Tucked away in a hidden corner of Shapingba Park in the city of Chongqing is a little-known cemetery, which buried about 400 young people who were killed in the armed battles of the Red Guard movement in 1967 and 1968. Among the 196 dead with available age information, 69 were below twenty and 66 of them were between twenty-one and thirty. The youngest was a fourteen-year-old girl. On their tombstones were inscriptions such as “Born great, died in glory” or “Long live revolutionary martyrs!”¹

In 1980, the twenty-four year-old poet Gu Cheng published a poem dedicated to those buried in this Cultural Revolution graveyard. The poem captures in a touching personal tone the tragedy of the political idealism of an entire generation. It has the following lines:

Everyone knows

it was the Sun who led you

off

to the tunes of a few marching songs,

in search of Paradise.

Later, halfway there

you got tired,

tripped over a bed

whose frame was inlaid with bullet holes and stars

It seemed as if

you had just played a game

and everything could start all over again.²

For those buried there, the game would never start over. For the vast majority who survived, the same game would not start again either. History had other things—other games—in store for them.

What made these young people, who could have been classmates, schoolmates, lovers, neighbors, or fellow factory workers, willingly engage in deadly factional warfare at the cost of their own lives? Decades of painstaking scholarship have illuminated the political and sociological conditions of these factional battles, yet scholarly views continue to be divided.

My first goal in writing this book is to bring a new perspective to the understanding of Red Guard radicalism in the 1960s. Yet instead of ending my account with Red Guard radicalism, my second goal is to use it as the starting point for tracing the longer-term biography of the Red Guard generation from the 1960s to the present. In the course of my research, it became clear to me that the biography of the Red Guard generation is also a history of political culture and political protest in modern China. History and biography are so deeply intertwined that an analysis of one cannot be separated from the other. Thus, my third goal is to offer an account of the transformation of the political culture and political protest in the People’s Republic of China. An exhaustive treatment of these three questions is beyond the scope of a single book. I have therefore adopted some analytical strategies to translate my three central concerns into manageable questions while trying to strike some balance between breadth and detail, generality and texture.

First, to understand factional violence in the Red Guard movement, chapter 1 offers a case study of Chongqing, which witnessed some of the most violent factional fighting in the country in the rambunctious 1967–68 period. The Chongqing case shows most starkly that a political culture that had consecrated the Chinese communist revolutionary tradition significantly influenced factionalism and the escalation of violence. It did so by making revolution a sacred script for youth of the Cultural Revolution to follow and enact. Despite significant regional differences, the central features of the Chongqing case may be found in other cities, suggesting that the causes of factional violence in Chongqing were not unique to the city, but had to do with the influences of forces in Chinese society at large.³

Chapter 2 broadens the scope of the analysis to examine how and why the political culture of the 1950s and early 1960s could have had such powerful influences on the Red Guard generation. While multiple factors combined to produce the effects, the central condition was the sacralization of the Chinese communist revolutionary tradition and the deliberate and sustained media campaigns to cultivate Chinese youth into revolutionary successors. This political culture worked, and could only have worked, under specific historical circumstances. These circumstances constituted the social world of the Red Guards and rebels, a world, as I will show, of enchantment and danger in the cold war context. Methodologically, as I move beyond factional violence to analyze political culture, dissent, and the sent-down and other movements that followed, this and the subsequent chapters also move beyond Chongqing.

Chapter 3 surveys the broad landscape of Red Guard dissent from 1966 to 1968 and argues that besides a commitment to revolutionary practice, a small minority of Red Guards and rebels were actively performing revolutionary theorizing. Just as factional violence was the result of practical revolutionary action, so dissent was ironically the outcome of theoretical revolutionary action. This chapter shows that the same myth of revolution that fired Red Guard passions for revolutionary practice, and led to violence, also drove their passion for revolutionary theory. And it was in the pursuit of revolutionary theory and in attempting to apply this theory to the analysis of Chinese reality that some young people began to entertain and express ideas of dissent. The proliferation of Red Guard newspapers, wall posters, leaflets, and other publications inadvertently provided the media spaces for expressing dissent, just as factional rivalry called for, and were intensified by, a war of words.

