Jiang Pei 江沛

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Jiang Pei 江沛. Hongweibing kuangbiao 红卫兵狂飙 [Red Guard Hurricane]. Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chubanshe, 1994.

In the epilogue to his history of the Red Guard movement, Jiang Pei writes that his motivation to work on the topic came from a professor who complained that Chinese historians should be ashamed at the relatively high level of Cultural Revolution scholarship produced by foreign academics. So Jiang set about to address the scarcity of Chinese-language scholarship on the Cultural Revolution; his Red Guard Hurricane is the successful result.

In some ways Red Guard Hurricane surpasses the Western language literature on Red Guards in detail and scope. Moreover, Jiang shows that political disagreement over the work teams (and not “class background”) as the root of initial student factional divisions, a notion that predates Andrew Walder’s more recent revisionist article. According to Jiang, several factors contributed to student conflict with the work teams (and thereby to intra-student factional divisions): first, the conduct of the work teams was at odds with what students were reading in the People’s Daily newspaper. Second, many work team members were still operating in the high-stakes Anti-Rightist movement style of “luring snakes out of their holes,” which made many students hesitant to cooperate.

Jiang asserts that the violence and disruptiveness of the Red Guard movement were responsible for huge setbacks and losses to the People’s Republic of China. To his credit, Jiang does not gloss over the willingness of many Red Guards to inflict pain on their perceived enemies. He holds that the source of the violence can be found in Mao’s active encouragement of armed struggle, in the People’s Daily’s praise of the “Destroy the Four Olds” movement, and in the willingness of public security offices to provide lists of names of supposed “class enemies” to Red Guards. At the same time, Jiang sees the young Red Guards as the victims of a system that since 1957 placed an excessively “leftist” emphasis on politics and class struggle. Jiang does not hesitate to condemn Mao Zedong and other leaders, chiefly Jiang Qing and the Cultural Revolution Small Group, as the authors and directors of this mistaken policy. The author convincingly shows that Mao’s role in elevating the status of Red Guards and in encouraging their violent escapades – from writing encouraging letters to Qinghua University Middle School Red Guards to repeatedly viewing throngs of Red Guards in Tiananmen Square – should not be underestimated.

Red Guard Hurricane has many strengths. Jiang’s chronological treatment of the Red Guard movement is rich in detail and provides a colorful sense of the unique personalities involved, particularly the five top Red Guard leaders and the United Action (lian dong) faction in Beijing. He argues that even though the first strong questioning of the Cultural Revolution and its leadership came from a small group of United Action Red Guards, the highly public nature of these prescient critiques led to a more widespread undercurrent of doubt. Such discomfort with the direction Cultural Revolution was taking in late 1966 perhaps explains the high-level of non-participation in the movement, which the author calls ‘boycott’ (dizhi). To be sure, a degree of political correctness colors the author’s assessment of bold anti-Jiang Qing dissidents in 1966 as “the backbone of our nation” (p. 160), for the United Action critique matches up almost exactly with the post-Mao verdict on the Cultural Revolution. However, it is important for readers to know that some Red Guards were writing “Boil Jiang Qing in oil!” and “Long live Liu Shaoqi” on big character posters, and Jiang Pei quotes at length from such sources.

Red Guard Hurricane contains a useful day-by-day chronology of the Red Guard movement, as well as a detailed summary of previous Chinese scholarship on Red Guards. However, one of the weaknesses of the book is that at times its main chapters read more like a chronological list of unrelated events than a historical narrative. In addition, it is often difficult to ascertain the sources of Jiang’s rich information, for footnotes are few and far between. Nonetheless, the book itself is an invaluable source on the Red Guard movement, particularly as it unfolded in Beijing.

Jeremy Brown