The history of China during the 20th Century has been defined by internal conflict: first with China falling under Japanese control before the Second World War, second with the nationalists and communist uniting to overthrow that Japanese control. Eventually Chiang Kaishek and the Chinese Communist Party engaged in a civil war in which the nationalist government was forced to flee to Taiwan, but the internal feuding did not end there. Within the Communist Party there were many disagreements, between those who agreed with Mao Zedong, and those that did not. It was those disagreements that eventually led to Mao catalyzing the 100 Flowers Movement, the Anti-Rightist Campaigns, and eventually the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
The most effective of these campaigns - in terms of mass mobilization - was the Chinese Cultural Revolution of late 1965. The Cultural Revolution had four phases, according to Hong Yung Lee, the author of The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: A Case Study. Those phases are (1) the politics of bureaucracy in October 1965, (2) the redefinition of conflict in August 1966, (3) the politics of the masses in December 1966, and (4) the politics of factionalism in August 1967 until April 1969. Each of these phases changed the way in which the conflict unfolded across the Middle Kingdom, but the most interesting factor of study throughout the Cultural Revolution was the reaction of the people and how they were involved. How was the Red Guard formed? How were they motivated to do the things they did? And did things get out of hand?
Hung Yung Lee’s The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution surmises that the Red Guard formed out of Mao Zedong Thought, but split from distinctive definitions of class. Red Guards were eventually formed by mobilizing university students, and they spread out from there. Mao’s views were endorsed by the 11th Plenum of the CCP, but were opposed by Liu Shaoqi (Lee 64). In response to the Plenum Mao’s wife, Jiang Jing, and the Cultural Revolution Small Groups began making large “Character Posters” to bring Mao Zedong Thought to the mainstream. Mao sent letters of support to the students of Tsingshua University on August 1, 1967, and in response three days later Maoist students there and at Beijing University organized rallies (Lee 65). Mao was tired of the bureaucratic politics the party had created, and Lee writes:
The implication was unmistakable: the party leaders, particularly Liu [Shaoqi], were to be criticized. (66)
Mao and Jiang used the Cultural Revolution Small Groups, and Mao’s popular appeal to their advantage. “… Mao wore a Red Guard armband when he attended the first big mass rally” (Lee 67) as a visual show of support. This image had popular appeal, and soon the movement spread.
On August 20, Red Guard activities spread to Beijing streets and beyond the University walls (Lee 67). The party, wanting to control this movement, tried to redefine the conflict. Zhou Enlai announced the “policy of ‘great exchange of experiences,’ the main vehicle that carried the Red Guard Movement from [Beijing] to the periphery and enabled Maoist leaders in [Beijing] to establish direct contact with the local student groups” (Lee 68). The government allowed free travel for students across the country to spread party ideals and party unity. They wanted stability more than anything else and saw this as a unifying opportunity to create a high level of nationalism. “When the transportation facilities could no longer accommodate all the Red Guards, they embarked on a ‘Long March’ on foot” in emulation of the Long March led by Mao Zedong fleeing from Chiang Kaishek’s Nationalist army (Lee 68). As the students spread throughout the country, the movement grew larger and larger.
Eventually however, there arose disagreements in ideologies between Red Guard members, and different factions arose. “The only officially recognized guide for [the Red Guard’s] actions were the Thought of Mao [Zedong] and the ‘Sixteen Articles.’ Both, however, were ambiguous on many important questions, and the most important issue of all – class line – was completely ignored by the ‘Sixteen Articles’ and was subject to conflicting interpretations in Mao’s Thought” (Lee 68). It is widely believed that “[class] is the most crucial concept in Communist doctrine…” and two factions of Red Guard arose out of two different interpretations of class (Lee 68).
Should class be determined economically, or by “various social ‘groupings’ according to a ‘wide variety of standards’”? The second justified the attack on the party organization itself, allowing those without power to attack those that did using the doctrine of class struggle as legitimization. It also allowed the children of bourgeoisie to claim “proletarian class consciousness” and be participants in the Cultural Revolution (Lee 69). According to Lee, “During the Cultural Revolution, the Maoists flatly declared: ‘Class is not only an economic concept; more important, it is a political concept’” (Lee 70). This went in line with Mao’s earlier dissentions from traditional communist thought; like his use of the peasants as his revolutionary base instead of the urban working class in traditional Marxist thought. The Red Guards who believed this became known as the Radical Red Guards and were made up of the masses.