One of the key ideas of Red Guard dissent centered on the privileges of family origin. Not surprisingly, the supporters of theories of family origin were children of cadres (gan bu zi di) while their critics were children of ordinary families (ping min zi di). This chapter shows that a wide divide between the offspring of these two different types of families (gan bu zi di versus ping min zi di) surfaced in 1966–1968 in the starkest of ways and that the most sophisticated political dissent was a systematic attack against the caste system implicit in the class policies of the Chinese communist party. This was the same divide that would emerge today between ordinary Chinese and the offspring of Chinese communist leaders, now often called the “princelings” (tai zi dang) or “second-generation reds” (hong er dai), a question I will return to in the conclusion of this book.

Chapters 4 and 5 cover a longer time span, from about 1968 to about 1979, and follow the trajectories of the Red Guard generation through their years as sent-down youth. Historical circumstances decisively taught youth of the Red Guard generation that their role as characters in the grand historical drama of an imagined revolution had come to a close. With the end of that drama, the script that had guided their thinking and actions lost much of its magic. Thrust into changing circumstances, they would have to learn new life scripts—new outlooks, new values, and new moral frameworks. Chapter 4 reviews the history of the sent-down campaign and shows that the new scripts they gradually learned in their daily labor as sent-down youth contradicted and further eroded the scripts that had guided them in the Red Guard movement. In contrast to the values of the “good life” of revolution, they came to affirm the values of ordinary life and developed new understandings of “personal interest,” “class enemy,” and “the people”–indeed, of the meaning of life.

Chapter 5 shows that, during the sent-down period, members of the Red Guard generation were engaged in an underground cultural movement, which consisted of an amalgam of semiopen, underground, or surreptitious cultural activities. On the production side, there was the writing of letters, diary, poems, songs, political essays, short stories, and novels. On the reception side, the movement was about the reading, copying, and circulation of forbidden books and unpublished manuscripts, about singing, story telling, and listening to foreign radio stations. I argue that the meaning of the underground cultural movement lies in its practices of transgression and self-cultivation. In contrast to the “high” political culture of the Red Guard period, the underground culture desacralized the revolutionary culture of the earlier period and articulated a new sense of self and society through miscellaneous forms of self-writing.

Chapter 6 studies the wave of protest activities toward the end of the Cultural Revolution era, starting with the April Fifth movement in 1976 and ending with the democratic campus elections (xiao yuan xuan ju) unrest in 1980. It argues that this new protest wave was both a radical reversal of the Red Guard movement and a precursor to the student protests in 1989. As such, it represented a crucial new turning point both in the trajectory of the Red Guard generation and in the history of modern China. Insofar as the 1976–1980 protest wave marked an emergence from a historical nonage and a farewell to idolatry, it inaugurated a new era of enlightenment in modern Chinese history.

Chapter 7 studies the memories of the Cultural Revolution from the beginning of the reform era to the present. It shows that the Cultural Revolution is remembered selectively, its history broken and fragmented. A decisive factor in shaping the memories of the Cultural Revolution is the same class line, albeit sometimes in different masks, that was the locus of political struggle between “old Red Guards” (lao bing) and rebels in 1966. Post-CR memories are a field of contestation between the same forces that were at war in the Cultural Revolution, suggesting that the history of contemporary China may be read as a continuation of the history of the Cultural Revolution.

Throughout this book, I use such terms as trajectories, journey, and life course to talk about the history of the Red Guard generation. These words may convey a sense of linear progress, as if, from the time of birth, members of the Red Guard generation were destined to march toward a clear, fixed, and grand goal. For much of their youth, that was indeed the horizon and limit of their imagination. But this book is not an exercise in teleology. On the contrary, I hope it will demonstrate fully the tragic consequences of such teleologies for the protagonists of my book. By analyzing the longer history of the Red Guard generation, which will highlight the many ups and downs of the generation, I hope this book will show the futility of grand teleological perspectives for understanding history. There is neither linearity nor teleology to the trajectory of the Red Guard generation, or perhaps other political generations in other times and places.

