On May 28, 1967, as rebel factions in Chongqing were entering the most violent period of factional warfare in the Cultural Revolution, a radical middle-school group called “September 1 Column” (jiu yi zong dui) published a widely known testament. Quoting a line of Mao’s poetry as its title—“Death only strengthens the bold resolve”—this document expressed a strong yearning to die for the cause of the revolution. It described Mao as an object of boundless love and loyalty and the revolutionary cause as noble, awe-inspiring, and yet dangerous because of the existence of murderous enemies.¹

This two-thousand-odd-character document was just one of numerous that appeared in the Red Guard press in the heydays of the Cultural Revolution. Its pronounced passion for Mao and the revolution was nothing extraordinary in the political milieu of the time and may easily be dismissed as rhetoric. Yet its effects were real. Several members of this group would later die in battles with their factional rivals. By the end of 1968, over twelve hundred would die in the fierce factional warfare in Chongqing alone.² Thousands died around the country.

What was extraordinary was that barely half a year earlier, they and their rivals had belonged to the same faction fighting common conservative opponents, conservative here meaning Red Guard organizations sponsored by local party authorities. After their conservative rival was defeated, however, a process of intrafactional splitting ensued. From within the same faction, a minority splintered off to form a more radical wing. Thereafter, the moderate and radical wings were to engage in a spiraling cycle of violence for over a year until it was stopped by the deus ex machina of Mao himself. “September 1 Column” belonged to the more radical wing.

To understand this historical document and the violence with which it was associated requires an analysis of the whole history of the Red Guard movement in Chongqing. This history will show that violence did not happen overnight, but appeared in a gradual process of escalation. In this process, municipal and provincial party authorities followed the scripts of political campaigns familiar to them, conservative organizations sponsored by party authorities rose and fell, and rebel organizations triumphed over the conservative groups, only to split again into two opposing factions locked in a battle of life and death till the end.

It will become clear from my analysis that this process was characterized more than anything else by revolutionary competition. Individuals and groups fought one another to show and prove that they, and not others, were the true revolutionaries. The logic resembled that of a political marketplace, where the most valuable currency was the idea of the sacredness of Mao and revolution. Because it was an idea, it was up to the individuals to prove that they possessed revolutionary credentials. They had to do so through revolutionary performances. When the majority of the society was engaged in such competitive performances, the bar for the proof had to be constantly raised to show that one had more of it than others. As death was the ultimate proof, violence at the risk of one’s life became an attractive option. The escalation of violence happened as a result of this competition.3 This logic was made possible by the conjoining of several conditions: a political culture that apotheosized revolution, a political context of domestic fears and external threats, and a political process of ambiguity and uncertainty that compelled public displays and performances of revolutionary faith. This chapter focuses on the political process of factional violence in Chongqing. Political culture and context will be the subject of the next chapter.

Work Teams in Chongqing

Municipal and provincial party authorities played a decisive role in the first stage of the Cultural Revolution in Chongqing. They were the interpreters, transmitters, and executors of central party policies. As such, they scripted and staged performances that directly influenced the unfolding of the drama. The most important of their actions was the dispatching of work teams and the sponsorship of conservative organizations. In these actions they followed the Chinese communists’ long-standing practice of political campaigns. Under the sponsorship of party authorities, conservative Red Guard organizations carried out a cultural revolution against familiar targets from before the Cultural Revolution, but without challenging party authorities. It was in this process that rebel groups appeared, clashed with the conservatives, and then were bolstered by encouraging messages from Beijing that called for national support of rebels “in the minority.” For authorities and conservatives, the script of the revolution was equivalent to the suppression of counterrevolutionaries.

The first work team in Chongqing was sent to Chongqing University on June 8, 1966. The work team announced that “Chongqing University is not the same as Peking University. In the main, the party committee at Chongqing University is good.”4 This policy aimed to divert attacks away from the leadership down to students and faculty. Consequently, “Mutual attacks happened among both students and faculty and staff. The campus was in chaos. As a result, many cadres and faculty inside and outside the party, especially some senior scholars and people with historical problems, became particularly frightened, nervous, and insecure.”⁵

In taking this line of action, the Chongqing municipal leadership followed instructions from the leaders in Sichuan Province and the Southwest Regional Bureau.⁶ On May 26 and June 7, 1966, the Southwest Regional Bureau and the Sichuan provincial party committees issued policy guidelines about how to implement the “May 16 Notification.” The “May 16 Notification” made “capitalist-roaders” the target of the Cultural Revolution. Yet the policy guidelines issued by Sichuan party authorities did not mention capitalist-roaders as the target, but instead called for criticisms of persons with “incorrect thought” in the fields of culture and ideology.⁷ In effect, they shifted the targets from party leaders downward to the masses and a few known cases of “problem” intellectuals.

In directing the target of the Cultural Revolution toward the masses rather than party leaders, Sichuan party leaders justified their policies with long-standing practices in mass political campaigns. They performed the revolution according to the script familiar to the party authorities. They compared student rebellions to the “Hungarian incident” and viewed the activists as rightists.⁸ Ma Li, a deputy mayor of Chongqing, confessed the following in March 1967:

I rarely exposed my own problems, exposed some of the problems of some other leaders, while mainly directing my target at the masses. This created a tense atmosphere among the masses. . . . The reason why I was a conservative was because I had a wrong understanding [of the situation]. For example, I confused the Cultural Revolution aimed at digging out capitalist-roaders within the party with the anti-rightist campaign in 1957 which was a counter-attack against rightists who had attacked the party. I exaggerated the impurity of some revolutionary organizations and did not believe that the masses could solve this impurity problem on their own.9

In other work units in Chongqing, the initial work teams also took this approach of targeting the grassroots rather than the leadership. At No. 6 Middle School, a work team dispatched by the party committee of the Chongqing Center-City District (shi zhong qu) arrived at the end of June. Upon arrival, the work team made an announcement that was almost identical to the one made by the work team sent to Chongqing University on June 8: “The Chongqing party committee is not the same as the Beijing party committee. The party committee at Chongqing No.6 Middle School is not the same as the party committee at Peking University. There are no signs of rottenness so far.”¹⁰

At an iron mining factory, 13,789 posters were put up during the work team stage. These posters reportedly exposed 449 antiparty, antisocialism personnel. The number breaks down into the following:¹¹

