THE FORMER RED GUARD

For many people in China today, the Cultural Revolution conjures up images of young students dressed in green army jackets, wearing red armbands, waving copies of Mao's Little Red Book and chanting “Long live Chairman Mao!” Known to the world as “Red Guards,” those young rebels raided schools and government agencies, intent on beating up their teachers, intellectuals, and government officials whom they believed were straying from Mao's revolutionary line. Between 1966 and 1976, the upheaval led to the deaths of millions of Chinese citizens.

Liu Weidong joined a Red Guard group when he was a high school student in Zhongjiang County, Sichuan Province. He now lives in Chengdu.

LIAO YIWU: When did you become a Red Guard?

LIU WEIDONG: I think it was in the summer of 1966. That was the year when Chairman Mao launched “the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution.” It was his view that the Communist revolution, which had taken over China in 1949, was starting to lose its impetus. Many Party bureaucrats focused too much on developing China's economy and were deviating from socialism. More important, Mao, who was then seventy-three years old, believed that his senior colleagues were trying to seize power from him. So he enlisted the support of college and high school students, who immediately rallied around him.

LIAO: According to history books, many radical students began to turn on their teachers, administrators, and Party officials, attacking them for spreading capitalist and bourgeois ideas. In Beijing, students began to wear armbands, calling themselves the “Red Guards”—the defenders of Chairman Mao and vanguards of the new revolution.

LIU: Yes. The concept of the Red Guards spread quickly around the country. Students in Sichuan caught on very fast.

LIAO: There were many factions within the Red Guard organization in Sichuan. Which faction did you join?

LIU: I joined the Army of Revolutionary Rebels group, a county-level Red Guard faction. All the nationally famous Red Guard organizations were based in big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. At the county level, the Red Guards were merely a group of young rebellious hicks. But the Army of Revolutionary Rebels was an exception. We were precocious politically, even though most of us were suffering from malnutrition and looked much smaller than our ages.

LIAO: Compared with today's high school students who are more obsessed with MP3 players and pop music than with the Communist revolution, you guys were really precocious.

LIU: We had no choice. If you didn't pledge to support Chairman Mao, you would be accused of going against history. As you know, our parents who had gone through previous political campaigns all told us that the only way to survive in China was to listen to the Party. So, within a few weeks after the Cultural Revolution started, we were all mobilized. We didn't need to register or get approval to form a Red Guard organization. We would just get our buddies together, come up with a revolutionary name, and have it carved on a rubber or wooden stamp. Then we would go buy some red armbands, get a big red flag, and declare ourselves a Red Guard group. In Lanting County, over a hundred Red Guard organizations were formed within a week.

LIAO: With so many Red Guard groups, which government agency was supervising them?

LIU: None. The county Communist Party branch had already been taken over by the Red Guards. Prominent government officials were locked up as “capitalist roaders.” Then all the Red Guard groups coordinated what we called a ten-thousand-person meeting to publicly denounce them as enemies of the people. The meeting was held at a high school playground. Every Red Guard group displayed its own red flag in front of the stage. It was quite festive. Before the meeting started, a contingent of counterrevolutionaries was herded onto the stage. Those enemies included the county chief, the Party secretary, the director of the County Cultural Bureau, the principal of the largest county high school, former landlords, Rightists, and several of our teachers. The Red Guards forced them to wear white paper dunce caps and to hang a black cardboard sign around their necks. They lined up in front of the podium, with their heads down, arms tied at the back. One after another, students went up to the podium, condemning those counterrevolutionaries for representing the Four Old Elements of society. The public condemnations lasted about four to five hours. After the meeting, Red Guards paraded those counterrevolutionaries on the main thoroughfare. Onlookers shouted slogans such as “Down with those who take capitalist roads! Defend Chairman Mao and the Communist revolution.” Some spat on their former officials and teachers. Kids threw stones or chased them around with bamboo whips. I noticed that most of the counterrevolutionaries had bloody faces.

In that era, our passion for the revolution and our admiration for Chairman Mao were equally matched by our hatred for those whom we believed went against Mao.

LIAO: Didn't realize persecuting people could give you guys such a high.

LIU: Oh yes. In previous political campaigns, the purges were carried out under the supervision of local Communist Party officials. It was different during the Cultural Revolution. Ordinary folks turned around en masse and began to target those in power. Red Guards beat up whoever they felt were counterrevolutionaries, without worrying about any consequences. It was like catching a pickpocket on the street. Every onlooker wants to get a piece of the action, slapping or kicking the thief. The person who kicked the hardest would get the most applause. That was exactly what happened during the Cultural Revolution.