Ultimately, as I will argue in the conclusion, the historical transformation of the Red Guard generation was full of paradoxes. For the protagonists of my story, the history of a generation was nothing less than a history of perpetual disruption of personal lives. Yet remarkably, amidst these endless disruptions, they retain a sense of optimism and hope up to the present day.

In what follows I will first discuss why I use the term the Red Guard generation and who belongs to it. Then I will review the state of art in the study of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and outline my theoretical approach.

Defining the Red Guard Generation

According to Karl Mannheim’s sociology of generations, a sociological generation comes into being through shared historical experiences. Among members of a generation, as Mannheim puts it, “a concrete bond is created . . . by their being exposed to the social and intellectual symptoms of a process of dynamic de-stabilization.”4 Thus the same age cohort may produce different sociological generations if it is exposed to different historical experiences. Within a generation, different “generational units” may be differentiated due to differences in social location.⁵

The Red Guard generation refers to members of the age cohort born around 1949 who experienced the Red Guard movement. This was the first age cohort raised and educated after the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Its most significant formative experiences were the Red Guard movement. The core of this generation, totaling about 10 million, was in middle school in 1965 on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. If we count the elementary school population in 1965, which was less likely to be directly involved in Red Guard activities, but not unlikely to be sent down, then the number reaches 120 million.6 The Red Guard generation also included students in colleges and universities in 1966–1968, which numbered at 674,000 in 1965. Xu Youyu estimates that the total size of the Red Guard generation was between 10 and 30 million.⁷

At least two generational units may be identified within this generation—those that experienced only the Red Guard movement and those that experienced both the Red Guard movement and the sent-down movement. Most students in colleges in 1966–1968 did not experience the sent-down movement. Students in junior and senior high schools (or middle schools) in 1966–1968, however, experienced both. This second demographic group was by far the larger of the two generational units in sheer numbers. Often called the “old three classes” (lao san jie), it also has a more distinct generational identity than the first group. For the most part, however, my study of the Red Guard generation comprises both groups without treating them separately. Many youth who were sent down in the second part of the 1970s were too young to have experienced the Red Guard movement; strictly speaking, they do not belong to the Red Guard generation.

The Red Guard generation has variously been called the lost generation,⁸ the thinking generation,⁹ the disillusioned generation,¹⁰ the zhiqing generation,¹¹ the lao san jie,¹² the Red Guard generation,¹³ and the Cultural Revolution generation. I use Red Guard generation, because this term captures the first major transformative event of this generation, the Red Guard movement. To be sure, the same generation also experienced the sent-down movement and is often called the “educated-youth” or sent-down generation. Yet, as a formative experience, the Red Guard movement was the first and decisive watershed in its history. I have chosen not to use the term Cultural Revolution generation because there is no consensus among scholars as to the exact periodization of the Cultural Revolution. Chinese official historiography considers the Cultural Revolution a ten-year disaster lasting from 1966 to 1976.¹⁴ While many scholars follow this convention, others contend that the Cultural Revolution lasted only from 1966 to 1969, a periodization that coincides with the Red Guard movement.¹⁵

The term Red Guard movement is used here by convention more than with precision. I use it to refer to the three years from May 1966 to July 1968, even though it may be more precise to speak of the period from May to October in 1966 as the Red Guard movement and the later stage as the zaofanpai, or rebel, movement. When the children from elite cadre families in Beijing first launched the Red Guard movement, they expressed a clear sense of ownership—that the movement was theirs and that only students who met their criteria could join Red Guard organizations. Those who did not meet their criteria were not only excluded but could also become the target of their attacks. In this sense, the Red Guard movement was their way of showing that they were the true heirs of the Chinese communist revolution. In contrast, the rebels who gradually dominated the Red Guard movement after October 1966 often identified themselves as zaofanpai rather than “red guards,” a distinction that former rebels still maintain today.

