of Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic of China. The name Runzhi is usually used to refer to Mao during his youth.

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“Raise your head and see the pole star, think of Mao Zedong,” “Revolution is a great celebration.” We felt deeply connected to the people within our own Red Guard group. I was very young, and fell asleep later in the night. When I woke up suddenly in the early dawn, I found that a red flag and someone’s coat had been placed over me. Almost everyone else had also fallen asleep, and in the dawn light those boys and girls seemed like the most beautiful people in the world. But the same boys and girls were swept up in the violence of the move-

ment. Their youthful energy was channeled into violent destruction. And that was the fourth key feature of the Red Guard movement: its propensity for vio- lence. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, one of the most common slogans was “Long live the red terror!” Many people were beaten or tortured to death or driven to commit suicide. The violence started with the “criticism and struggle sessions,” the extrajudicial interrogations and the beatings. It turned into full-scale pitched battles between factions. On one occasion, I saw with my own eyes a large crowd of Red Guards surrounding the gate of a gov- ernment office that was rumored to be the hiding place of a conservative fac- tion. Suddenly, a man was pushed out of the gate, and the beating started instantly, before he had a chance to speak. People would squeeze through the crowd, then shout in triumph, “I hit him!” It was some time before the crowd suddenly stepped back, having realized that the man being beaten was “one of us!” By this time the victim was lying half dead on the ground. That was prob- ably the first time I felt fear at the indiscriminate violence. It seemed that many wanted to use violence to prove their own courage,

maturity, and dedication. Ordinarily mild-tempered people became savage. At first they used fists and feet; later they used guns. At first, the dead would be paraded around in their coffins, and the Red Guards would argue over who shot first; later, no one cared who started it. Red Guards loved to stand on the running boards of cars, brandishing handguns. The high school kids, even more than the university students, showed no concern for their own safety or that of anyone else. The Red Guard group that had the reputation of being the best fighters in Nanchang was the No. 5 Middle School “Hand- ful of Die-hards,” who were led by a girl known as “Die-hard woman.” Vio- lence caused them no hesitation, whether they were victims or perpetrators. On one occasion another Red Guard group had caught someone that they claimed was an “old conservative boss.” They shot him in the head in front of a hotel and then went to eat inside, leaving the body in the street. All evening, going in and out of the hotel, they just pretended not to see it.

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On July 27, 1968, Mao Zedong sent 30,000 people from his “worker propaganda teams” into the Tsinghua University campus to end the battle between Red Guard factions. One of the factions, led by Kuai Dafu, resisted them because they had not received word directly from Mao.10 In surprise, Mao asked, “Has the rebel faction really rebelled?” In fact, it was only igno- rance: Kuai Dafu did not know that the teams were sent by Mao, and he even sent requests to Mao’s office for help in casting off this “black hand.” When he saw Mao at a dawn meeting the next day, he cried at his error. When Mao said, “The black hand is me,” all resistance immediately col- lapsed. Thus the Red Guard Movement, which had started at the Tsinghua University Middle School, came to an end at Tsinghua University. Soon afterward, the Beijing Red Guards and their leaders were assigned to posi- tions far outside the capital. The top Red Guards were put under house arrest or thrown in prison by the government and the People’s Liberation Army in the 1970s, during the latter part of the Cultural Revolution. The rank-and- file Red Guards were dispersed through a massive program assigning students to jobs in farming communities. By 1980, 17 million people had been sent out of the cities for “reeducation” among poor farmers. Those who did not end up on the farms were assigned to factories or to the army. A fuller explanation of the concept of “manipulated rebellion” is in order.

When I say that the Red Guards acted “under orders” or that they engaged in a “manipulated rebellion,” I do not mean to imply that those who gave the orders had complete control over the movement. Nor do I mean that those who gave the orders were able to achieve their goals by using the Red Guards. What I mean is that the Red Guards were able to organize on such a scale because it was so ordered by Chairman Mao, instigator of the Cultural Revo- lution. The Red Guard Movement was a mini-revolution within the Cultural Revolution. In fact, it was the core of the Cultural Revolution. The relationship between leaders and ordinary people in the Cultural Rev-

olution is an issue of particular interest. In fact, for the purposes of Cultural Revolution research, they are inseparable. Any history of this period must include both and take careful account of the relationship between them. Within this relationship, we must be clear about which group led and which followed, about whether the leaders or the people played the primary, active

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10. Kuai Dafu (蒯大富, 1945– ), a native of Binhai, Jiangsu Province, was a major leader of the Red Guard Movement during the Cultural Revolution. He joined the Red Guards when he was a student at Tsinghua University and played an active role in perse- cuting senior leaders such as Liu Shaoqi, a former president of China. Kuai was prosecut- ed in 1978 and served a seventeen-year sentence.