I also played a role during the ten-thousand-person meeting. My job was to stand behind Mr. Bai, our former school principal. Each time the audience shouted revolutionary slogans, another Red Guard and I would kick Mr. Bai, grab his gray hair, and push his head down farther as a sign of deep repentance. We tied a piece of metal string around his neck, with a big chunk of stone hanging at the other end. I could see the metal string cut into his flesh. Even so, we were still not satisfied and constantly searched for new ways of torturing him. Several days later, he could no longer take it. He had been moaning all day long. At night, he asked permission to use the latrine. I escorted him there and waited outside. Twenty minutes had passed; he didn't come out. So I went in. He wasn't in there. I became really nervous and immediately reported the incident to the Red Guard headquarters. They sent a dozen Red Guards over and we searched all over the latrine and there was no sign of him. While we were discussing whether to put out a most-wanted poster on the street, we heard noises coming from a well outside the latrine. One guy got a very long bamboo stick, and reached down, trying to figure out what was happening. The stick wasn't long enough and it didn't work. So the commander of my Red Guard group ordered me to go down the well myself to check it out.

With a rope tied to my waist I slipped down the side of the well. About ten meters down, I switched the flashlight on and searched the water below. There, I saw a body floating, with its face down. My hair stood on end. My ears were ringing. My body was shaking. I wanted to climb up right away. But if I didn't get the body, I knew I was going to be in big trouble. I composed myself a little bit and called the people from above. They threw down another rope with a hook. I grabbed the hook, attached it to the shirt collar of the dead body, and climbed up as fast as I could. Then people on the ground began to pull the other rope. Halfway up, the shirt collar broke and the body plummeted back into the water like a heavy deepwater bomb. The commander ordered me to go down a second time. After I pulled the body out, we found out it was Mr. Bai. His body was covered with bruises. There was a belt tied to his neck. He seemed to have been choked to death, rather than drowned. Poor Mr. Bai! He was born into a family of rich and conservative intellectuals in the 1940s, when China was still ruled by the Nationalists. While he was in college, he joined the underground Communist Party. After graduation, he went to teach at high schools in the rural areas. He used teaching as a cover to mobilize peasants to rebel against the Nationalist government. After the Communist takeover, he was appointed the principal of a high school in our county. Many times, he turned down promotions and opportunities to work in big cities. When the Cultural Revolution started, we accused him of forcing students to learn Western science and technology.

News of Mr. Bai's death spread fast. It was a mystery, and nobody knew how he managed to sneak out of the latrine and end up down in the well. I was there guarding the latrine. How could he try to kill himself by hanging and then jump into the well? Could it be that he was murdered? Someone must have choked him to death and then threw him into the well. But what was the motive? He was already declared the enemy of the people, and had been punished with severe beatings. Why would anyone bother to kill him?

LIAO: Mr. Bai disappeared “under your watchful eye”? Didn't the police interrogate you?

LIU: Not really. All they did was ask me to write down what I had seen. They quickly reached a conclusion: suicide to escape punishment. In those days, it was very common to see students beat their teachers to death. So, if an accused capitalist was tortured to death, nobody cared. There was another school principal, who was elected as a model Communist leader before the Cultural Revolution. He was a famous horticulturist. He planted many fruit trees inside the school campus and converted the school into an orchard. He had students go to classes in the morning, and assigned them to work in the orchard in the afternoon. For a while, he was a celebrity in the area. People from all over the country came to visit his school. In 1967, his students smashed the farming tools and accused him of being a capitalist, because he had sold the fruits at the local market to fund his school. They locked him up in a classroom. Each time there was a public meeting, he would be the target for condemnation. After the Red Guards got tired of torturing him at public meetings, they forced him to run around the rice paddies every day. That went on for about six months. One day, while he was running, he plunged right into the rice paddies and never got up. He died of exhaustion. The Red Guards were really mad that he had been sent to hell so fast. They pulled his body out and dragged it over to the school auditorium. There, they had another public denunciation meeting before they reported his death to the county. In those days, many of the Public Security Bureaus were paralyzed. Nobody was in charge. Nobody dared to question the case. If they had, they would have been accused of siding with the enemy. It was a lawless society. The words of Chairman Mao were the ultimate law of the land.