In a broad sense, China’s Red Guard generation may be viewed as part of a global 1960s generation. Almost everywhere, from France to the United States to Brazil,16 this generation found itself in the middle of radical social movements. There was mutual awareness among youth revolutionaries in different nations, and to all of them, Mao and the Chinese Cultural Revolution offered new ways of imagining the world. Although my book focuses exclusively on the trajectories of the Chinese Red Guard generation, I hope that a recognition of the global context of youth agitation in the 1960s will help to avert making China’s Red Guard generation appear too exceptional, however extraordinary the generation’s trajectory might be. Even their violent performances of a revolution, studied in chapter 1, are not so unique as to be without international parallels. As Richard Wolin notes, Italy’s Red Brigades and Germany’s Red Army both “embraced the (erroneous) Marxist view that bourgeois democracy and fascism were natural political bedfellows” in their strategy of using violence to “unmask” the fascist character of the state, whereas, in France, “from the outset the Maoists had emulated [my emphasis] the comportment of the disciplined, professional revolutionaries vaunted in Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?”¹⁷

Two Levels of Analysis

The long-term trajectory of the Red Guard generation presents several analytical difficulties. Theories for explaining the Red Guard movement, for example, may not be as applicable to the sent-down campaign. And studying these major historical events is different from studying the memories of the generation in the twenty-first century. My analysis is thus conducted at two levels.

First, at the general level, this book studies the transformation of the first political generation that came of age in the People’s Republic. I conceptualize the trajectories of the Red Guard generation as a ritual process lasting from birth around 1949 all the way to the present. In this process, the Red Guard movement was a decisive liminal event, and what came later were different forms of reaggregation and routinization, as well as varieties of new beginnings and new liminal events.

In Victor Turner’s anthropology of the ritual process, the liminal is the second phase of a three-stage ritual process. The first stage separates the ritual subject from previous structural conditions. The second stage, the liminal, is antistructural, where the ritual subject redefines his or her identity under conditions that have “few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state.”18 The final stage of aggregation marks the subject’s settling back into society. The process of reaggregation may also be considered as one of routinization according to Max Weber’s sociology of charisma and routinization. The transformation of China’s Red Guard generation thus has two central analytical components. One is the “ritual” practices in the liminal stage, the other is the stage of routinization.

Second, and at the more concrete level, I identify and analyze specific events within the protracted ritual process. The analysis in the individual chapters takes place at this concrete level (but without neglecting the broader framework) and draws on theories and concepts about the specific issues dealt with in the individual chapters. Thus the study of factional violence in chapter 1 is informed less by theories of the ritual process and more directly by theories of social movements and collective violence, especially theories of performance for explaining collective action. Similarly, the analysis in chapter 2 draws on theories of embodied memory and the invented tradition in explaining how political culture shaped Red Guard behavior, while later chapters introduce still other concepts appropriate for my analysis.

The Red Guard movement being the most crucial event in the shaping of the Red Guard generation, I use most of the remaining space in this introduction to discuss the scholarship in this area and outline my own analytical perspective. At the end of this introduction, I return to the notion of routinization and briefly outline the trajectories of the Red Guard generation in the decades after the Red Guard movement.

Studies of the Red Guard Movement

The Red Guard movement occupies a central place both in the life course of the Red Guard generation and in the history of popular protest in modern China. Since studies of it are often mixed with studies of the Cultural Revolution, my review will include both types of works.

An earlier tradition studies the Cultural Revolution from the perspective of political culture,19 but, as Lowell Dittmer points out, these studies tend to conceive of political culture as a conservative force resistant to change, “functioning to reinforce the persistence and equilibrium of the system.”²⁰ Reconceptualizing political culture as a system of symbols rather than values, Dittmer examines how participants in the Cultural Revolution used symbols to inform and guide their action. He argues that the bipolar structure of political symbolism, of good versus evil and light versus darkness, both legitimated the expression of popular grievances and unleashed tendencies toward polarization and anarchy. His analysis, however, focuses on the interactions between elites and the masses without differentiating either or showing how political symbolism affected factionalism.

