Red Guards and Red Terror: Youth Mobilisation (Edexcel A Level History: Route E: Communist states in the twentieth century): Revision Note

Summary

• After taking a step away from frontline politics following the failure of the Great Leap Forward, Mao decided to return in 1966

• He identified those who had reversed his reforms as secret capitalists who were betraying the revolution

  • Mao decided to use the young people, who had been indoctrinated and held him in high esteem, to remove his opponents and help him return

  • Mao's Little Red Book had been key to this indoctrination

  • Mao's most committed supporters joined the Red Guards

• Mass rallies of over 1 million people were held to launch a campaign by the young people against the 'Four Olds'

  • These were old culture, old customs, old habits, and old ideas

  • Mao encouraged the Red Guards to attack all figures of authority to create a new Communist culture and ideas

• This led to anarchy, violence and terror

  • Thousands of people suspected of supporting old ideas were tortured and murdered

  • Thousands of priceless, ancient objects were destroyed

• In 1967, radical rebel worker groups and members of the Red Guard launched a coup against Shanghai's Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership

  • Encouraged by Mao, this power-seizing movement spread across China

  • Eventually, Mao intervened using the People's Liberation Army (PLA) to suppress the Red Guards and rebels due to the chaos that was being caused

Red Guards: Mao's mobilisation of youth and mass rallies, 1966

• The reforms introduced after the disastrous Great Leap Forward convinced Mao that the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had decided to take China down the 'capitalist road'

  • To seize power back from these 'capitalist roaders', Mao decided to use China's young people

Why did Mao turn to young people?

• Young people had not been involved in the Long March, the fight against Japan or the War in Korea

  • Mao was keen for them to experience their own revolutionary struggle to help radicalise them

• Young people did not blame Mao for the Great Famine that followed the Great Leap Forward (opens in a new tab)

  • Instead, they had been taught in school that Mao was a hero who had saved China from the Nationalists and the American imperialists

  • They had been indoctrinated by the 'cult of personality' that portrayed Mao as a God-like figure

  • Mao encouraged them to join the Red Guards and to read and carry his Little Red Book

What was the Little Red Book?

• The Little Red Book was issued by the Central Political Department of the People's Liberation Army (PLA)

• It was a collection of Mao's statements with a foreword by Lin Biao

  • It was initially intended to be given to every soldier, but Mao recognised its potential as an indoctrination tool

  • By 1967, an estimated 370 million copies of the Little Red Book had been published

• The Little Red Book was soon being treated as if it were a religious text

  • People attempted to resolve arguments or dilemmas by finding relevant quotes from Mao

  • Claims of miracles began to be reported, such as the Little Red Book curing blindness

The mass rallies, 1966

• The first of eight mass rallies was held in August 1966

• One million Red Guards crammed into Tiananmen Square to see Mao

  • His appearance caused hysteria, with hundreds of thousands of Red Guards waving copies of the Little Red Book and chanting in adulation

• The vast crowds were told that the future belonged to them and that they had a key role to play in it

  • They were encouraged by Mao to "rebel against authority" and those "capitalist roaders" who were "betraying the revolution"

  • The Red Guards were left in no doubt that Mao wanted them to attack all symbols of authority

  • Whatever actions they took and whoever they decided to target, the Red Guards were assured they would have official approval

NOTE: Please insert image of the Red Guards in Tiananmen Square

Red Guard attacks on the Four Olds: culture, customs, habits and ideas

• Free rail passes were given to all members of the Red Guards

  • This enabled them to attend rallies and travel further in pursuit of targets to attack

• These targets were all identified as belonging to one of the 'Four Olds'

  • Old ideas

  • Old culture

  • Old customs

  • Old habits

• Mao told the Red Guards that these 'Olds' belonged to the bourgeois classes who were trying to repress the Chinese people and betray the revolution

  • The 'Olds' must be destroyed to be replaced by a new culture based on Communist ideas

  • As a result, religious buildings were destroyed, teachers were attacked, and classical music or literature was condemned

Anarchy and red terror: violence and cultural destruction 1966–68

• Mao explained that chaos was preferable to order under bourgeois figures of authority

  • As a result, the police and army stood aside

  • The campaign to 'Smash the Four Olds' very soon became murderous

• Libraries were burned, temples were ransacked, and priceless ancient relics were destroyed

  • Official documents record over 100,000 homes in Beijing being broken into in search of 'old artefacts'

  • Around 5,000 places of historical and cultural importance were also destroyed in the capital

• People in positions of authority were tortured, forced to make confessions of their 'betrayal' of the revolution and murdered

  • Members of the Red Guard suspected of coming from middle-class backgrounds often became extremely brutal to prove their loyalty to Mao

• Rival bands of Red Guards began to compete against each other to prove their revolutionary zeal

  • This led to spiralling levels of murder and violence, motivated by peer pressure and competition rather than Maoist ideology

The terror

• Rivalry between Red Guard bands and the desperation to prove communist credentials led to a period known as 'the Terror', where China descended into anarchy

  • In January 1967, radical rebel workers and Red Guards attempted to overthrow Shanghai's CCP leadership

  • This attempt to seize power spread across China, aiming to replace the CCP with a government based on the Paris Commune of 1871

  • It appeared as if China was about to descend into another civil war

• Mao ordered the conversion of the Shanghai People's Commune into the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee in February 1967

• Mao encouraged the Red Guards to continue their struggle

  • It was only when Mao realised that attacking the PLA would leave China vulnerable to internal chaos and attack by foreign countries that he changed his mind

  • He then used the PLA to restore order

To what extent did the Red Guards achieve Mao's aims during the Cultural Revolution?

• Mao's use of the Red Guards to create the political conditions for his return has not been viewed as a success by historians

  • Some historians argue that although many people in authority were removed during the Cultural Revolution, they were not replaced by the young radicals Mao had hoped for

  • Other historians argue that the Cultural Revolution spiralled out of control and undermined the CCP itself

The new order was not radically different

• The authority figures that were overthrown were replaced by people of similar beliefs and backgrounds

Key historians

The reconstructed political system was in the end not so much what Mao might have called a “negation” of what had preceded it, as a modified version staffed by new people, principally PLA officers... More striking was the absence of significant numbers of “revolutionary successors,” the younger generation upon whom Mao had hoped to rely for his new order, notably the Red Guards and the Rebels. But their absence was attributable in part to the behaviour of the “little generals” themselves.

Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, 2008

The Cultural Revolution threatened the CCP itself

• Rather than just target the 'capitalist roaders', the Red Guards attacked the entire CCP

Key historians

Ironically, the same process of revolutionary competition also led to political dissent. The passions for revolutionary practice that led to violence were matched by passions for revolutionary theory. It was in the pursuit of revolutionary theory that small groups of youth expressed ideas of dissent, the most radical of which challenged the legitimacy of the Chinese political system by arguing that Chinese communist elites had formed a new privileged class to be overthrown. There began to appear a perceptual shift of the locus of social conflict from between the people and the bourgeoisie to between the people and the privileged class within the party.

Guobin Yang, The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China, 2016