The opposing group was more conservative in their approach, and consequentially became known as the Conservative Red Guards. “The conservatives followed the economic interpretation of class, thus attempting to turn the whole movement against the remnants of the bourgeoisie” (Lee 71). As such, they did not allow people of “bad revolutionary backgrounds” to obtain membership in their faction and gave leadership roles to children of cadres and revolutionaries. This created an elitist structure to the Conservative Red Guard perpetuated by local students throughout China, even more so because of the children of cadres being “… the most privileged group in China prior to the Cultural Revolution” (Lee 82). Local kids wanted to join a Red Guard faction, but since they didn’t exactly know how they relied on those with revolutionary family backgrounds to take the lead, giving them more power and control (Lee 72).
The struggle grew between the Radical Red Guards and the Conservative Red Guards. “… [The] students with ‘bad’ family backgrounds displayed more enthusiasm and a true ‘rebel spirit,’ whereas the children of cadres protected the Party Leaders and thus stood on the conservative side” (Lee 77). One group supported the party, the other Mao Zedong’s reforms. The conservatives restricted membership to students from the “Five Red Categories”, and declared themselves:
… [The] sons of workers, poor and lower-middle peasants, revolutionary cadres, revolutionary army cadres, and revolutionary martyrs… Who created history? Who pushed society toward progress …? Who conquered the world? Our five-red-categories parents have done these things. (Lee 86)
They therefore justified rightful heirs to leadership among the party and masses, and took on the elitist ideology. The conservatives and elites made the majority of students, forcing the radicals to rely more upon outside support, but their only support came from Jiang Jing’s Cultural Revolution Small Group and from Mao himself (Lee 99).
The populace began to grow tired of the elite however: “The dominance of the children of cadres and their tendency to use the simplistic class line to protect their vested interests came into conflict with Mao’s concern about the trend toward restratification of the Chinese society” (Lee 93). They Red Guards began attacking the Four Olds in an effort to break from old bourgeois and feudalistic thoughts. Items representing old customs, old habits, old culture, and old thinking were taken from people’s homes and destroyed.
According to Lee, the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was marked by the cyclical rise and fall of each group, despite Mao’s continuous efforts to mitigate the conflict and obtain he best from both” (Lee 99). The struggle between the Radical Red Guards and their Conservative counter-parts ebbed and flowed in a devastating ideological conflict. The Radicals were underdogs, “but they successfully managed to challenge the conservative majority as the official line on the controversial issues gradually swung in their direction” (Lee 109).
Historian Paul Clark approached the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guards in a different way. Clark focuses more on public appearances, propaganda, film and the arts in his analyses. Mao Zedong’s public appearances played a large role in mass mobilization throughout the country and appeal of the Red Guard.
The start of the Cultural Revolution saw young people answering Mao Zedong’s call to rise up against the establishment (excluding himself) by organizing themselves into Red Guards. … On the several occasions when he appeared before millions of adoring Red Guards and other young people in [Tiananmen] Square, Chairman Mao was often in an army uniform. (Clark 52)
Mao’s wardrobe choice was not accidental, Clark would say. Instead it was a purposeful choice used to mobilize the Red Guards into action.
When people began to attack the four olds in order to purify Chinese society, art and film were also criticized:
A rebel group calling itself the “Red Army”, made mostly of film professional cadres, and other groups presumed to pass judgment on the pre-Cultural Revolution films… Examining the standing of directors, scriptwriters, actors, and others. Labels such as “serving the revisionist black line in literature and art” were applied to those judged wanting in proper revolutionary credentials. Such people were sent to do physical labor at a May Seventh Cadre School… (Clark 121)
And as old music and art were eventually shunned away, Red Guards and others participants in the Cultural Revolution began creating their own art for the new era. New “highly charges, somewhat clumsy songs” that contained Red Guard rhetoric dominated the airwaves in 1967 and 1968 (Clark 239). These songs, along with the behemoth Character Posters, were a propaganda campaign used to motivate the masses.