Mao’s role in the Cultural Revolution was an elephant in the room. While some scholars continue to emphasize Mao’s role,²¹ others turn to the social origins of factionalism. Studies of factionalism in Guangzhou middle schools find that Red Guards and rebels were divided along the lines of class interests formed prior to the Cultural Revolution.²² Perry’s and Li’s study of labor factionalism in Shanghai finds three different modes of activism (rebellion, conservatism, and economism) and explains each mode by emphasizing one of three factors—psychocultural, social network, and social interest.²³ The linguistic and rhetorical dimensions of the Cultural Revolution have also attracted some attention, although these aspects are seldom tied directly to factional violence.²⁴

In his study of the Cultural Revolution at Tsinghua University, Andreas shifts attention from factionalism to unity by asking what united a rebel movement consisting of individuals with weak organizational ties such that it could overturn the entrenched power of local party organizations. His answer is that the rebel movement derived its power from charismatic mobilization. Andreas’s insightful study, however, may have overestimated the unity of the rebel movement and the clarity and coherence of the charismatic mobilization efforts. In fact, in most provinces, after overthrowing local authorities in the “power seizure” in early 1967, the rebel movement split from within itself. Two rival factions grew out of the same rebel faction, and the most violent phase of the Red Guard movement was between these new rivalries.25 This factional violence is similarly not the focus of Yiching Wu’s recent book. Focusing on bottom-up grievances and discontent, Wu views the protests in the Red Guard movement as expressions of a longing for equality and democracy, without considering the causes of rampant violence between rebel factions.²⁶

Rejecting social explanations, Andrew Walder proposes a political explanation. In his prolific studies of factionalism in universities in Beijing and Nanjing, Walder argues that what mattered was not class interest or family origins, but the choices people made under the uncertain conditions of the initial period in June 1966. He finds that individuals in similar structural positions often made opposed choices because of the ambiguity of the contexts and the political signals from above, and the different choices they made bound them to antagonistic factions.²⁷

Together, these theories have significantly contributed to our understanding of the complexities of the Red Guard movement and the Cultural Revolution. The question of faith and belief, as well as their associated passion, however, is understudied. Yet, as Michael Dutton writes of the violence inflicted on the “enemy within” in Chinese revolutionary history, “the excesses are, in the main, not the result of nonbelief—the cynical deployment of smoke screens to hide true egoistic intentions which usually relate to the gaining or maintaining of power—but are produced as an effect of believing in the cause too much. In this way moral zealousness expresses itself in a semiotics of tyranny.”²⁸ In the conceptual language I will adopt in this book, as I will explain, this amounts to saying that the moral zealousness of the Red Guards and rebels performed itself in a drama of revolutionary violence.

Theories of Collective Violence

Collective violence encompasses a great variety, from brawls and duels to looting, riots, and violence in revolutionary situations. In the field of social movements and contentious politics, collective violence refers to “those repertoires of collective action that involve great physical force and cause damage to an adversary to impose political aims”²⁹ Collective violence has a distinctly political character and is therefore sometimes referred to as political violence.³⁰ Patricia Steinhoff and Gilda Zwerman define political violence as “deeply contested actions, events, and situations that have political aims and involve some degree of physical force.”³¹

Charles Tilly outlines a relational approach to collective violence, arguing that the combination of a small number of relational mechanisms such as brokerage and boundary activation can explain all the main types of collective violence from violent rituals to brawls and duels.32 The relational approach, however, underestimates the role of ideas, emotions, and ideology in collective violence. As Jeff Goodwin puts it, a preference for relations over ideas is problematic, because “the possibility that social interactions might themselves be structured and shaped by cultural beliefs, habits, and ‘structures of feeling’ is largely ignored.”³³ Donatella della Porta similarly directs attention to the “mediating processes through which people attribute meaning to events and interpret situations,” although she also stresses the role of state repression.³⁴

While Tilly opts for a relational approach, he did not reject the role of ideas. In fact, Tilly acknowledged his teacher Barrington Moore’s insights about how religious ideas of purity led to violence. The centrality of ideas and ideology is evident in studies of a broad spectrum of historical phenomena, from revolutions and nationalism to religious and ethnic violence, student radicalism, and terrorism.³⁵

Richard Drake’s study of left- and right-wing terrorism in the Italy of the 1970s shows the power of ideological beliefs behind those radical movements and traces their roots to the 1960s. Drake writes about one of the founders of the Red Brigades in Italy, Alberto Franceschini, who, in his memoir, Mara, Renato e io, emphasizes his ideological itinerary, beginning with the communist indoctrination he had received as a young boy:

The fabled exploits of Gramsci, Togliatti, Lenin, and Stalin took the place of fairy tales in the Franceschini home. His grandfather, one of the first in Reggio Emilia to join the PCI, had fought as a partisan in World War II and never forgave Khrushchev for de-Stalinizing Communism. Alberto took his political bearings from this adored grandfather. As a young man in the 1960s, he moved from the increasingly mainstream Communist party to the outer fringes of the extraparliamentary left. Franceschini believed he was keeping faith with communism’s true Bolshevik traditions by modernizing them to meet the needs of contemporary Italy’s revolutionary situation. In helping to found the Red Brigades, Franceschini hoped to participate in a new Resistance, one that would finish the work of regenerating Italy left undone by the partisans of 1943–1945. All the Red Brigadists, he wrote, were “drug addicts of a particular type, of ideology. A murderous drug, worse than heroin.”³⁶

Works on nationalism show that sacred categories like the nation could inspire collective violence. Benedict Anderson argues that nationalism arose at a time when religion was on the decline. Thus the nation took the place of the divine in the imagination of the people. The willingness to kill and die for the nation was a willingness to sacrifice for the sake of the divine.37 Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle argue that American patriotism is a civil religion organized around a sacred flag, whose followers engage in periodic blood sacrifice of their own children to unify the group.³⁸ The violent side of modern nationalism is thus inseparable from its sacred character. Indeed, in René Girard’s work on violence and early religions, violence is identical with the sacred. It is through violence that the sacred is engendered. The category of the sacred demands sacrifice.³⁹ The relationship between the sacred and violence is also examined in John Hall’s comprehensive study of apocalyptic violence. He finds that both religious and secular movements had an apocalyptic character. Puritans and Jacobins alike treated violence as a sacred vehicle in their fervor to build a kingdom of God on earth. Although Hall finds a great variety of the apocalyptic from the ancient world to the present, his book suggests that the apocalyptic imagination, and the violence that comes from it, is a universal category.⁴⁰

Also affirming the centrality of the sacred in collective violence, Mark Juergensmeyer’s study of terrorism emphasizes the symbolic and performance character of violence. He argues that religious terrorism is not just tactics, but rather, “like religious ritual or street theater, they are dramas designed to have an impact on the several audiences that they affect.”⁴¹ The scripts for this performative violence are none other than sacred religious texts about cosmic war.

Stuart Kaufman develops a theory of symbolic politics to explain ethnic violence. By symbolic politics, he refers to “any sort of political activity focused on arousing emotions rather than addressing interests.”⁴² The core assumption of symbolic politics is that “people choose by responding to the most emotionally potent symbol evoked.”⁴³ The most potent symbols, such as national flags, sacred temples, and certain social values, have a mythic and sacred quality. Although Kaufman analyzes the role of elites and opportunities, ultimately he maintains that mythic hatreds and fears are sufficient to produce violence.

The divide between what Tilly calls the “relation people” and the “idea people” is a variation of the objectivism and subjectivism dichotomy much critiqued in social theory.⁴⁴ A cluster of theoretical articulations hinging on the notions of performance, practice, ritual, and cultural pragmatics in developments in cultural sociology offers promising ways of bridging the divide.45 A theory of performance built on the assumption of social action as meaningful action oriented to an audience integrates relations and ideas into one coherent model, which I will outline in the following section.

A Performance Theory of Collective Violence

The dramaturgical approach in sociological analysis comes from a simple idea, captured in a Shakespearean monologue beginning with the lines “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players.” By comparing social activities to dramaturgical action and people to dramatic personae, sociologists focus their analysis on actors performing to an audience.⁴⁶

The idea of people performing for an audience raises questions about the authenticity of the performance and the gap between performance and reality. Some may argue that performances are inauthentic by their very nature, that they are mere appearances. Although Goffman’s work rejects such a gap by denying there is a reality beyond performance, his analysis of the management of self-presentation conveys a strong sense of strategic motivation.⁴⁷ Recent sociological work on performance, however, underscores the fusion, or inseparability, of performance and reality by analyzing performances as rituals. In this view, performance, like rituals, is constitutive of reality.⁴⁸ In my analysis of Red Guard performances, I will make no claims about their authenticity or inauthenticity. What matters are the causes and effects of their performances. Red Guards proclaiming their resolve to die for the revolution may be doing so out of a deep and sincere commitment to the revolution, or it may be completely phony. What matters is why such utterances seemed to have gained such powerful influence over both the people who uttered them and their audience. An analysis of the origins of this symbolic power is essential for understanding their impact on the radicalization of collective violence.