It was a crazy time. Even elementary school students were mobilized to rebel against their teachers. Some girls grabbed their female teachers and shaved half of their hair off, calling it the “Yin and Yang” hairstyle. On the street, you would constantly see children carrying Chairman Mao's Little Red Book and a red sword made of wood. They would stop adults on the street, asking them to recite Chairman Mao's quotations. If they made one mistake, the children would stab their back with the wooden sword, and force them to start from the beginning. If they continued to make mistakes, children would report them to the Red Guards, and that person could be charged with “forgetting Chairman Mao's words.” If the adult became defensive and refused to admit guilt, he or she could end up getting slapped in the face.

LIAO: I remember that. Looking back, those Red Guards were really like the Nazis. The Cultural Revolution reminds me of the killing of Jews during World War II or the purges under Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union.

LIU: That's an exaggerated statement. Initially, many of those “capitalists” were beaten up because they wouldn't admit their guilt and attempted to argue with us. As time went by, they became very obedient. If you accused them of being a spy, they would nod their heads and agree with everything you said. So the beatings became less severe. Then we moved our targets to something else. We began to declare war against the old religious temples, which Chairman Mao called “feudalistic and superstitious strongholds.” Lanting was a small county, but there were many Buddhist temples, filled with statues and art objects. We first burned scriptures, books, and paintings. Then we used hammers to smash the smaller statues. With large statues, we borrowed rock drills to bore holes in their bodies, and then we smashed their heads off. There was a huge Buddhist statue carved on the cliff of a mountain. We went up there, trying to get rid of it with rock drills but couldn't reach it. One guy managed to get some explosives. That sucker ended up blown into pieces. After the statue was gone, we painted in red a big slogan on the rocks nearby: “Long Live the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution. Long Live Chairman Mao.”

There were also lots of funny tales during that time. Some junior monks in a monastery decided to form a Red Guard rebel group. They tore off their kasayas and donned Mao jackets. With their shaved heads, those monks looked very comical. Our group even sent some representatives over to show moral support. The monks dragged the abbot out of the temple, pulling the prayer beads from around his neck, and then replaced the beads with a black cardboard sign. They paraded the abbot and several nuns on the street and had a public denunciation meeting. One monk went up to the podium and accused the abbot of spending too much time reading Buddhist scriptures. They recommended that the abbot should read the revolutionary works of Chairman Mao. Another monk said he once purchased a picture of Chairman Mao from the store and wanted to put it up in the main prayer hall. But the abbot rejected his request by saying that Chairman Mao was not a god, just an ordinary human being. While the young monk was recounting this episode, tears welled up in his eyes. He walked up to the abbot and slapped him in the face. He then raised his arm, shouting: Down with the abbot, the filial descendant of China's leading capitalists. He then turned around to the nuns and shouted: Sister Liu [the senior nun in the temple] is the capitalist's concubine. Down with Buddha, the representative of feudalistic superstitions.

LIAO: That was ridiculous. Didn't you ever think that you guys had gone too far?

LIU: I was born into a family of blue-collar workers. The Cultural Revolution offered me the opportunity to finally trample on those elite. It was glorious. I couldn't get enough of it. My youth, my dream, and my passion were all associated with the Cultural Revolution. The most exciting moment in those days was to see Chairman Mao in person, when he greeted millions of Red Guards in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.

LIAO: Tell me how you ended up going to Beijing to see Chairman Mao.

LIU: Between 1966 and 1967, Red Guard organizations around the country started a nationwide movement to travel and spread Mao's words to the masses. The final destination for the Red Guards would be in Beijing so we could get a glimpse of our Great Leader. My friends and I formed a “Long March Red Guard Touring Group.” We walked hundreds of kilometers to the city of Chengdu. All the hotels in the city had opened up to us. The city had even turned the theaters into youth hostels because there weren't enough hotels to accommodate all the Red Guards. Since we were one of the earliest groups, we managed to get into a nice hotel. All we had to do was to show our Red Guard badges and we could eat and live for free. During the day, we would go out to the local market to buy or swap pins and badges of Chairman Mao. By the way, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, every region and every company designed and produced its own Chairman Mao pins and badges. They became collector's items.

Not long after, we all became bored with Chengdu and decided to board the train for Beijing. When we showed up at the station, the Beijing-bound trains were quite full. My buddies and I climbed in through the windows. Each car was dangerously packed: people lay on the baggage racks or under the seats; many simply stood back-to-back in the aisles. It was hard to breathe. Despite the hard conditions, none of us wanted to get off. It was already September. We had heard that Chairman Mao would greet the Red Guards one more time that year. There was no way we would miss it.