What about the Red Guard’s effect on the individual? Liang Heng shares his personal account in his story “A Personal Experience of the Cultural Revolution”. He reminisces back to his school days where his teacher urged his class to “take out [their] notebooks an ‘open fire’” against the “insidious ‘black’ intellectuals” that were trying to oppress them (Heng and Shapiro 379). Heng and a few friends formed their own Red Guard unit with support from their local newspaper. They began criticizing their teachers and school with satirical cartoons and posters that they copied from other character posters around their town (Heng and Shapiro 379-380). When travel was made free for college students and the more revolutionary teachers and middle school students, Heng and a few friends decided to go on a “Long March” of their own. Many other Red Guards had the same idea. Heng described it as if “Suddenly… China had been turned into a nation of soldier-actors, at least so far as the young people were concerned. We were to re-create for ourselves the hardships suffered by the Red Army more than thirty years before…” (Heng and Shapiro 381).
It was a very symbolic trip for Heng, in which he and his comrades were “… turning [themselves] into worthy inheritors of the torch of Revolution by journeying to the very spot where it was first lit” (Heng and Shapiro 382). The symbolism and indoctrination did not stop at the mere journey however; Heng was given a uniform and costume in order to more easily identify with Mao and the Red Army.
My proudest moment was when Peng Ming pinned on my Red armband, not a makeshift paper one, but one of the finest red silk, with the shining snow-white words “Red Guard” painted onto it. Then he attached a beautiful chairman Mao button on my jacket, a noble yellow profile with metallic red rays emanating from it and Tiananmen Square in red relief below. I think I grew ten inches. (Heng and Shapiro 382)
Along his travels, Heng saw where peasants had painted slogans on there houses like “ONLY 750 LI TO THE JING GANG MOUNTAIN and REVOLUTION TO THE END” making Heng and his comrades feel like they were participating in a “common pilgrimage.. Being pulled inexorably toward some sacred moonlight” (Heng and Shapiro 383). But Heng came to a realization about the peasants and their motivations:
They [the peasants] were treating us so warmly because they adored Chairman Mao for driving out the landlords and he had told them to welcome us; but they really didn’t seem to know why we were there or what was happening in the cities, nor did they really seem to care. This was disturbing to me. We were struggling to develop Communist thought and ideals, while it seemed as though they had been selfish and materialistic. (Heng and Shapiro 384)
The peasant did not seem to be revolutionary after all, and were instead motivated by the desire to own property (instead of the abolishment of it.)
Things changed when Heng returned home from his revolutionary pilgrimage. Different factions of Red Guards began criticizing Heng’s father as being “worse than capitalism, fiercer than the KMT, more dangerous than revisionism” (Heng and Shapiro 386). His father was an editor of a local paper, and many viewed him as an elitist and defender of the party, making him an elitist and target of the radical Red Guards. Heng’s own sister joined up with the Red Guards and began attacking old monuments and other relics of the “Four Olds”. Eventually Red Guards raided Heng’s home and burnt all of his father’s books, ransacked the home, and took his father’s paycheck for that week. Heng’s father told his children:
… Whatever you do please remember to be careful what you say. Never give your opinion on anything, even if you’re asked directly. Just believe Chairman Mao’s words, they’re the only thing that seems reliable anymore. (Heng and Shapiro 394)
Heng’s family was eventually sent to a rural village for re-education, where they were to gain true class consciousness by hard work in the fields. Heng’s once pristine vision of the direction of his country had turned sour and dim. China had become corrupt in its ideology. “The Cultural Revolution,” Heng says, “lost all connection with its original crackdown on anti-socialist elements, now long forgotten. A civil war was going on, with each side claiming to love Chairman Mao better than the other, to be protecting his revolutionary line against the policies that threatened it. Both sides were willing to die for the right of power under Chairman Mao’s name” (Heng and Shapiro 394). The Cultural Revolution had spun out of control.
The Red Guard originally formed from a group of students who criticized the party under Mao’s motivations in an attempt to purify the party. In the end the Red Guard split over the definition of class, with each claiming Mao’s favor over the other. The party tried to direct the people with campaigns against the “four olds” and redefining the conflict, but the pot quickly boiled over into civil war as the opposing factions armed themselves and started killing each other. What had started as student groups among the children of cadres and universities split off into gangs of radical Maoists who took drastic action in order to prove themselves “revolutionary.” But did China benefit from this movement? It is hard to tell. Certainly there is less criticism of the government after this era. Censorship increased and people were afraid to be critical of Mao and the Party. People would act like Heng’s father and would never give their opinions on anything. The right of dissent had been squashed.
