The Origins and the Later Divisions of the Red Guard Movement

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A Critique: The Origins and Divisions of the Red Guard Movement, 1966-1968

Xiaowei Zheng

The origins and divisions of the Red Guard Movement are an old but still debated topic. There are two major theories concerning this topic. The sociological interpretation argues that the Red Guard organization was established and later divided into factions because of student competition in the school system before the Cultural Revolution; the political interpretation, on the other hand, argues that it was due to different responses to vague political signals, i.e., the divergent attitudes to Liu Shaoqi’s work teams in the first several months of the Cultural Revolution, that forced students into opposed groups. These two arguments formed mainly because of their focus on different groups of people and emphasis on different aspects of the same matter.

In this paper, I will evaluate and analyze these two theories, examining the sources of these two interpretations and how they built their arguments using these sources. Also, I am going to examine the conceptual tools they applied. Since both theories base arguments on research in different cities and time periods, a brief overview tracing the whole sequence of events is crucial.

A Brief Chronology

The Establishment of the Red Guard: May to July, 1966

On the night of May 29, 1966, a dozen high level cadre students of the Affiliated Middle School of Qinghua University (Qinghuafu) gathered in Yuanmingyuan and took a serious oath to protect the red regime and Chairman Mao.[1] In this secret meeting, they named themselves “Red Guards.” Due to the dissatisfaction with the Qinghuafu party committee’s lack of activism in carrying on the Cultural Revolution, on June 2^nd when Nie Yuanzi’s big character poster attacking Peking University’s party committee was published in the People’s Daily, a poster advocating the absolute authority of Mao was also posted in Qinghuafu with the signature “Red Guard”. This poster was visited by thousands of students and signed by over a hundred students following that “Red Guard” signature. Soon, in most middle schools in Beijing, Red Guard organizations were set up in this first week of June.[2] Politically enthusiastic high-level cadre children controlled this organization and saw it as a chance to establish their status and fulfill their ideals.

In the universities, students had been mobilized before Liu Shaoqi’s work teams entered the respective campuses. Starting on June 3^rd, in order to supervise the Cultural Revolution, work teams were sent to universities in Beijing and to most provincial universities by early July on the orders of the Central Committee;[3] however, the work teams hardly put the students under control. They were attacked in both the capital and the provincial universities. Moreover, work teams became the targets of the Beijing middle schools’ Red Guard organization too[4]. The antagonisms of the students led to the work team’s Anti-Interruption movement. As a result, in July, a great number of students were labeled “rightists”.[5]

In sum, in this first phase of the Red Guard Movement, only the students of Beijing middle schools had formed Red Guard organizations. Based on class lines and led by children of high level cadres, these Red Guard organizations were centered in the elite schools and very exclusive.

Red Guard Factions in Universities and Middle Schools: August to December, 1966

In the universities, students’ different attitudes toward the introduction of work teams led to the formation of opposing factions. However, Beijing middle schools’ Red Guards were able to maintain their solidarity despite having different ideas regarding work teams. In late July, Mao withdrew the work teams and reinstated the radical students. Moreover, after reading the three proclamations of the Qinghuafu Red Guards,[6] Mao wrote an enthusiastic letter on August 1^st expressing his “strongest support” for these Red Guards. Consequently, Red Guard organizations developed rapidly in all the universities and middle schools of China.

University students were divided because of their strongly different attitudes toward the already withdrawn work teams and the Cultural Revolution Preparation Committee that the work teams had helped to establish. In universities the formation of the Red Guards was also the beginning of factionalism. On August 1^st and August 2^nd, the first pair of antagonistic university Red Guard organizations was established at the Beijing Construction Institute.[7] Soon, in early August, most of the universities developed two factions of Red Guards.[8] The one that supported the work teams were “conservative” Red Guards, while the other that opposed the work teams were “rebels”. Gradually, the rebel Red Guards were winning in the universities.