Leading cadres: 7

Middle-level cadres: 42

Ordinary cadres: 72

Teachers: 26

Technical and medical personnel: 29

Workers: 273

Although the targets included some cadres, the majority of the persons under attack were ordinary workers. Li Musen, a factory worker who later became a leader of the Smashers (za pai) in Chongqing, explained that he became a rebel because a friend of his accidently discovered that the party leadership in his factory had classified workers into different categories, a standard practice of investigation in the “Four Cleans” campaign prior to the Cultural Revolution. Li’s friend was put in the fourth category, which was considered the worst. Even though Li himself was listed as a second category, he was upset because he thought he deserved to be in the first and best category.¹²

The Rise of Conservative Organizations

While work teams were busy mobilizing attacks against “cow ghosts and snake spirits,” municipal and provincial party leaders actively sponsored the establishment of Red Guard organizations. In Beijing the earliest Red Guard groups were organized by students in elite high schools without party sponsorship. In fact, many of them were denounced by work teams and labeled as counterrevolutionary. In Chongqing, however, the launching of the earliest Red Guard organizations was orchestrated by municipal and provincial party leaders.

The organizing work was done behind closed doors. For example, in late August 1966, before the inauguration of the major conservative organization Maoism Red Guard Headquarters, Li Jingquan, the party secretary of the Southwest Regional Bureau and Sichuan Province, traveled from Chengdu to Chongqing to give on-site instructions. On September 7, 1966, he convened two secret meetings with student representatives in Chongqing. At the meetings he instructed students to set up Maoism Red Guard Headquarters immediately to counter rebel students, noting that the organization should recruit students from “five red” categories. When a student responded that there were not so many students from “five red” families, Li instructed that in that case they should recruit workers and peasants.13

In a self-criticism published on March 13, 1967, Chongqing party secretary Xin Yizhi named eight ways in which the municipal party committee supported the conservative organization Maoism Red Guard Headquarters, listing the following: 1. The municipal party committee let its secretary deliver a speech at the inaugural meeting of the organization; 2. invited local army leaders to serve as political instructors of the organization; 3. sent liaison personnel; 4. mobilized workers and peasants to enter their children in the organization; 5. promoted the organization in its newspapers; 6. sent Chairman Mao’s works to the organization; 7. gave prominence to this organization during National Day parade; and 8. provided logistical support.¹⁴

These activities encompassed the staging and performing of revolution on the part of party authorities and conservative Red Guards organizations. Giving media visibility to the conservative organizations was especially important, because it legitimized the organizations. The inauguration of the organization was held on September 8, 1966. The following day, the official Chongqing Daily covered the event on its first page and editorialized that the organization was a revolutionary organization comprising of the children of “five red” categories (“Salute the Heroic Red Guards!”). On September 10, 1966, also on its front page, Chongqing Daily published an open letter by thirty-six workers and peasants calling on fellow workers and peasants to join the Maoism Red Guard Headquarters. For the next few days, Chongqing Daily reported the enthusiastic responses to the thirty-six parents’ open letter, claiming that many parents had brought their children to register at the recruitment station of the Maoism Red Guard Headquarters. On September 15, 1966, the paper reported that the previous day, the Maoism Red Guard Headquarters had conducted a mass meeting of its thirty thousand members, together with ten thousand supporters from worker and peasant organizations, to pledge loyalty to Chairman Mao and determination to carry out the Cultural Revolution. All major party and military leaders of the city spoke at the meeting.15

Besides public performances like these, party authorities staged smear campaigns to undermine rebel organizations. On August 28, 1966, students of the August Fifteenth group at Chongqing University, which had just been founded on August 26, went to Jiangbei District to mobilize residents. In the downtown area they put up many slogans and posters, one of which was titled “Concentrate battle fire, bombard the municipal party committee.” It happened that over two hundred school teachers were being subject to criticisms and investigations by the work team at the Xiahengjie Elementary School in the neighborhood. They were in a state of insecurity and anxiety, fearing that they might become victims of a new “antirightist” campaign. Seeing posters attacking the municipal party committee, they took this as an opportunity to show their loyalty to the party. They denounced the activities of the August Fifteenth students as another “Hungarian incident” and covered the August Fifteenth posters with their own. This led to fist fights with the students from Chongqing University. Afterward, municipal party leaders orchestrated a smear campaign to denounce August Fifteenth for their “atrocities.” Public exhibitions were held and leaflets were distributed which falsely accused August Fifteenth of injuring over one hundred teachers and even stripping a female work team member of her clothing and parading her naked in public.¹⁶ It was in the middle of these events that rebel organizations walked onto the historical stage.

The First Insurgence of Rebel Organizations

Although the first rebel organization, August Fifteenth, was officially launched only on August 26, 1966, acts of rebellion had happened earlier. The work team sent to Chongqing University announced soon after its arrival that “practice has shown that the Chongqing University Party committee is a correct, Marxist-Leninist committee.”17 This was an attempt to channel student activism away from university leaders toward “dead targets,” namely, cadres or intellectuals already labeled as rightists before the Cultural Revolution and during the “Four Cleans.” This approach backfired, however, provoking students to question why the work team tried to suppress student activism. Under student pressure, the work team arranged for the university’s party secretary, Zheng Siqun, to make a self-criticism to faculty and students. Departmental meetings were called, at which department-level party secretaries were also supposed to make self-criticisms to students and faculty. The meeting in the Department of Radio was called off in the middle as students began to fire questions at party and work team leaders.

On June 18 deputy work team leader Zhang Haiting remarked at a cadre meeting that party and youth members must firmly follow the instructions of the party committee, “even if [the instructions] are wrong.” Zhang’s remarks further angered students. On the night of June 18, students in the Department of Radio held a meeting to denounce the work team and Zhang’s report. The meeting attracted students from other departments as well and lasted until 2 am. At the end of the meeting, the students held a demonstration on campus. The next day the Chongqing municipal party authorities declared this to be a “counterrevolutionary incident.” Students who participated in these activities were subject to mass criticism at mass meetings on campus.¹⁸

The “June 18” incident marked the beginning of student rebellion against party authorities at Chongqing University. On June 21, 1966, at a campuswide meeting, Chongqing municipal party secretary Xin Yizhi announced that university president Zheng Siqun had been suspended from work and put under investigation and that a new work team under vice mayor Yu Yueze would be running the university. For the duration of its stay at Chongqing University, the work term tried to focus the attention of the campus on denouncing Zheng Siqun. At a meeting on July 29 it declared that Zheng Siqun was guilty of opposing the party. Zheng committed suicide on August 2 while under detention by the work team.¹⁹ Zheng’s suicide shocked the students and provoked strong reaction against the work team. The work team withdrew on August 5.