Works Cited
Clark, Paul. The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Heng, Liang and Judith Shapiro. "A Personal Experience of the Cultural Revolution." China: Yesterday and
Today. Ed. Molly Joel Coye, Jon Livingston and Jean Highland. 3rd Edition. New York: Bantam
Books, 1984. 378-400.
Lee, Hong Yung. The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revoltuion: A Case Study. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1978.
The most effective of these campaigns - in terms of mass mobilization - was the Chinese Cultural Revolution of late 1965. The Cultural Revolution had four phases, according to Hong Yung Lee, the author of The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: A Case Study. Those phases are (1) the politics of bureaucracy in October 1965, (2) the redefinition of conflict in August 1966, (3) the politics of the masses in December 1966, and (4) the politics of factionalism in August 1967 until April 1969. Each of these phases changed the way in which the conflict unfolded across the Middle Kingdom, but the most interesting factor of study throughout the Cultural Revolution was the reaction of the people and how they were involved. How was the Red Guard formed? How were they motivated to do the things they did? And did things get out of hand?
Hung Yung Lee’s The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution surmises that the Red Guard formed out of Mao Zedong Thought, but split from distinctive definitions of class. Red Guards were eventually formed by mobilizing university students, and they spread out from there. Mao’s views were endorsed by the 11th Plenum of the CCP, but were opposed by Liu Shaoqi (Lee 64). In response to the Plenum Mao’s wife, Jiang Jing, and the Cultural Revolution Small Groups began making large “Character Posters” to bring Mao Zedong Thought to the mainstream. Mao sent letters of support to the students of Tsingshua University on August 1, 1967, and in response three days later Maoist students there and at Beijing University organized rallies (Lee 65). Mao was tired of the bureaucratic politics the party had created, and Lee writes:
The implication was unmistakable: the party leaders, particularly Liu [Shaoqi], were to be criticized. (66)
Mao and Jiang used the Cultural Revolution Small Groups, and Mao’s popular appeal to their advantage. “… Mao wore a Red Guard armband when he attended the first big mass rally” (Lee 67) as a visual show of support. This image had popular appeal, and soon the movement spread.
On August 20, Red Guard activities spread to Beijing streets and beyond the University walls (Lee 67). The party, wanting to control this movement, tried to redefine the conflict. Zhou Enlai announced the “policy of ‘great exchange of experiences,’ the main vehicle that carried the Red Guard Movement from [Beijing] to the periphery and enabled Maoist leaders in [Beijing] to establish direct contact with the local student groups” (Lee 68). The government allowed free travel for students across the country to spread party ideals and party unity. They wanted stability more than anything else and saw this as a unifying opportunity to create a high level of nationalism. “When the transportation facilities could no longer accommodate all the Red Guards, they embarked on a ‘Long March’ on foot” in emulation of the Long March led by Mao Zedong fleeing from Chiang Kaishek’s Nationalist army (Lee 68). As the students spread throughout the country, the movement grew larger and larger.
Eventually however, there arose disagreements in ideologies between Red Guard members, and different factions arose. “The only officially recognized guide for [the Red Guard’s] actions were the Thought of Mao [Zedong] and the ‘Sixteen Articles.’ Both, however, were ambiguous on many important questions, and the most important issue of all – class line – was completely ignored by the ‘Sixteen Articles’ and was subject to conflicting interpretations in Mao’s Thought” (Lee 68). It is widely believed that “[class] is the most crucial concept in Communist doctrine…” and two factions of Red Guard arose out of two different interpretations of class (Lee 68).
Should class be determined economically, or by “various social ‘groupings’ according to a ‘wide variety of standards’”? The second justified the attack on the party organization itself, allowing those without power to attack those that did using the doctrine of class struggle as legitimization. It also allowed the children of bourgeoisie to claim “proletarian class consciousness” and be participants in the Cultural Revolution (Lee 69). According to Lee, “During the Cultural Revolution, the Maoists flatly declared: ‘Class is not only an economic concept; more important, it is a political concept’” (Lee 70). This went in line with Mao’s earlier dissentions from traditional communist thought; like his use of the peasants as his revolutionary base instead of the urban working class in traditional Marxist thought. The Red Guards who believed this became known as the Radical Red Guards and were made up of the masses.