As for the middle schools outside Beijing, with the help of Beijing students, they formed Red Guard organizations similar to those in the capital.[9] The “bloodline couplet” played an important role in organizing middle school students. Using the bloodline theory as its organizing principle, Red Guard organizations were dominated by cadre children in the provincial elite high schools.[10] The division in the provincial middle schools did not develop until the “September Storm” of attacking the municipal government when the government was not able to support these Red Guards. Thus, the cadre students were divided internally, and the attack on Tan Lifu and the “bloodline couplet” in October gave middle class students a chance to rise up and join the movement. With the help of the rebel faction in the universities, this new group of students called themselves “rebels” and vilified the old red guards composed of cadre children as “conservatives”. However, the work teams did not change the Red Guards in Beijing. Beijing’s middle schools were still under the absolute control of high cadre students. They formed three Picket Corps; with strong support from some central leaders such as Zhou Enlai, this armed force kept dominating the middle school students in Beijing.

The Development of the Red Guard Factions: After January, 1967

With their parents being, or on the verge of being purged, the high level cadre students sensed the urgent political situation. To maintain their power and prestige, they undertook a last stand of counterattack—United Action (Liandong). However, Liandong was devastated at the end of 1966, and those old Red Guards leaders who had initiated the movement were put into prison. It was only after the fall of Liandong in the spring of 1967 that the students who had been excluded from the Red Guard organizations began to organize their organizations 4.3 and 4.4.[11] Around this time, Guangzhou’s middle school factions were developed under other political circumstances. In 1967 after the January power seizure, Guangzhou was placed under military control. The subdued high level cadre children were revived with the support from the military; they resumed the practice of the bloodline principle and participated in this new struggle.

In universities, after the rebels controlled the school, students within the rebels began to form independent groups. Just as Hinton’s description of Qinghua University suggests, these groups did not differ from each other in their principles or rhetoric that they followed, nor was there a class background determining the composition of the groups; it was just egoism that led them to fight.[12] This fighting continued till the workers propaganda team entered the campuses.

The Development of the Sociological Interpretation

The sociological interpretation can be traced to 1970 when Dai Hsiao-ai and Liu Guokai wrote their memoirs right after the Red Guard movement. Both memoirs indicate a class line interpretation. Liu Guokai, as a son of a “middle class” functionary, joined the rebel Red Guards to break the dominance of the privileged in the unequal social system.[13] While Dai Hsiao-ai, as a five-red-class worker, also joined the rebel groups; in his memoir, however, he also clearly realizes how the famous bloodline couplet had changed and formalized the Red Guard organizations.[14] These memoirs keep reminding us of the importance of the blood theory, indicating its factual influence in people’s life.

In the 1970s when Red Guard materials were highly insufficient, foreign scholars began their theoretical speculations of this movement, seeking to find a conceptual tool in understanding it. One article by Hiroki Kato represents the speculations of this time. In this article, he argues that in order to find the origins of the Red Guard movement, it is possible and essential to separate it as a certain event from the larger movement, the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guard movement “has its own meaning in and of itself.”[15] By separating it from the changing political circumstances, he believes that the actions of the Red Guard were under a rationale that can interpret the madness of these young people. In this way, he traces the rationale in the Communist Youth League (CYL) which “furnished opportunities for young Chinese to express their energy, idealism, and concerns;” and the education system where “the political and social concerns of Chinese youth were expressed.” The very high percentage of children from the five-black-class in higher education before the Cultural Revolution discouraged those five-red-class students who were supposed to have more benefits, and put them on the defensive.[16] Moreover, the recruitment of many other classes in the CYL exacerbated their despair. Consequently, all this pre-Cultural Revolution despair put the five-red-class on the defensive and they began the Cultural Revolution. Being surprised about how early this educational institutional perspective was proposed, one has to say that to a large degree, the arguments offered by later empirical studies in the 1980s were still based on this conceptual tool, but did not surpass it.