About the same time when students rebelled against the work team at Chongqing University, similar activities happened at the neighboring Chongqing Teachers Junior College (CTJC). In a poster put up on June 23, students at CTJC denounced the work team and the college’s party committee for repressing the student movement and being “royalist.” At a campuswide mass meeting on July 19, Gong Qinting, head of the work team at CTJC, ordered the disbanding of two small rebel groups. On August 12 the party committee at CTJC made another attempt to disband the rebels by announcing a plan to send them to the countryside to do agricultural work.20 On Au gust 13, rebel students from CTJC pleaded for help from fellow rebels in Chongqing University. Their plea met with immediate response, and students in Chongqing University decided to go to CTJC to show their support.

Upon learning that students from Chongqing University were coming, CTJC reinforced security guards at the college’s entrance to prevent the unwelcome visitors from entering the campus. Students from Chongqing University arrived at around 9 AM on August 15 and burst open the locked gate. Once inside the campus, these students were joined by CTJC rebels and began to hold a mass meeting on the sports ground. The gathering was four thousand strong.²¹ The meeting went on in the heat of the sun amidst power cuts, quarrels, and debates between the rebels and CTJC authorities and supporters. Angry with the opposition they met, some rebel students went to the municipal party committee to request that municipal leaders attend the meeting. Chongqing municipal party secretary Xin Yizhi reluctantly arrived at the scene at CTJC in the evening. Students questioned why the work team was still operating at CTJC when the central party committee had ordered the withdrawal of work teams and why the party authorities wanted to disband the rebel groups in CTJC. Seeing that his answers did not satisfy the students, Xin left the meeting. The students declared victory and concluded the meeting with parades in the streets. Because this was the first major confrontation between the rebels and conservatives in Chongqing, when rebel students in Chongqing University formally launched an organization on August 26, they adopted August Fifteenth as its name.²²

A period of rivalry and clashes between conservatives and rebels followed. As the August Fifteenth rebel faction met with such organized resistance, new rebel groups appeared. August Thirty-First Combat Corp (8·31 zhan dou zong dui) was founded at Southwestern Teachers College on September 3 (so named because it had a major clash with the campus royalists on August 31). August Thirty-First also gave its name to a workers’ rebel organization at Red Crag Machinery Factory (hong yan ji xie chang). On that day the rebels at the factory, ignoring orders from the municipal party authorities, left their jobs and went to city center to study wall posters. This public demonstration of their rebel position turned Red Crag August Thirty-First into the firm allies of August Fifteenth.23

On September 5, faced with organized opposition from the party-supported conservative groups, rebels left for Beijing to plead their case directly to higher authorities, where they attended Mao’s second review of Red Guards on September 15. At this point, it is necessary to discuss the role of central party leaders in Beijing.

Central Leaders as Distal Directors

Rebels’ interactions with central leaders in Beijing were crucial for rebels’ rise to dominance. If municipal authorities treated rebels as counterrevolutionaries, central elites under Mao and the Cultural Revolution Small Group (CRSG) praised them as heroes and true revolutionaries. From the central leaders, local rebels received support and encouragement to continue their revolutionary struggles and prove themselves in the revolutionary process.

In early September 1966, faced with attacks from party-sponsored conservatives, August Fifteenth decided to travel to Beijing to gaozhuang, i.e., to petition the highest authorities. In late September, a delegation of middle school rebels did the same. And then, in mid-October 1966, a delegation of worker rebels made their way to Beijing as well. Gaozhuang literally means submitting a written petition to a higher authority. The tradition goes back to imperial history, when imperial subjects would travel to the capital city to submit their grievances to the emperor. Petitioners took this action when they felt there was no way of seeking redress for the wrongs they had suffered from the local authorities. Rarely, however, had gaozhuang involved as many people as these cases in the Cultural Revolution. Even more important, the organizers of these trips all announced that they would travel to Beijing on foot as a way of showing their determination to undergo hardships and ordeals.²⁴ These gaozhuang trips thus clearly had a performative function. They were to demonstrate to both local opponents and central elites the revolutionary credentials of the participants.

Once in Beijing, petitioners visited university campuses to read wall posters and sought to meet with central leaders. If there happened to be a public review of Red Guards on Tiananmen by Mao, they would try to make it to the reviews. For example, on their first gaozhuang trip to Beijing in early September, members of the August Fifteenth not only attended Mao’s review of Red Guards on September 15, but their delegates, including their leader Zhou Jiayu, were selected and invited onto the Tiananmen rostrum to meet with the party leaders.

Among the most important morale boosters for the petitioners were the speeches delivered to them by central party leaders. Gaozhuang petitions were not limited to rebels from Chongqing. Rebels everywhere made it to Beijing to petition their cases. Central leaders from Zhou Enlai to members of the Cultural Revolution Small Group met numerous times with these petitioners to hear their complaints, give instructions and advice, and explain central policies. Transcripts of their speeches given on these occasions were quickly printed on leaflets or in Red Guard newspapers and became guidelines for local activists.

A main goal of the petitioners at these meetings was to seek affirmation from central leaders that their actions were revolutionary, not counterrevolutionary. At the earlier stage they invariably received affirmative answers. For example, on November 12, CRSG members Wang Li and Qi Benyu met with the Chongqing middle school delegates. Wang Li started his speech by saying: “You asked whether your gaozhuang trip to Beijing was a revolutionary action. We believe it is. You submitted that some people said that your act of bombarding the Chongqing municipal party committee was a counterrevolutionary act. Was it a counterrevolutionary act? We don’t think so.” Wang’s responses won loud applause from the students.25

Central leaders rarely just used their power to give directives to Red Guard petitioners. More often than not, they resorted to persuasion and sometimes goading. Like dramatic directors, their approach was not simply to tell the actors how to put on a particular act, but to help the actors “enter their role” so that the actors themselves could put on a performance successfully. They did so by invoking the already familiar myth of the revolutionary struggles of the CCP, by adding their reinterpretations, and by offering tips about methods of acting.