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role. As I noted above, I believe that the leadership was the agent in this rela- tionship. There are actually two issues here: the first is whether the leaders played the central role in the movement; the second is whether they achieved the objectives for which they started the movement or, indeed, whether they were able to control the movement throughout its duration (to put it another way, whether they were able to achieve interim objectives). In Rationality and Madness: The Masses in the Chinese Cultural Revolution

(later expanded and retitled Failure of Charisma), Wang Shaoguang gives a detailed analysis and description of the motivations and behavior of the peo- ple who joined the rebel factions during the Cultural Revolution in Wuhan.11 But he does not give enough attention to the relationship between the leaders and the masses or to who led within this relationship. He rejects the idea that the Cultural Revolution centered on its leaders, suggesting that a Mao-centered reading of the Cultural Revolution requires several assump- tions: that its instigators had explicit objectives and a plan to realize them; that they had transcendental authority to ensure that the plan was executed as they desired; that most people could understand the leaders’ intentions and plans and whole-heartedly participated in their execution. In short, Wang believes that if the movement was truly Mao-centric, only top-down, one-directional communication was permitted. But those assumptions seem too strong. No individual could possibly ful-

fill all of Wang’s criteria. History, as Engels said, is the composite result of “intersecting” forces, with no one person able to completely achieve his own objectives. We can add that if those objectives run contrary to social reality and human nature, to the point of being completely unrealizable, then it does not matter how much status or authority a leader might have. Wang seems to have overlooked the two questions that I posed above. Must a leader have absolute control over the entire course of a movement and completely realize all of his objectives in order to count as its “center”? I believe that any- one who plays a “leading role” in a movement (that is, as its primary instiga- tor) can be called its “center” and must bear moral responsibility for its actions. It is not necessary that the person be its “controller”—that is, to have achieved his own goals through the movement. Wang’s careful exposition gives reasonable accounts of many of the facts of

the Cultural Revolution. For example, he shows that many members of rebel organizations were rational and that they had made their own calculations; rational explanations can be found for why they joined their groups (though

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11. Wang Shaoguang, Failure of Charisma: The Cultural Revolution in Wuhan (Oxford University Press, 1999).

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for some it was mere chance). However, he underestimates the irrational, or fanatical, aspect of the rebels’ behavior, particularly in crowds, when a mob mentality could take hold. The Red Guards were the youngest of the rebel organizations, the shock troops of the Cultural Revolution. Among these young people there was even more irrationality than among other partici- pants, and the high school students were more irrational, more fanatical, than the university students. Some rational calculations were involved when the Red Guards split into two implacably hostile factions and began to battle each other, but there were also many emotional factors: beliefs, passions, and grudges. Neither faction believed that their actions constituted rebellion against Chairman Mao, nor did they believe themselves to be conservative. Each accused the other of those crimes. They were also deeply driven by the theory of struggle. In fact, in this, they were encouraged by their leader: Chairman Mao had become leader through a process of struggle. The Cultural Revolution involved both class warfare and conflict between

different factions within the Chinese Communist Party. The Red Guards believed that they could “turn the world red” through a process of violent insurrection. They must eventually have realized that their “enemy” was very similar to them, that they were all just pawns in a larger game. The problem was that the player who had set out these pawns was never able to move them exactly as he pleased; once the game had started, Mao could not stop the vio- lence without completely ending the movement. But still, the balance of power lay with him, not with the masses. He had the power to sweep the pieces off the board. He could not stop the battles between the Red Guard factions, but he could send both factions out of the cities and to the farms. But we should note that before that happened, the Red Guards did in fact achieve some of the things that Mao had wanted. For example, Kuai Dafu’s faction of Tsinghua Red Guards led the movement against Liu Shaoqi.12 The Nankai University Red Guards formed a group that was dedicated to “root- ing out traitors” and defeating the “capitalist class groups” within the party for Mao. Wang believes that Mao was certainly successful in energizing the masses,

probably too successful. But he failed to direct the movement because what the various factions “really cared about” were their own interests. Why did he

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12. Liu Shaoqi (刘少奇, 1898–1969), a native of Ningxiang, Hunan Province, was a senior Chinese politician and top Communist Party leader. Liu was the president of the People’s Republic of China and Mao’s designated successor from 1959 to 1968. He was labeled a “traitor” and “reactionary”during the Cultural Revolution and died after Red Guard persecution.