Following this institutional conceptual tool, “the definitive English-language contributions of the 1980s were based exclusively on interviews with former high-school Red Guards in Guangzhou.”Guangzhou.” They move a step further to show that the students’ divergent interests had come to the surface in high schools preceding the Cultural Revolution in Guangzhou. Basically, the conflicts among students came from the increasingly difficult prospect of moving upward, and were exacerbated by the shifting criteria for university admission and Youth League recruitment, in which class background was the most crucial influencing variable after 1962.[18]

Unger’s sixth chapter of Education under Mao has a similar argument. He argues that after recognizing the intense struggle in the school system, one can easily understand the movement and the pattern. He points to the fact that, first, in the initial phase of the movement in middle schools, students with military and high cadre family background took over the leadership of the student body. They were opposed to the “emphasizing performance” movement of Peng Zhen. The Cultural Revolution offered them new opportunities to give vent to the tensions aroused in previous years. For example, on June 13, at the request of cadre children, the college entrance examination was abolished.[19] Second, after the repudiation of work teams and the change of targets to the Capitalist roaders, the middle class had a chance to participate and they later formed the major opposing factions. The middle class children held better grades and the revolutionary cadre children held the purest origins. Thus, they satisfied the respective standard of the previous education system and formed balanced competitive groups; now, this relationship was carried on in the Cultural Revolution.[20] Third, what is remarkable in Unger’s Guangzhou case is that although the middle class students made up the majority of the rebels, it was the revolutionary cadre children who first established the rebel groups. Unger argues that even this could be explained by previous contests in the education system. Their divergent approaches were rooted in their experiences before the Cultural Revolution: local party cadre and middle-class students both stressed performance, and military children stressed bloodline. In the Cultural Revolution, the local civilian cadre children, carrying on previous grievances built up their independent group as rebel Red Guards which later was comprised of many middle class children. To conclude, Unger believes that the division into factions in the first year of the Cultural Revolution in Guangzhou was tightly rooted in the previous education system.

Focusing on the Red Guard instead of education, Rosen actually provides a very detailed study of the Red Guard movement. First, Rosen differs from Unger and Chan in that he traces the sequence of how the movement was formed. He particularly notices the behavior of those students who had a good background but joined the rebels, but unlike Unger, he treats it as a trade-off among different groups under the new political circumstance. Second, he notices the different timing when the bloodline theory worked, i.e., in the first and the last phase in Guangzhou the old conservative Red Guards had more chances to adhere to the bloodline theory and take actions, but in the second period they were attacked and subdued. Third, more strongly, Rosen emphasizes the geographic locations of the schools, which, in addition to the bloodline origin, also affected students’ choices in joining different divisions of the Red Guard groups. Finally, Rosen stresses university leadership in the factional divisions in Guangzhou middle schools.

However, in his conclusion, Rosen ignores all the above considerations of the movement in different areas and periods, and falls into a generalized sociological explanation made in his earlier jointly written paper: “our evidence from the rest of urban China points, we believe, to trends similar to those in Guangzhou and leads to the same general conclusions.”[21] Thus, this overgeneralization actually forms a “sociological” interpretation and makes it problematic and a target of other scholars.

Political Interpretation

The overgeneralization of the “sociological” perspective indeed undermines Rosen’s efforts in positioning timing, geography, and a detailed analysis in his argument, thus failing to account for the dynamics of the Red Guard movement. This then becomes the point where Walder attacks this perspective. Walder argues that factions emerged when student activists from similar social background responded differently to the political signals. It was these initial responses that made students split into the opposing sides, which exposed them to unforeseen risks when the movement took unpredictable turns.[22] The division was rooted in the political interactions in the early phase of the conflict, but not in the group interests of different social divisions. Factions struggled to justify earlier actions and avoid being wretched political victims.

Based on the materials in Beijing, Walder especially focuses on the college students whose different attitudes toward the work teams were the major reasons for their division. However, he excludes other factors based on people’s different origins, and argues that their political response was the sole reason contributing to the formation of the factions. But this is not true even in Qinghua University where the contrast of attitudes toward the work teams seemed to be the sharpest. In Qinghua, Liu Shoqi’s daughter Liu Tao, He Long’s son He Pengfei and other high level cadre children who detested the rigid “revisionist education line” rose up first. On June 7^th, they put out the first poster in Qinghua University attacking the Party secretary Jiang Nanxiang.[23] In addition, in Beijing Industrial University, Tan Lifu’s faction was also based on their emphasis on the bloodline theory. These examples show that actually there were small factions built up in universities based on the bloodline principle.