The opposing group was more conservative in their approach, and consequentially became known as the Conservative Red Guards. “The conservatives followed the economic interpretation of class, thus attempting to turn the whole movement against the remnants of the bourgeoisie” (Lee 71). As such, they did not allow people of “bad revolutionary backgrounds” to obtain membership in their faction and gave leadership roles to children of cadres and revolutionaries. This created an elitist structure to the Conservative Red Guard perpetuated by local students throughout China, even more so because of the children of cadres being “… the most privileged group in China prior to the Cultural Revolution” (Lee 82). Local kids wanted to join a Red Guard faction, but since they didn’t exactly know how they relied on those with revolutionary family backgrounds to take the lead, giving them more power and control (Lee 72).
The struggle grew between the Radical Red Guards and the Conservative Red Guards. “… [The] students with ‘bad’ family backgrounds displayed more enthusiasm and a true ‘rebel spirit,’ whereas the children of cadres protected the Party Leaders and thus stood on the conservative side” (Lee 77). One group supported the party, the other Mao Zedong’s reforms. The conservatives restricted membership to students from the “Five Red Categories”, and declared themselves:
… [The] sons of workers, poor and lower-middle peasants, revolutionary cadres, revolutionary army cadres, and revolutionary martyrs… Who created history? Who pushed society toward progress …? Who conquered the world? Our five-red-categories parents have done these things. (Lee 86)
They therefore justified rightful heirs to leadership among the party and masses, and took on the elitist ideology. The conservatives and elites made the majority of students, forcing the radicals to rely more upon outside support, but their only support came from Jiang Jing’s Cultural Revolution Small Group and from Mao himself (Lee 99).
The populace began to grow tired of the elite however: “The dominance of the children of cadres and their tendency to use the simplistic class line to protect their vested interests came into conflict with Mao’s concern about the trend toward restratification of the Chinese society” (Lee 93). They Red Guards began attacking the Four Olds in an effort to break from old bourgeois and feudalistic thoughts. Items representing old customs, old habits, old culture, and old thinking were taken from people’s homes and destroyed.
According to Lee, the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was marked by the cyclical rise and fall of each group, despite Mao’s continuous efforts to mitigate the conflict and obtain he best from both” (Lee 99). The struggle between the Radical Red Guards and their Conservative counter-parts ebbed and flowed in a devastating ideological conflict. The Radicals were underdogs, “but they successfully managed to challenge the conservative majority as the official line on the controversial issues gradually swung in their direction” (Lee 109).
Historian Paul Clark approached the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guards in a different way. Clark focuses more on public appearances, propaganda, film and the arts in his analyses. Mao Zedong’s public appearances played a large role in mass mobilization throughout the country and appeal of the Red Guard.
The start of the Cultural Revolution saw young people answering Mao Zedong’s call to rise up against the establishment (excluding himself) by organizing themselves into Red Guards. … On the several occasions when he appeared before millions of adoring Red Guards and other young people in [Tiananmen] Square, Chairman Mao was often in an army uniform. (Clark 52)
Mao’s wardrobe choice was not accidental, Clark would say. Instead it was a purposeful choice used to mobilize the Red Guards into action.
When people began to attack the four olds in order to purify Chinese society, art and film were also criticized:
A rebel group calling itself the “Red Army”, made mostly of film professional cadres, and other groups presumed to pass judgment on the pre-Cultural Revolution films… Examining the standing of directors, scriptwriters, actors, and others. Labels such as “serving the revisionist black line in literature and art” were applied to those judged wanting in proper revolutionary credentials. Such people were sent to do physical labor at a May Seventh Cadre School… (Clark 121)
And as old music and art were eventually shunned away, Red Guards and others participants in the Cultural Revolution began creating their own art for the new era. New “highly charges, somewhat clumsy songs” that contained Red Guard rhetoric dominated the airwaves in 1967 and 1968 (Clark 239). These songs, along with the behemoth Character Posters, were a propaganda campaign used to motivate the masses.
What about the Red Guard’s effect on the individual? Liang Heng shares his personal account in his story “A Personal Experience of the Cultural Revolution”. He reminisces back to his school days where his teacher urged his class to “take out [their] notebooks an ‘open fire’” against the “insidious ‘black’ intellectuals” that were trying to oppress them (Heng and Shapiro 379). Heng and a few friends formed their own Red Guard unit with support from their local newspaper. They began criticizing their teachers and school with satirical cartoons and posters that they copied from other character posters around their town (Heng and Shapiro 379-380). When travel was made free for college students and the more revolutionary teachers and middle school students, Heng and a few friends decided to go on a “Long March” of their own. Many other Red Guards had the same idea. Heng described it as if “Suddenly… China had been turned into a nation of soldier-actors, at least so far as the young people were concerned. We were to re-create for ourselves the hardships suffered by the Red Army more than thirty years before…” (Heng and Shapiro 381).