A basic element of performance is the script. For Robert Benford and Scott Hunt, “Scripts are not rigid texts that movement participants are required to follow. Rather, they are interactionally emerging guides for collective consciousness and action, guides that are circumspect enough to provide behavioral cues when unanticipated events arise yet sufficiently flexible to allow for improvisation.”⁴⁹ Scripts do not preclude possibilities for improvisation and creativity. Thus Bernhard Giesen argues that “as detailed as the script may be, there is always space for varying interpretations and creativity—no theatrical performance will exhaust the meaning of a dramatic text completely and no theatrical performance can entirely be reduced to the script. Like constitutive rituals theatrical performances, too, allow for contingencies.”50 Similarly, David Apter argues that political theatre “is not mimetic of the world around it but an aspect of the world itself.” It may be theatrical and entertaining, as is often the case with political campaigns, but it may also be deadly, especially when words, symbols, and scripts become sacred and are “blown up to virtually biblical proportions.” Apter continues:

In the past the most disjunctive and theatrical political events involved ideologies of nationalism, socialism, or other doctrinal alternatives. Today the emphasis is on ethnic and religious or sectarian forms of nationalism and identity. Incorporated into narratives and texts, the language itself is revelatory. Reconstructed in the form of a drama engaging in mythological exercises, political theatre in this sense can lay claim to embodied truths that become more true the more they transcend ordinary reason, to become at the extreme the justification of self-immolation and martyrdom.⁵¹

Later we will see how for Red Guards and rebels in Chongqing, performance was their reality.

The performance of a script takes place in concrete contexts and in often fluid processes. The contexts, such as a theater or a public square, give reality and meaning to the show. The processes of a performance involve multiple characters, including audiences, in interaction. Although they may be more or less predictable, there are always contingencies. Improvisation is an essential part of acting.

When applied to political performances such as political violence, the script may be interpreted broadly as political culture or narrowly as political symbols and myths (as in Kaufman’s symbolic politics). Contexts may be structural or cultural and may include class relations, organizational affiliation, regional histories, national politics, and even international relations. Process is interactive and relational and may include political opportunities and the mutual influences of different types of actors. With the notions of context and process, therefore, a performance theory of collective violence integrates the social and political explanations of Red Guard factionalism with key elements in cultural theories of nationalism, ethnic violence, and political violence such as Kaufman’s theory of symbolic politics.

In the first three chapters, a performance theory is used to explain the causes and consequences of Red Guard violence. But what about the trajectories of the Red Guard generation after the Red Guard movement? As chapter 3 shows, the sacred script that had led to violence had paradoxically also led to dissent. The holy script of revolution achieved its pinnacle in the Red Guard movement, but it also reached its point of exhaustion. What happened in the years after the Red Guard movement was a process of desacralization of the holy script and the emergence of new values and practices.

The Routinization of Liminality

To conceptualize what happened to the Red Guard generation after the Red Guard movement, I return to Turner’s notion of the ritual process. What happened to the violent political passions after the Red Guard movement was brought to an end in July 1968? The “drama” of the Red Guard movement had ended, but history would thrust the Red Guard generation through one new drama after another.

Presumably, the stronger the liminal effects of the Red Guard movement, the more difficult it will be for the participants to forget about those experiences and move on to new lives. We will see that this is true to the extent that members of the Red Guard generation never seem to have left their past behind. Their memories of it have accompanied them all the way to the present.