In addition, Walder fails to explain the behavior of Beijing middle schools’ Red Guards. In the work team period, “there had indeed been students in high schools that had cooperated with the work teams.”[24] These students were also the children of high officials. With Mao’s personal approval for the more rebellious factions in August 1966, these high official children who had once cooperated with the work teams switched to join the rebels and started criticizing the work teams. However, in November, it was also these students who, when discovering that their parents were soon to be purged, made their final move, forming the Liandong. At that time, having received a very clear political signal from Chairman Mao, why didn’t they just do the same as they did in August? In their actions there was a hidden theme that helped shape their strategy. The final stand of these students was an attempt to maintain the old status quo that they had once enjoyed. When their parents could no longer protect them, they had to count on themselves, at the price of being opposed to Chairman Mao.

Therefore, the old structure, though implicit, still formed a habitus so that people’s behavior could not be explained solely by their political rationality to follow the signals. The structure that was established before the Cultural Revolution indeed played a role in determining their actions. Walder said, “Social position can be a guide to political action only to the extent that there is continuity and coherence in circumstances when people conceive the consequences of their actions.”[25] However, the habitus actually made the students behave in an unconscious way.

Conclusion

In my view, the sociological interpretation and the political interpretation had more similarities than differences: both noticed the important role of the work teams in determining the university students’ choices; and, even Walder notices that blood line had its role in the movement. In addition, both Rosen and Walder mentioned the important political circumstances that made the factions disappear or survive.

Both of them have a problem in overgeneralizing their arguments. Walder, who successfully explains the factions in the universities, does not succeed in making sense of the Beijing middle school students, who indeed kept sticking to the status quo even when the political situation changed. However, Unger and Rosen’s argument is valid only under the following specific conditions: elite schools, senior highs, and particularly in the first and the third period. When they turn it into a general rule, it cannot adequately explain other situations. I would prefer to see a combination of political and sociological perspectives.

Another very disappointing similarity is the failure of both to improve on the conceptual tools. When understanding the bloodline, as a political label, they all equalize it with social status. Using Walder’s words, it is a “politically shaped social class.” However, the same social class also includes different economic status, a very important dimension that could determine one’s reaction and the social resources one could depend on when a crisis occured. Actually, in recent studies scholars have improved their conceptual tools when analyzing these factors, just as Zang Xiaowei did in his Children of the Cultural Revolution.

In his studies on children’s lives in Maoist China, Zang relies on four concepts: class, caste, adaptation and subgroup. For him, class is the analytical foundation. He defines it in terms of income, occupational prestige and social status: “These three elements constitute an important dimension of social stratification with profound impact on political behavior.”[26] And Zang asked: “what is the relation of socioeconomic status and political behavior?”[27] Caste is defined by Zang according to family political status, i.e., the five good classes, five black classes and the middle classes. Zang chooses this word because it is “inheritable and an important determinant in employment, education, marriage.”[28] Though other scholars adopted the Chinese usage of good class and bad class, Zang still thinks that the distinction between caste and social economic class is important. His third concept is crisis and adaptation: “Crisis challenges customary interpretations of relation…and brings about a disruption of habitual ways of life, gives stimuli that arouse consciousness of self and others;” adaptation “involves a redefinition of self and others, the clarification of life goals and struggles to achieve control over outcomes…The adaptive potential also refers to the resources he or she can mobilize in dealing with a particular habit.”[29] Finally, Zang adopts the concept of subgroup in the assessment of variations in family life and political behavior in the Cultural Revolution. Subgroups are formed by dividing Chinese families within each political status category (i.e., the blood line) into different socioeconomic groups with three subgroups, upper, middle, and lower, within each caste. Thus, the use of “subgroup” enables one to see how socioeconomic status and political status were associated and determined one’s life.