In their speeches, central leaders often talked about the meaning and nature of revolution during the Cultural Revolution. In these, they both invoked the familiar myth of the revolutionary struggles of the CCP and added their re-interpretations. They emphasized that the Great Cultural Revolution was an unprecedented world-shaking revolution, that it had to be made by people themselves rather than being directed from above, and that the best test of a true revolutionary was through revolutionary practice. At the meeting with students from Chongqing on November 12, 1966, when asked whether the central party leadership should intervene in the struggles in Chongqing by removing local party leaders from their official positions, Wang Li said:

It is better not to remove them yet. Why? Because that should come as a result of your own struggle. In my view, you haven’t struggled enough. Under such circumstances, before effective struggles are carried out, removing them [from their positions], reshuffling power—that would be too easy for them. They would no longer be responsible for anything. . . . Usually we do not use the method of removing people from top down. This would not solve the problem. Problems in the revolution should be resolved by Chongqing people themselves.26

At the same meeting, Qi Benyu talked about the necessity of revolution and dangers of capitalist revision by citing the history of class exploitation in Sichuan. Referring to a work of sculpture about the exploitation of peasants by landlords, which inspired a documentary film called Rent Collection Courtyard, Qi said: “One thing I want to say is that we support your rebellion. Your rebellion was well done, but has not yet done enough. You should have bigger rebellions. I have seen Sichuan’s Rent Collection Courtyard. Have you seen it? It is a living textbook for class education. If we do not carry the Cultural Revolution thoroughly, then it is possible that capitalism and feudalism will have a comeback. Our country will change color.”²⁷ When answering questions about who was revolutionary and who was not, central leaders called on the young people to prove themselves by going through the trials of the revolutionary process. A speech given by Tao Zhu, onetime head of the Cultural Revolution Small Group, included the following remarks:

What is counterrevolutionary? Earlier, it refers to people from Taiwan, or people with radio transmitters.²⁸ Now, the masses want to do revolution. If you suppress revolution you are counterrevolutionary. True revolutionaries, false revolutionaries, half-revolutionaries, 1/3 revolutionaries, 1/4 revolutionaries—they all must be tested in this movement. “Good people” in the past may not necessarily still be good people. . . . At present, there is more than one Red Guard organization in Beijing’s schools. You can compare one with another to see who is red and who can be red all the way to the end. You cannot allow yourselves to organize but forbid others to do it. You cannot say you are true revolutionaries and they are fake. This is mass organizing. Their organizations may also be revolutionary. Maybe hold a revolutionary competition. Good ones will grow, bad ones will collapse. . . . True or fake revolutionaries will be distinguished in revolutionary practice.29

Tao Zhu’s remarks inadvertently captured the hidden logic of the Cultural Revolution. During the revolution, nothing could be taken for granted; individuals had to prove whether they were “fake” or true revolutionaries. The proof had to come from people’s observable behavior—their performances. Thus while there was push for people to perform from the bottom up, there was also a pull for them to do the same from party leaders at the top.

Performing Martyrdom: The “December 4 Incident”

As in other parts of the nation, with the launching of the “criticizing bourgeois reactionary line” campaign in October 1966, conservative organizations in Chongqing headed for their demise. Orchestrated by the Cultural Revolution Small Group with Mao’s support, the campaign supported rebel organizations as true revolutionaries and attacked conservative factions for taking the “bourgeois reactionary line.” This campaign strengthened the rebels, who had been under attack by royalist organizations. The fatal blow to conservatives in Chongqing was the “December 4 Incident.”

On December 4, 1966, the four conservative organizations, under the leadership of Workers Fighting Troops (gong ren zhan dou jun), held a rally in the Datianwan Stadium as a last attempt to demonstrate their revolutionary credentials and rejuvenate their weakening power. In accordance with the common practice of the time, they announced that the rally would be open to the public. August Fifteenth made careful plans to disrupt the rally, another common practice of the time. In the morning of December 4, members of August Fifteenth showed up at the rally. As soon as the mass meeting began, Zhou Jiayu, leader of August Fifteenth and an invited guest with a seat on the podium, seized the microphone in an attempt to make a speech.³⁰ Members of August Fifteenth began shouting slogans in praise of “their own organization” while more of its supporters entered the stadium. Amidst the chaos, the two opposing factions got embroiled in fist fights. Bricks, stones, and shoes were hurled. There were injuries and bloodshed. The August Fifteenth faction lost no time in launching a publicity campaign, charging the conservative groups with murder and bloodshed. Street rallies were immediately held to protest conservatives’ cruelty. Alleging that several of its members were killed by conservatives in the “December 4 incident,” August Fifteenth held a memorial service the following day. Zhou Ziren’s diary contains detailed descriptions of the demonstration on December 4 and the memorial service the following day, revealing their highly dramatic quality. The performative nature of the memorial service, however, was little known to the participants.31 Rumors had already spread that the “December 4 incident” caused the death of dozens of members of August Fifteenth. To those who wanted to use bloodshed as a battle cry, rumors were easily taken as truth, because, as Zhou Ziren puts it, “if somebody is killed, then it becomes easy to spin a story” (死了人，文章就好做了”).³² Later it turned out that the corpses used for the memorial service were not people killed in the December 4 incident, but had been seized from the crematorium. Yet at that point truth no longer mattered because August Fifteenth had achieved its purpose of defeating its conservative opponents. The corpses from the crematorium had been used effectively to stage the power of martyrdom.

To condemn the alleged bloodshed and death caused by conservative organizations, August Fifteenth took their case to Beijing. On December 17, 1966, in Beijing, the leading rebel organization in Beijing, the Third Headquarters, held a high-profile mass rally in celebration of the victories of rebel organizations. Central leaders including Zhou Enlai and Jiang Qing attended the meeting. The only speaker from outside Beijing was Luo Guangbin, a main figure of August Fifteenth and author of the famous revolutionary novel Red Crag, who spoke as an eyewitness to the “bloody case” of December 4 in Chongqing. As a result, August Fifteenth gained national fame for its purported heroic struggle against “bourgeois road takers.”

It was also in this period that August Fifteenth launched its newspaper August Fifteenth Battle News. Its first issue, published on December 9, 1966, devoted most space to the “bloody case” on December 4. These attacks from both local rebels and national rebel organizations sealed the fate of Chongqing’s conservative organizations.

In a way, the rise of rebel Red Guards was a response to the political strategy of the municipal and provincial party leaders described earlier. The leaders’ plan to divert attacks away from themselves down to the grassroots and to sponsor conservative organizations alienated those who were eager to join the Cultural Revolution. They drove them into the ranks of rebels by labeling and treating them as rightists and counterrevolutionaries. The far-reaching consequences of such labels on one’s life and career were well understood by everyone, and it was not surprising that those who were so labeled would fight hard to remove them.33 The only way to do this was to show that they were the true revolutionaries. They had to perform a revolution.