Nevertheless, in the long run, personal biographies inevitably confront new historical forces, and new conditions will complicate the impact of an early experience. Thus to understand the long-term biographical impact of the Red Guard movement requires an extension of the concept of liminality.⁵²

In the reaggregation stage of the ritual process, the ritual subjects settle back to society. But Turner stops short of showing exactly how this process happens, essentially assuming that it is a natural, unproblematic process. Weber’s analysis of the routinization of charisma becomes useful here. With the routinization of charisma, he argues, “Only the members of the small group of enthusiastic disciples and followers are prepared to devote their lives purely idealistically to their call. The great majority of disciples and followers will in the long run ‘make their living’ out of their ‘calling’ in a material sense as well.”⁵³ Combining Turner’s concept of the liminal process with Weber’s concept of routinization, I will use the notion of the routinization of liminality to conceptualize the history of the Red Guard generation in the decades after the Red Guard movement.

Weber emphasizes the centrality of economic interests in routine life in the process of routinization: “The process of routinization of charisma is in very important respects identical with adaptation to the conditions of economic life, since this is one of the principal continually operating forces in everyday life.”54 Adapting to the conditions of economic life is an “affirmation of ordinary life.” Weber pointed out that the rational achievements of Occidental monasticism were seemingly irreconcilable with its charismatic, antieconomic foundations, although in fact it followed the same logic of the routinization of charisma.

This logic of the routinization of charisma was evident among China’s Red Guard generation. The difference was one of content. The Red Guard movement partly resulted from an idealism underwritten by sacred beliefs in charismatic endowments.⁵⁵ This idealism was linked culturally to the Confucian vision of an autonomous moral self and historically to the nationalistic aspirations of China’s twentieth-century revolutionary youth.⁵⁶ It affirmed ideals similar to those embodied in the Aristotelian concept of “good life” and held in contempt, if only implicitly, the values of ordinary life. A major development in the life course of the Red Guard generation is the transformation of political idealism into an affirmation of ordinary life, although, as I will show in later chapters, a sense of idealism has persisted.

The Sent-Down Experience as a New Beginning

Coming after the Red Guard movement, the sent-down period was a process of routinization. The radicalism of the Red Guard movement had receded; everyday life became more of a routine. Yet the everyday life of the sent-down period had its own radical meaning for sent-down youth, because it turned out to be more of an ordeal than they had ever dreamed of. In that sense, the sent-down experience was the beginning of a new ritual process with profound new influences.

Within the framework of the performance of a sacred revolutionary tradition, the sent-down period proved to be a process of desacralization. The revolutionary romanticism that fired Red Guard radicalism hit the reality of rural labor. Subsistence struggles on a daily basis brought new interests, values, and human relations to the fore. The more intellectually bent sent-down youth turned to books, reading, note-taking, and other cultural pursuits for mental nourishment, doing so in an environment of cultural and material impoverishment. Chapters 4 and 5 offer an account of these activities, revealing a profound albeit quiet shift in the way the generation imagined the world and their own role in it. Without such a shift, the new wave of protest in 1976–1980 would barely be imaginable. Representing the Red Guard generation’s emergence from a historical nonage and a farewell to idolatry, that new wave of protest may rightly be called China’s new enlightenment, the “old” enlightenment being associated with the May Fourth movement.⁵⁷

The significance of the sent-down experience as another defining moment in the trajectory of the Red Guard generation may also be seen from another angle. Although full of pain and hardship, that experience became a fountainhead of nostalgia and memory ever since sent-down youth returned to the cities. It became a part of their self-identity as much as, if not more than, the Red Guard experience.

For many people, the Red Guard experience remains a powerful memory, so much so that, beginning in the early reform period, the party-state instituted a whole system aimed at controlling the history and memory of the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guard movement. Leaders of zaofanpai, after enjoying fleeting moments of glory in 1966–68, lost out in the political struggles of the Cultural Revolution. When the Cultural Revolution came to an end, they were thrown into prison and never given an opportunity to defend themselves or tell their side of the story until after they had served their prison time or retired. Chapter 7 analyzes the context in which these former zaofanpai make a comeback in their collective efforts to narrate their own history. The chapter also traces the reconstruction of a “red culture” and the role of “second-generation reds” in it. The analysis shows that contemporary memories of the Cultural Revolution are factionalized along the lines of the divisions in the Red Guard movement, suggesting that the politics of the Cultural Revolution has persisted to the present day.