The train finally moved haltingly, but half an hour later, it stopped. Then it moved again. There was no schedule to follow and the train just took its time. Each time the train stopped, the heat inside the cars would become unbearable. But we didn't dare to drink water because there was no access to toilets, which were filled with people who couldn't find a space. We could only use the toilet when the train pulled into a station. Many girls ended up peeing in their pants. When guys couldn't hold it, some simply squeezed close to the window, took out their stuff, and then aimed at the outside. During those desperate moments, everyone was so understanding.

Believe it or not, we were on the train for over forty-eight hours before we finally arrived in Beijing.

We slept inside a classroom at an elementary school. On the night before Chairman Mao's appearance, we were so excited that we couldn't sleep. At about 3 a.m., we put on our green Red Guard jackets and walked for about eight kilometers toward Tiananmen Square. By the time we got there, the main road had already been cordoned off by police. We had to walk around and follow the crowd to another entrance. Tiananmen Square, which is about 440,000 square meters, was fully packed with Red Guards. I looked around and saw a sea of green uniforms and red flags, which were waving in the early morning breezes. Everyone felt so proud, anticipating the most exciting moment to come.

We stood in the square from early morning until noon. Finally Mao emerged in the tower over the Gate of Heavenly Peace. Instantly, the square became alive with the deafening sounds of slogan shouting. We waved red flags and the Little Red Book, crying and chanting, “Long live Chairman Mao.” Mao took off his green army cap and waved it in his hand. Through the microphone, he shouted back, “Long live the people.” You wouldn't believe the excitement that the Great Leader had generated. We felt the Great Leader and the people were one. We stayed in Tiananmen Square for several hours under the hot sun, jumping and screaming. Our adrenaline was running high. Many of us lost our voices and couldn't talk for several days afterward. We were so euphoric, happy, and blissful.

LIAO: Do you still have the same euphoric feeling you had then?

LIU: No, but I still cherish those memories. I will never forget them. We were so pure and innocent.

LIAO: What do you mean you were pure and innocent? Beating up your teachers, smashing ancient relics, and engaging in armed fights among the various Red Guard groups, those were not the doings of pure and innocent people.

LIU: We were fighting for our beliefs. We were defending Chairman Mao and the Communist revolution. Anyone who obstructed the revolution deserved to be punished. Today, most people no longer have any spiritual aims. Money is everything and people are killing one another for money. Women sell their bodies for money. Corrupt officials sacrifice their principles and violate laws for money. A son can strangle a mother to death to get her money. Money corrupts the soul of this country. Where are the Communist ideals and beliefs? Oh well, my generation was so passionate about Communism. We gave up schooling to engage in the revolution. Later on, when Chairman Mao encouraged high school graduates to settle down in the countryside to receive reeducation from peasants, we followed Mao's holy words, bid goodbye to our parents in the city, and left without any hesitation. In other parts of the world, people in their teens and early twenties were learning science, technology, arts, and literature in colleges. In China, we wasted our younger days plowing and planting in the rice paddies. Now that the Mao era is long gone, people of my generation have become a bunch of useless simpletons. Those capitalists, who used to be the target for persecution, are now ruling the world. The Chinese government calls itself a socialist country, but it has gone full-blown capitalistic. As I have told you, since people like me didn't get to go to college when we were young, we have become the first ones to be laid off. Compared with many of my fellow Red Guards who are still stuck in the countryside, poor and neglected, I'm pretty lucky. At least I have managed to move back to the city.

LIAO: What's your status now?

LIU: The company I work for used to be state-owned. It's been insolvent for years, but the government subsidized it. With the current market reform, the government has abandoned state enterprises. My company is on the verge of bankruptcy. Half of the people in my company have been laid off. I work in the human resources department and have managed to stay on. But life is just going downhill day by day. I've been told that a private developer has expressed an interest in buying the company, demolishing the old factory buildings, and building luxury residential houses. Who knows what will happen next. I don't even dare to think about it. Oh well, so far, my life has been a total failure and a waste. I'm already forty-nine. If I lose my job, I can't see myself starting all over again. It's too difficult.

During the Cultural Revolution, I remember we felt we were invincible and aspired to save the whole world with Communism. I would never have imagined that I could end up like this half a century later. I can't even save myself.