The Split of the Rebels

The second stage of the Red Guard movement in Chongqing, from December 4, 1966 to May 16, 1967, was one of uncertainty and internal division. In this period, the August Fifteenth split into two factions and began to engage in open and fierce factional warfare that would last to the end of the Red Guard movement.

The dynamics of conflict in the second stage differed from the first stage. In the first stage, municipal and provincial leaders played a key role in the rise of both conservative and rebel Red Guards. In the second stage, however, they became mere props of shows enacted by the rebels. Rebel factions held numerous mass meetings at which they put “capitalist roaders” on the stage for mass criticism. Sometimes, rebel factions fought over the “ownership” of an individual cadre qua “capitalist roader,” and the higher ranking the official was, the more intensely they fought, because, as one interviewee puts it, “the bigger the capitalist roader, the stronger the sense of accomplishment. It was a way of showing one’s own status” (走资派越大，成就感越大，表明自己的身份).³⁴ The No. 1 “capitalist roader” in Sichuan being Li Jingquan, Li was subject to many mass criticism sessions. One piece of sensational news in 1967 was that Li Jingquan went to Shanghai to hide from criticism sessions, but was abducted back to Chongqing by rebels.

A turning point in the history of the Cultural Revolution in Chongqing and nationally was the January Revolution in Shanghai. On January 4, rebels in Shanghai took over power at Wen Hui Daily. The next day, power seizure took place at Jiefang Daily (or, Liberation Daily). Then, on January 6, the leading rebel organization in Shanghai held a mass meeting and announced that they no longer recognized the leadership of the Shanghai mayor and party secretary, thus effectively declaring a municipal power seizure. On the night of January 21, the Central People’s Radio broadcast a People’s Daily editorial. Titled “Proletarian Revolutionaries Unite, Seize Power from Those Power-holders Who Take the Capitalist Road,” the editorial praised the seizure of power by Shanghai rebels as a revolutionary action. On February 5 the Shanghai Commune was established as the new organ of power in Shanghai, but the name was changed to Shanghai Revolutionary Committee on February 23. This “January Revolution” in Shanghai became a national model for rebels to seize power from the existing authorities.

Chongqing’s version of January Revolution followed the national model closely. On January 16, 1967, the August Fifteenth at Chongqing University took over power of the university.35 On January 22, the day People’s Daily published its editorial, major rebel organizations in Chongqing met to discuss and coordinate their power seizure plans. On January 24, under the auspices of the Chongqing Garrison Command, aka the Fifty-fourth Army, about fifty rebel organizations formed a Preparatory Committee for the United Committee of Proletarian Revolutionary Rebels of Chongqing City (United Committee, 重庆市无产阶级革命造反联合委员会筹备会) and proclaimed control over all municipal party and government agencies.

The seeds of division were sown at the same time. On February 1 dozens of rebel groups led by the Chongqing Workers Rebel Troops (工人造反军), “August Thirty-first Fighting Column” of Southwest Teachers College, and the Chongqing Liaison Office of the Capital Third Headquarters sent a telegraph to the Party Central in Beijing, accusing the January 24 power seizure by the “United Committee” of being a mere show orchestrated by the power establishment and the military. From then on, the rebels openly split into two factions. The moderate and majority faction was called the United Committee (ge lian hui), with August Fifteenth of Chongqing University as the leading organization. The radical and minority faction was initially called the Smashers, because its slogan was to smash the United Committee. Later, its name was changed to Rebel to the End (fan dao di). The August Thirty-first of Southwest Teachers College led this faction.

Throughout February and March 1967, the two rebel factions fought each other verbally and physically. Backed by the Chongqing Garrison, August Fifteenth emerged as the victor. By mid-March, many groups on the Smashers’ side had been disbanded, and some of their members arrested by public security authorities after being branded as counterrevolutionaries. The August Fifteenth faction in the municipal public security department estimated that 36 “reactionary” organizations were disbanded by the public security bureau (gong an ju), while 82 organizations were “smashed” by mass organizations and 146 organizations voluntarily disbanded.³⁶ The crackdown on radical rebels happened nationwide and was later dubbed the “February adverse currents” or “February repression of counterrevolutionaries.”

On April 1, 1967, Mao approved the release of Zhongfa (67) Document No. 117 to curb this crackdown. The document stated that mass organizations must not be randomly disbanded or accused of be counterrevolutionary. With the issuing of this document, the United Committee faction came under attack for its role in repressing rebels. The organizations previously branded as counterrevolutionary were rehabilitated, and imprisoned rebels released. Reenergized by policies from the center and full of pent-up anger at the United Committee, the Smashers reassembled their organizations and went on the offensive. The conflicts between United Committee and the Smashers soon escalated into armed conflict. On April 23, 1967, for example, the Smashers held a three-hundred-thousand-strong “Down with Liu Shaoqi, Smash United Committee” rally in the city stadium. In the street parades following the rally, the Smashers clashed with August Fifteenth. More clashes took place in the days following.

The intensifying conflicts between the two factions led to the issuing of Circular No. 159 (Zhongfa 67) on May 16, 1967. Titled “CCP Suggestions About Resolving the Chongqing Problem,” and known as the “five red articles” for short,37 it approved establishment of the Preparatory Group of Chongqing Municipal Revolutionary Committee (重庆市革命委员会筹备小组), to be headed by the deputy political commissar of the Fifty-fourth Army, Lan Yinong. The circular demanded the rehabilitation of organizations and individuals who had been wronged in the “February counterrevolutionary campaign,” but was reticent on the status of either the United Committee or the Smashers. The ambiguity of this document catapulted the two rival sides into a more deadly period of warfare.

Sources of Rebel Split

The crucial development in the second stage of the Cultural Revolution in Chongqing was the irreparable split of August Fifteenth into two opposing factions. In some parts of the country, factional conflicts were between conservative and rebel factions.³⁸ In other provinces, conservative factions were defeated by the end of 1966 while rebels split into two opposing factions. These included Shandong, Jilin, Henan, Hunan, Hubei, Yunnan, Shanxi, and Sichuan.

It is puzzling that after the defeat of the conservatives, rebel groups that had fought against conservative organizations shoulder to shoulder would split into rival camps and fight each other to death. In current scholarship, one view holds that the January power seizure created the condition for the split inside rebel ranks, and it was hunger for power that drove the same faction to split. Yet, although the power seizure was a galvanizing event, the split had already begun before it.