This inclusion of the economic dimension and adaptation into our analysis is crucial. In the Cultural Revolution, Chinese people neither lived according to the political caste they belonged to, nor the changing political situations they faced. In other words, people’s lives were not simply determined by their bloodline labels, but were more determined by their economic situations; also, people did not just try to adjust to political circumstances like mere careerists, but many of them had the self-consciousness. There were clear-headed people, who thought, lived and acted in a sober way. These were people who dared to criticize and think critically. All these factors affected their choices and life.

Presently, the conceptual tools concerning the factionalism debate are still quite undeveloped. Moreover, both the sociological and the political interpretation generalize their own partial truth and ignore other parts of the story. The study of the Red Guard still needs more advanced conceptual tools and more careful examination of the historical materials.

References

Bennett, Gordon A., Ronald N. Montaperto. Red Guard: The Political Biography of Dai Hsiao-ai. Gloucester, Mass: Anchor Books, 1980. The book was originally printed by Doubleday & Company, Inc, 1971.

Chan, Anita, Stanley Rosen, and Jonathan Unger. “Students and Class Warfare: The Social Roots of the Red Guard Conflict in Guangzhou (Canton).” China Quarterly 83 (September 1980): 397-446.

Hinton, William. Hundred Day War: The Cultural Revolution at Tsinghua University. New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1973.

Jiang, Pei. Hongweibing Kuangbiao. Zhengzhou: Henan Reming Chubanshe, 1994.

Kato, Hiroki. “The Red Guard Movement: Its Origin.” Asian Forum 5, no. 2 (1973): 79-110.

Liu, Guokai. Ed. Anita Chan. A Brief Analysis of the Cultural Revolution. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, Inc, 1987.

Rosen, Stanley. Red Guard Fac). Boulder: Westview Press, 1982.

Unger, Jonathan. Education Under Mao: Class and Competition in Canton Schools, 1960-1980. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

Walder, Andrew G. “Beijing Red Guard Factionalism: Social Interpretations Reconsidered.” The Journal of Asian Studies 61, no.2 (2002): 437-471.

Zang, Xiaowei. Children of the Cultural Revolution. Oxford: Westview Press, 2000.

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[1] Jiang Pei, Hongweibing Kuangbiao, (Zhengzhou: Henan Reming Chubanshe, 1994), 8.

[4] Especially in the elite schools, such as Girls’ School Affiliated to the Beijing Normal University, Qinghuafu, and the No. 25 middle schools, attacked the work teams with big posters. Jiang,

[5] For example, Beijing’s Kuai Dafu, Guangzhou’s Gao Xiang, and the Beijing middle school’s Red Guard leader Li Dongmin.

[6] The three proclamations are: to rebel is justified, work teams are revisionists, and it was necessary to destroy old thoughts, culture, and habits. Jiang, 34.

[12] William Hinton, Hundred Day War: The Cultural Revolution at Tsinghua University (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1973).

[13] Liu Guokai, Ed. Anita Chan. A Brief Analysis of the Cultural Revolution. (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, Inc, 1987).

[14] Bennett, Gordon A., Ronald N. Montaperto. Red Guard: The Political Biography of Dai Hsiao-ai. (Gloucester, Mass: Anchor Books, 1980.)

[15] Hiroki Kato, “The Red Guard Movement: its Origin”, Asian Forum vol. 5 no. 2 (1973) 81.

[16] One figure of July 1966 showed that more than 50 percent of the college students of Peking were from the “ex-exploiting class.” Ibid, 84.

[17] Andrew G. Walder, “Beijing Red Guard Factionalism: Social Interpretations Reconsidered.” The Journal of Asian Studies 61, no.2 (2002): 442.

[18] Anita Chan, Stanley Rosen, and Jonathan Unger. “Students and Class Warfare: The Social Roots of the Red Guard Conflict in Guangzhou (Canton).” China Quarterly 83, (September 1980): 397.

[19] Jonathan Unger, Education Under Mao: Class and Competition in Canton Schools, 1960-1980. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 112.

[26] Zang Xiaowei, Children of the Cultural Revolution (Oxford, Westview Press: 2000) 6.