It was a very symbolic trip for Heng, in which he and his comrades were “… turning [themselves] into worthy inheritors of the torch of Revolution by journeying to the very spot where it was first lit” (Heng and Shapiro 382). The symbolism and indoctrination did not stop at the mere journey however; Heng was given a uniform and costume in order to more easily identify with Mao and the Red Army.
My proudest moment was when Peng Ming pinned on my Red armband, not a makeshift paper one, but one of the finest red silk, with the shining snow-white words “Red Guard” painted onto it. Then he attached a beautiful chairman Mao button on my jacket, a noble yellow profile with metallic red rays emanating from it and Tiananmen Square in red relief below. I think I grew ten inches. (Heng and Shapiro 382)
Along his travels, Heng saw where peasants had painted slogans on there houses like “ONLY 750 LI TO THE JING GANG MOUNTAIN and REVOLUTION TO THE END” making Heng and his comrades feel like they were participating in a “common pilgrimage.. Being pulled inexorably toward some sacred moonlight” (Heng and Shapiro 383). But Heng came to a realization about the peasants and their motivations:
They [the peasants] were treating us so warmly because they adored Chairman Mao for driving out the landlords and he had told them to welcome us; but they really didn’t seem to know why we were there or what was happening in the cities, nor did they really seem to care. This was disturbing to me. We were struggling to develop Communist thought and ideals, while it seemed as though they had been selfish and materialistic. (Heng and Shapiro 384)
The peasant did not seem to be revolutionary after all, and were instead motivated by the desire to own property (instead of the abolishment of it.)
Things changed when Heng returned home from his revolutionary pilgrimage. Different factions of Red Guards began criticizing Heng’s father as being “worse than capitalism, fiercer than the KMT, more dangerous than revisionism” (Heng and Shapiro 386). His father was an editor of a local paper, and many viewed him as an elitist and defender of the party, making him an elitist and target of the radical Red Guards. Heng’s own sister joined up with the Red Guards and began attacking old monuments and other relics of the “Four Olds”. Eventually Red Guards raided Heng’s home and burnt all of his father’s books, ransacked the home, and took his father’s paycheck for that week. Heng’s father told his children:
… Whatever you do please remember to be careful what you say. Never give your opinion on anything, even if you’re asked directly. Just believe Chairman Mao’s words, they’re the only thing that seems reliable anymore. (Heng and Shapiro 394)
Heng’s family was eventually sent to a rural village for re-education, where they were to gain true class consciousness by hard work in the fields. Heng’s once pristine vision of the direction of his country had turned sour and dim. China had become corrupt in its ideology. “The Cultural Revolution,” Heng says, “lost all connection with its original crackdown on anti-socialist elements, now long forgotten. A civil war was going on, with each side claiming to love Chairman Mao better than the other, to be protecting his revolutionary line against the policies that threatened it. Both sides were willing to die for the right of power under Chairman Mao’s name” (Heng and Shapiro 394). The Cultural Revolution had spun out of control.
The Red Guard originally formed from a group of students who criticized the party under Mao’s motivations in an attempt to purify the party. In the end the Red Guard split over the definition of class, with each claiming Mao’s favor over the other. The party tried to direct the people with campaigns against the “four olds” and redefining the conflict, but the pot quickly boiled over into civil war as the opposing factions armed themselves and started killing each other. What had started as student groups among the children of cadres and universities split off into gangs of radical Maoists who took drastic action in order to prove themselves “revolutionary.” But did China benefit from this movement? It is hard to tell. Certainly there is less criticism of the government after this era. Censorship increased and people were afraid to be critical of Mao and the Party. People would act like Heng’s father and would never give their opinions on anything. The right of dissent had been squashed.
Works Cited
Clark, Paul. The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Heng, Liang and Judith Shapiro. "A Personal Experience of the Cultural Revolution." China: Yesterday and
Today. Ed. Molly Joel Coye, Jon Livingston and Jean Highland. 3rd Edition. New York: Bantam
Books, 1984. 378-400.
Lee, Hong Yung. The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revoltuion: A Case Study. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1978.
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