Xu Youyu documents the beginning of the split in Chengdu in an event on November 13, 1966.39 In Chongqing the split began in December 1966, also before the power seizure.⁴⁰ Thus the cause of the split was not only or even mainly a hunger for power triggered by the January power seizure. Xu Youyu finds the following differences between moderate and radical rebel factions at the national level:

1. Members in moderate factions had better family backgrounds, whereas many of those in radical factions came from “black families.” Radicals were less “pure” in family background.

2. Assessments of persons in power were different. Moderates believed that most of those in power were “good” or “relatively good,” whereas radicals believed they were all bourgeoisie and should be removed.

3. Moderates were less hostile to the military than radicals. Conversely, the military tended to support the moderate faction.

4. Radicals accused moderates of being “right-leaning opportunists” who were reformist and half-hearted about a real revolution.

5. Moderates were proud followers of Mao’s grand strategy, whereas radicals gave Mao’s policies more radical interpretations and took them further.

6. Moderates and radicals had different views about cadres. Moderates used the same political standards that they had employed for the past seventeen years, while radicals argued that only those who were persecuted by the work teams in the initial period of the CR were true revolutionary cadres.

7. Radicals were critical of Zhou Enlai, who seemed to favor moderates.⁴¹

The differences between the moderate and radical divisions in Chongqing were more or less similar to Xu Youyu’s list. From today’s vantage point, these differences might appear unremarkable, and certainly not so gravely consequential as to lead to sustained factional violence. The central issues of contention between the August Fifteenth and the Smashers, for example, concerned the political character of the January power seizure and the question of cadres. The United Committee led by August Fifteenth argued that its seizure of power was a revolutionary act in the spirit of the Shanghai January Revolution. Furthermore, it argued that bringing in cadres who had made mistakes in its leadership structure was also a revolutionary act, because “Under the leadership of the Party and Chairman Mao and under the historical conditions of proletarian dictatorship, 95 percent of the cadres are revolutionary. Over the past seventeen years, most of the cadres have been on the side of Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line. . . . Most of them were not only the executors of the capitalist bourgeois line but also its victims.”42

The Smashers charged that the power seizure led by the August Fifteenth was not truly revolutionary but rather followed a “rightist opportunist and rightist capitulation line,” because the power seizure was conducted mainly by the representatives of the twelve colleges in Chongqing, while major worker organizations were excluded. They further contended that the creation of the provisional leadership structure after the power seizure did not follow the democratic principles of the Paris Commune and that including cadres from the existing regime in the new leadership team only showed that the power seizure was a fake one.

However unremarkable these differences might appear in hindsight, they were viewed as matters of life and death and were debated publicly until verbal debates escalated to physical warfare. Huang Ronghua, a former rebel leader in Chongqing, recalls the intensity of the debates between August Fifteenth and its opponents in her factory and how these debates aimed at swaying listeners into joining their own group:

In our factory, the various warrior groups still only differed in opinion and had not split. We were still debating and fighting verbal battles under the same roof, trying to persuade those with different views to join our own side. Among students, however, the “conservative” and “smashers” that split from within the citywide August Fifteenth rebels had already formed their own camps. Their main job was to send people to grassroots units to publicize their respective views in order to win over more supporters and expand their ranks. Students from the August Fifteenth of Chongqing University and August Thirty-First of South-West Teachers College set up stages in the Laoguang Square of our factory to hold debates. They attracted tens of thousands of spectators. Some of these went there to show their support; some were there to decide which side to take; and some were there just for the fun of it.⁴³

Undoubtedly, local conditions meant that all intrarebel conflicts were not the same. Yet the generality of the phenomenon means that it must be due to some common underlying factor. If we look at the main differences between the moderates and radicals, it is clear that these boiled down to the nature of revolution and revolutionary conflicts. Is it possible that the visible differences between the two factions in fact only masked a deeper but common concern, namely, the concern to carry the revolution forward even if it had to be carried out in violence? Indeed, driving the violent escalation was a conviction that the revolution had to be carried out through violence for it to be worthy of the name of revolution. I will argue that the common factor was the inexorable aspiration to follow and enact the iron law of revolution. This is not to suggest that it had nothing to do with interest, but that the interest was not material but rather political, and interest-based conflicts were wrapped in such a powerful myth of revolutionary struggle that, even for those directly involved, it was not at all easy to separate them, not even almost fifty years later. Li Zimao, a rebel leader at Tsinghua University who was involved in the “hundred days of warfare” at Tsinghua, wrote in his 2014 memoir that the conflicts between the two rebel factions at Tsinghua University were driven by their goal of fighting for university leadership positions; at the same time, he wrote about people’s death-defying courage and idealism in an age that worshipped heroes: “Among those of the two factions who stayed to fight, the vast majority had consciously and actively participated in the Cultural Revolution from the very beginning. They had idealistic aspirations, were full of hot-blood passion, and firmly believed in Mao Zedong’s judgment that ‘the bourgeoisie is within the communist party.’ They were determined to ‘carry it to the end’ and to devote themselves heart and soul to the movement.”44

The January Revolution in Chongqing

In Chongqing, the period that split the rebel faction into two opposing factions decisively was the January Revolution in 1967. During this period a majority of rebel organizations led by August Fifteenth of Chongqing University built a coalition, staged power seizures in the city, and established a preparatory revolutionary committee. A minority of organizations led by August Thirty-first of Southwest Teachers College contested the power seizure activities of the August Fifteenth, arguing that the power seizure was “fake” because the new authority structures included party leaders who had been overthrown in the earlier stage. Citing theories of revolution from the international communist movement, they reiterated that an intrafactional split was a necessary step in all revolutionary movements. They argued that the iron law of revolution dictated such a split.

The Shanghai January Revolution had already positioned itself in the pedigree of sacred proletarian revolutions in modern world history. The series of power seizure events that happened in Shanghai in January 1967 was probably first named the January Revolution at a meeting of Shanghai rebel leaders on January 19. The manifesto declaring the triumph of the January Revolution, issued on February 5, 1967, gave the name of Shanghai Commune to the new leadership structure that was created with the revolution. The names January Revolution and Shanghai Commune thus put the action of Shanghai rebels explicitly in the lineage of the October Revolution in Russia and the Paris Commune of 1871, a tradition of proletarian revolution held sacred in China.