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fail? Why did the Cultural Revolution fail? Were Mao’s objectives compatible with the real interests of society and the individuals who made it up? Even if they were theoretically compatible, did ordinary Chinese people— or even human nature in general— support his ideals? Or is there another explana- tion? Imagine that he had even greater power and status; imagine that he was the leader of a group other than young people or that his strategy had changed somewhat. Could his goals have been achieved then? But how could he have changed his target group? One of his reasons for starting the Cultural Revolution was to harden the next generation of proletarian revolutionaries, to temper them in a storm of violence. He wanted to create a generation of new people. But what was the result of that tempering? This question demands that we consider fundamental human nature. The

future may not bring the same utopia as the past, but it could bring a new kind of utopia, thus the impetus for revolution. The Cultural Revolution failed because no one could resist the “brilliant leader,” because no one had the weight to withstand the storm that he unleashed. Liu Shaoqi’s organiza- tion was not up to it, nor was the old guard of the “February adverse cur- rent.”13 The Cultural Revolution ultimately died away because of the indif- ference of the public. It was defeated by whispers of rumor. The huge response to the Cultural Revolution’s call to action gradually died away. Mass political activism reached a peak; then, as after every peak, it declined. It was like the military power of the Qin: as they unified the empire, no other state could resist their power. But by the time of the second Qin emperor, the mil- itary giant had become as fragile as glass. The educated youth who were forced out of the cities into poor, rural

areas had been the first Red Guards. In their rural exile, they did suffer a kind of reeducation. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to call it a second enlightenment. This second enlightenment was more skeptical of the Cul- tural Revolution than Mao Zedong had ever predicted. The flight and death of Lin Biao— Mao’s anointed successor, no less— also shook people’s belief in the “brilliance” of their leaders.14 In April 1976, the first spontaneous mass

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13. The February adverse current (二月逆流) refers to an attempt to stop the Cultural Revolution organized by senior leaders at a Politburo meeting in February 1967. It was the first organized, open resistance to the Cultural Revolution. 14. Lin Biao (林彪, 1907–71), a native of Huanggang, Hubei Province, was a famous

general in the People’s Liberation Army and later a senior politician. Lin became Mao’s designated successor during the 9th Party Congress in 1969 after Liu Shaoqi’s downfall. He failed in an alleged coup to assassinate Mao in 1971 and died in a plane crash in Mon- golia while trying to flee to the Soviet Union.

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demonstration in years broke out in Tiananmen Square. Unconnected with any leader or organization, it included many current Red Guards. Though it was quickly suppressed, the downfall of the Gang of Four soon afterward showed how attitudes were changing. In fact, the end of the Gang of Four laid the foundation for social stability at last. Young, educated people had started to look at the world from their position at the bottom. They had suf- fered and hardened in the farms and the factories. They had learned much about the realities of Chinese society and the realities of the Chinese masses. They also had learned much about themselves. But they had paid an enor- mous price for this knowledge: they lost their entire youth. Chinese society today is, of course, very different from what it was forty-

four years ago. However, the theme “Brutal China,” chosen for the last issue of Beijing Cultural Review in 2010, was an insightful one. Many of the essays in that issue showed that even as China becomes wealthy, we can still see authoritarian currents and much violence in Chinese society. We see a failure to value human life both in our social institutions and in many of our citi- zens. Can this really be unconnected with the savage fanaticism of the Red Guard movement? To open the focus still wider for a moment, is the violence not connected to the Cultural Revolution or to the philosophy of violent struggle that marked the entire mid-twentieth century and reached a climax in the violence of the Cultural Revolution? To avoid future disasters, we must carry out a careful dissection and sterilization of the heritage of the twentieth century, with respect to both its philosophies and its practices. But I hope that I can also offer an alternative perspective without appear-

ing unduly perverse. We should consider the possibility that in fact the indi- viduals of the Red Guard generation are now the ones who reject the Red Guard philosophy and actions most thoroughly. Today the history of that period may be more attractive to young people than to those who actually lived through it. The Red Guard generation had two distinct experiences in the 1960s and 1970s: urban and rural, triumphant and defeated, destructive and constructive, anti-revisionist and restorative. On an emotional level, one might even call these experiences hope and despair, love and rejection. The personalities of the former Red Guards have been stiffened with a measure of independence. Their past has made them less likely to give quick allegiance to any lofty ideology or “superman” leader. They know the value of the grad- ual recovery of common sense. They have also learned from the pointless deaths of comrades around them: there can be ugly consequences to exuber- ant vitality if it is completely unconstrained and particularly if it is allowed to evolve into wanton violence. They are no longer young, these Red Guards;

the red guard generation 95

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they may even have become a little conservative. They have now accumulated some things of their own that they believe are worth defending. Of course, they must strive to remain open-minded and to understand the younger gen- erations with whom they share this country.

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