Chapter 24 20. How to be a Red Guard

Hundreds of thousands of Red Guards, mainly boys and girls from middle schools in the city, marched through Beijing's majestic Tiananmen Square wearing red armbands and waving the Little Red Book of Quotations from Chairman Mao.When the Red Guard movement launched in the late summer and fall of 1966, the world was shocked.By the time the Red Guards were disbanded in mid-1968, they had proven themselves to be a terrifying machine of immense destructive power.These young students admired the burly Chairman Mao very much, and responded to his call to learn revolution from revolution.On behalf of Chairman Mao, they cleared society of all old things, including old art and old ideas, all over China.I believe there has been no movement like it in the world since the Boys' Crusade.

During the two-year history of the Red Guards, their experience was painful.At the beginning, they took the "Long March" by train to all parts of the country for free, and they won friendship and enjoyed privileges wherever they went.Although they started out as scavengers and saviors of the country and its revolution, they soon joined different groups in the school, which soon split into factions and fought each other.They nominally run various public enterprises, displacing party leaders and city and factory officials.After taking charge of local government, they became interested in politics again.The factional conflict between them has once again developed from demonstrations to punching and kicking, and even the use of weapons.By the summer of 1968, many cities had been completely devastated by fighting between the Red Guards.The local armies at first just stood by and provided weapons to the Red Guards at times.Later, they were ordered to stop the fighting among the Red Guards and restore public order.Mao sadly criticized the young men involved in the fighting, accusing them of failing to live up to his expectations, and began sending them to the countryside, thus ending their harrowing stint as Red Guards.Although they "voluntarily" went to the countryside under the pressure of the collective, leaving the city and living and working like farmers is a terrible challenge for them, and it can even be said to be a devastating challenge for many.Mao Zedong launched and initially led the Red Guard movement, but it became unruly and died.

Some Red Guards in better geographical locations fled to Hong Kong and Taiwan to escape to the countryside. The book "Revenge of the Heavens" describes the personal experience of a participant.This book may be of interest to readers as it is like a piece of evidence presented in a murder case.The young author is caught between the old and the new, and is clearly at the mercy of a host of factors, including personal security, self-esteem, patriotism, disillusionment, and the hope of profiting from his book. The author, whose pen name is Ling Ken, confessed that he became a Red Guard in July 1966 and played a leading role in the Red Guard power-seizure movements in Xiamen and Fuzhou.In the second half of 1966, he visited Shanghai, Qingdao, Beijing, Northeast China, Taiyuan, Lanzhou and other places. In 1967, he also helped one faction against another in Xiamen. In the second half of 1967, the Red Guards used weapons in faction battles, and many people were killed or injured in each faction.The faction leaders were finally summoned to Beijing in February 1968 and stripped of their power.Ling smuggled into a village on Kinmen Island in July of the same year, and later came to Taiwan, wrote a 500,000-word memoir, and spent more than 300 hours being interviewed by a research team led by Ivan London.Together, the two form a book that describes a local leader's personal experience during the "Cultural Revolution."During the publication of Ling's memoirs, two interesting things happened.The first thing is that the book devalues ​​Mao and his political leadership from beginning to end: Little Red Book is just a bauble; seeing Mao doesn't leave an impression; The only question is how can they get more out of Mao, rather than being used by Mao.This certainly contradicts the evidence presented by European and other observers.According to these observers, in the early days of the Red Guard movement, millions of young people inspired by Mao reached the point of obsession and fanaticism.This kind of practice of obliterating the idealistic central driving force of the "Cultural Revolution" can obviously only be seen from Taiwan's documents.And for Taiwan, civil war is now (or was not so long ago) still a sacred expectation.

The second interesting thing about Ling's memoir is that it also includes an unlikely but very sweet love story.This reminds people of an American translator who, when translating Lao She's tragic novel (Reiner and Hitchcock Press, New York, 1945), added a bizarre plot of the boy marrying the girl.The addition of people undoubtedly made this translation a bestseller in central America.The Red Guard heroine is named Meimei, which is probably the most common name for girls in China, meaning "little sister."The heroine is a real Chinese girl: elegant, accomplished, of the upper class, very particular about life, and above all obedient to old morals.She was in love with Ling Re, and she had to spend a lot of time destroying the "four olds" everywhere, and incidents of fighting, rape, and wounding happened everywhere at that time, but the two never had sexual relations.This is really a wonderful dream girl, but she does not belong to this world.However, Ling's description of the Red Guards' gradual rise to power in his native Fujian is very realistic and moving, because in view of the whole work, this description does not need grotesque fabrications.When the party committee refused to transport the 304 young people he led from Xiamen No. 8 Middle School to Fuzhou by truck, they started marching and strictly required themselves not to eat or drink.Ten people collapsed after traveling 31km in the scorching sun.At this time, party leaders felt the need to truck them to Fuzhou.Later, during the "August 29" massacre in Fuzhou, although this Xiamen group was outnumbered, it challenged the local party leadership. "The Red Guards in Fuzhou adopted tactics of defeating each other." Ling was surrounded by six or seven girls, and was bitten, scratched and strangled by them in as many as 37 places, including his lower abdomen.Readers can feel that what Ling is talking about is his personal experience.

The violence of the Red Guards began in schools.At that time, the Red Guards put a high hat on the teachers and put them in the "black den" as "ghosts and snakes" (this was the term at the time).There are many descriptions of these people being brutally tortured and attacked in the book.We have no reason to doubt that such atrocities did occur during the riots in China.The fundamentals of Maoism were no longer working at that time.Riots became violence for violence's sake, or, as the Soviets called it, "hooliganism," rather than violence in the name of good.However, some reports believe that violence in the name of goodness is a characteristic of the "Cultural Revolution."

In the second stage, the Red Guards broke into public places to destroy the "four olds".Ling's squad at Xiamen No. 8 Middle School was divided into 22 smaller groups with various names, including the "Tiger Fighting Team" and the "Frozen Flies" team.Encouraged by Mao's slogan "It is reasonable to rebel", they began to wreak havoc in Xiamen.Shocking as they were, the atrocities they committed were widely publicized at the time.The Red Guard movement soon developed into a third phase, the purpose of which was to seize power.They organized the Red Guard Command and its special agencies, acquired jeeps, trucks, and loudspeakers, and eventually overthrew the party committee and took over part of the local government.During this period, the military did not intervene, and even the police did not shoot in self-defense.In the end, the Red Guard movement became purely factional, with one group fighting another, increasingly resorting to force.At this time, the army suppressed and disbanded the Red Guards.Described in the first person, it is both appalling and extremely spicy.

This review is mainly based on Ling Ken, Ivan Lunjiao, and Milim Lunjiao's "The Revenge of the Heavens: The Diary of a Chinese Youth" (Lunjiao, Putnam Press, 1971), published in The New York Review of Books, February 24, 1972.