Nationwide, the language of January Revolution was disseminated through the publication of the manifesto proclaiming the victory of the January Revolution in Shanghai’s Liberation Daily on February 7, 1967, and of a People’s Daily article on February 5, 1967, titled “Long Live the Spirit of the Great January Revolution.” In Chongqing the earliest public mention of the term January Revolution I came across was in an article published in the inaugural issue of the rebel newspaper October 5 Storm on February 1, 1967. The same issue carries polemics in praise of power seizure, arguing for the inevitability of intrarebel struggles as a reflection of an “objective law” that defies human will.

The launching of October 5 Storm coincided with the temporary closure of August Fifteenth Battle News. On January 27, 1967, the newspaper stopped publishing because its editors decided that the revolution had triumphed and no more polemics were needed. It resumed publishing on February 17, 1967, however, when August Fifteen felt a renewed need to defend the power seizure in Chongqing and the United Committee. The February 17, 1967, issue published the following short notice explaining why the paper was relaunched:

After August Fifteenth stopped publishing, some people used newspapers as a front to distort truth and exaggerate matters and launched attacks against August Fifteenth at Chongqing University and the United Committee. Their activity seriously sabotaged the great alliance and great power seizure of the revolutionary rebels and deflected the general orientation of the struggle. To defend Mao Zedong Thought, to defend the general orientation of the struggle, to advocate for the guidelines and policies of the Party, responding to the strong demands of the great masses of workers and peasants, our newspaper decided to resume publication on a temporary basis beginning with this issue.

In its next issues, the October 5 Storm continued its polemics against the “fake” power seizure led by the August Fifteenth. An article in the February 20, 1967, issue argues that internal splits between rebels are an inevitable law of proletarian movements:

The great polemics also show: The struggles over power seizure and counter power seizure between proletarians and the bourgeoisie inevitably find their way into the rebel factions. Engels said, “Proletarian movements of necessity undergo various stages of development. At each stage, some people will come to a stop.” With the development of our movement, opportunism of all colors will inevitably grow out of the rebel ranks. This will inevitably lead opportunists to engage in separatist activities in opposition to Marxism-Leninism. At the same time, it will also inevitably lead Marxists-Leninists to struggle against opportunism and separatism.45

In countering the attacks from their opponents, August Fifteenth and United Committee also invoked the tradition of the Russian October Revolution and the Paris Commune. Here is an excerpt from an article that appeared in August Fifteenth Battle News on February 25, 1967: “The new things of revolution will inevitably defeat the old things of the counter-revolution. That the new things of revolution will inevitably triumph—this is historical dialecticism. Such was the case with the Paris Commune. So was it with the October Revolution. Such was it with the founding of the People’s Republic of China. And such inevitably must be the case with the United Committee!”⁴⁶

These polemics suggest that the rebels deliberately followed theory when they tried to explain the divisions between themselves. They were fitting their practices to the scripts of revolution in the pedigree of Marxist theory of dialectical materialism. In so doing, they enacted what was prescribed only in theory. A cynical reader of the twenty-first century might suspect that all this was a rhetorical smoke screen for hiding self-interest. Yet to those directly involved in those activities, reenacting the script of revolution was a perfectly authentic revolutionary experience. Basking in a sense of triumph, Zhou Ziren, the editor of August Fifteenth Battle News, wrote a diary entry on March 6, 1967, that conveyed the joys of revolutionary experience:

I was late for a mass meeting. When I got there, people had left. This was the first time I entered this auditorium since I came to the city five years ago. When I entered the main lobby of this magnificent palace, my heart was beating like waves in the ocean. I thought of a painting: After their battle attacks on the Winter Palace in the October Revolution, two marines were smoking a cigarette in the quiet lobby. The beautiful palace was full of bullet holes and the floor was a complete mess. Hadn’t I just walked into a historical painting? Looking at the scraps of wall posters and slogans from the past few months, I thought: weren’t they like the bullet holes left from fierce battles? I felt exhilarated. I ran like wild up the tall stairways. How I felt like singing loudly into the east wind in the city, “We have made sacrifices to a glorious cause, we feel boundless joy and pride.”47

His memories of the heroic scenes of the Russian Revolution show that people were consciously linking their experiences in the Cultural Revolution to the tradition of proletarian revolutions in world history. The vividness with which he imagined the Russian Revolution suggests that the images of that tradition had been implanted deeply in their minds. On occasions like these, those images became a source of inspiration for their own revolutionary performances. Linked to the pedigree of the October Revolution and the Paris Commune, the January Revolution was apotheosized as a sacred event. As the People’s Daily article on February 5, 1967, states, the spirit of the January Revolution would live on forever.

The January Revolution provided legitimacy for radicals to challenge what they considered to be the “fake” power seizure in Chongqing. At the same time, August Fifteenth used it to justify its own power seizure as an act of revolution. Thus, the period of power seizure split the rebels from within, not because of a presumed human hunger for power, but because in the sacred chronicles of world proletarian revolutions seizing power was viewed as an essential goal of the revolution and a sign of its triumph. In this sense, the Chongqing rebels’ split over power seizure resulted from a shared consciousness of the sacred tradition of revolution. When August Fifteenth and the United Committee, with the support of Chongqing’s Fifty-fourth Army, hunted down the Smashers in the period known as the “February suppression of counterrevolutionaries,” not only did they fail to quash the Smashers, but, on the contrary, they sealed their split with the Smashers once and for all.⁴⁸ For everyone, being labeled a counterrevolutionary was all the more reason to display one’s revolutionary credentials. Thus, by mid-May 1967, the stage was set to move from verbal battles to war.

“A People’s War”

The third period of factional struggle in Chongqing, May 16, 1967, to October 15, 1968, was a “people’s war,” to use the rebels’ own words. This “people’s war” included prolonged and deadly battles with heavy casualties. Armed battles occurred in streets, factories, and schools. During this period, both factions were organized like military units, with special units for combat.49 Each faction came to occupy sections of the city as its base, and opponents were often chased out. At one point, in the tradition of Mao’s guerrilla warfare, August Fifteenth even established a base area in the nearby Huayin Mountain.

The following is just a short sample list of the major battles in Chongqing.

■ June 5–8, 1967: Armed battles between the Smashers and Spring Thunder (a subsidiary of August Fifteenth) in Southwest Teachers College.

■ July 7, 1967: Armed battles between 32111 Combat Team of No. 6 New Middle School and February 7 Combat Team (August Fifteenth) and Light Industry Regiment (Smashers). For the first time, a military weapon (rifle) was used in the armed conflicts in Chongqing.⁵⁰

■ July 23, 1967: August Fifteenth attacked August Thirty-First at Southwest Teachers College. As a result, August Fifteenth took control of Chongqing’s Beibei District.

■ July 25, 1967: Gun fights between the two factions led to ten deaths on the side of the Smashers.⁵¹

■ August 1, 1967: Armed battles in Yangjiaping District between the two factions. Two soldiers of the garrison command and three students from Chongqing University were killed. There were many other casualties.⁵²

■ August 3, 1967: A transportation ship of the Chongqing Military District was sunk by the Rebel to the End (formerly the Smashers). Three soldiers were killed. Battles broke out at No. 29 Middle School, the Construction Machinery Factory, and in several street sections.

■ August 4, 1967: The August Fifteenth Propaganda Team of the Finance and Trade Sector was ambushed by the Rebel to the End. Six middle school students and one college student were killed.⁵³

■ August 8, 1967: The Rebel to the End faction in control of several machinery factories converted three transportation ships into military battleships. Sailing upstream the Jialing River, they exchanged intense artillery fire with the August Fifteenth faction stationed on the river banks; 24 people were killed, with 129 wounded.⁵⁴

Backed by the Fifty-fourth Army, August Fifteenth emerged as the victor. Many members of Rebel to the End fled Chongqing. Central party leaders in Beijing intervened repeatedly, each time with harsher tones. On July 13, 1967, Xie Fuzhi and Wang Li descended on Chongqing to meet with representatives of both factions. Their attempts at peacemaking were interrupted by a brewing crisis in Wuhan (which subsequently erupted into the July 20 Wuhan Incident). They ended their visit abruptly and flew to Wuhan. Fighting continued between the two factions.

On September 5, the Party Central issued another circular, known as the September 5 Order, forbidding anyone to seize weapons from the military. Fighting stopped temporarily, only to intensify again after March 5, 1968, thanks to a speech made by Zhou Enlai praising the Rebel to the End faction, which was on the losing side of the battle. On June 2, 1968, the Chongqing Municipal Revolutionary Committee was established. Nationwide, the establishment of “revolutionary committees” absorbed members from both factions and marked the rebirth of collapsed power structures and the beginning of the end of the Cultural Revolution. On October 15, 1968, the Chongqing Municipal Revolutionary Committee held a mass meeting to celebrate the victory of the Cultural Revolution. At the meeting, the two opposing factions officially announced the dissolution of all their organizations and headquarters. The “people’s war” officially came to its end.

Factional warfare happened across the country, often ending in violence. As in Beijing, the main period of factional warfare in Chongqing happened between two rebel factions, not between conservative and rebel factions as in Guangzhou. In Guangzhou the military supported the conservative faction from the beginning, and, as a result, the main factional warfare was between the conservatives and the rebels throughout. In Chongqing the military supported August Fifteenth, the more moderate among the rebel wing.

Although factional battles were intense and deadly in many places, they were especially so in Chongqing, involving the use of rifles, heavy artillery, and even tanks and military battleships. This was probably due to the peculiar mix of local and national elements in Chongqing. Chongqing was an important base of industry with a concentration of military factories. Local rebels themselves spoke proudly of the “eight big military factories” in Chongqing, almost as if they had something to match the “ten big buildings” in Beijing.55 Weapons were thus more easily available than in most other cities. Sometimes they were handed out; more often they were stolen or seized by force.

The availability of weaponry alone was a negligible factor in and of itself. People had to have legitimate reasons for taking hold of weapons and using them. How did this happen?

There is no doubt that Mao and his policy of “arming the left” fueled factional violence.⁵⁶ Yet, in Chongqing and elsewhere, deadly factional battles had already occurred before “arming the left” became a policy. Local Red Guards and rebels had resorted to fighting before they received clear signals of support from the top. Weapons had already been used. Evidence in Red Guard newspapers from Chongqing indicates that the escalation of factional conflicts from verbal battles to armed violence was a gradual process. To extend the metaphor of performance, it was almost as if armed violence was the logical climax of the revolutionary drama of the Cultural Revolution. How so?

To the Red Guard generation, no revolution would be a true revolution without violence. Violence was an integral part and ultimate manifestation of revolution in the imagination of this generation. The sacred tradition of the Chinese revolution, carefully crafted by the party in the same period in which this generation was coming of age, celebrated martyrdom and revolutionary heroes. It exalted violence as a necessary means of revolution and glorified death for the cause of revolution. In the following section I will discuss two critical events in Chongqing to show how factional battles became imitations and enactment of revolutionary warfare in the past.

Two Factional Battles

The first battle to be examined here was called the June 5–8 Incident. On those days in 1967, August Fifteenth and the Smashers fought each other at the Southwest Teachers’ College. The main faction of August Fifteenth at the Southwest Teachers’ College was called Spring Thunder, which had occupied the college’s newly built library. Spring Thunder’s opponent at the college was August Thirty-First. In the afternoon of June 5, August Thirty-First attacked Spring Thunder and took control of the two lower levels of the library, but could not take over the two upper floors occupied by Spring Thunder. As the battle continued on June 6–7, reinforcements from other August Fifteenth groups in the city arrived, but were initially blocked outside the campus by August Thirty-First. Finally, on the night of June 7, major reinforcements from the August Fifteenth at Chongqing University arrived on the scene. Under attack above from Spring Thunder and below from the reinforcements, August Thirty-First could no longer hold out. Some of its members were captured, while others made their escape by jumping off the building. Although no military weapons were used, the battles from June 5–8 marked the beginning of large-scale factional violence in Chongqing.

The second case was the July 25 incident. On July 25, 1967, members of the August Fifteenth faction, armed with knives, pistols, rifles, machine guns, and submachine guns, attacked four hundred unarmed members of two Smashers groups, Red Crag Regiment and September First Column, at the Industrial School in Chongqing.57 After half a day’s battle, August Fifteenth defeated the Smashers and took control of the Industrial School. August Fifteenth killed ten members of the Smashers and lost two lives on its own side.⁵⁸

In each case, after the battle each side was engaged in publicity, attacking the opponent and commemorating its own dead. Those who died in action were conferred with “martyr” status. The commemoration included both public memorial services and newspaper pages devoted to the incident and the martyrs. The newspaper pages contained narratives about the incident in the form of editorials, reportage, and eyewitness accounts. The narratives published by each side viewed the other side as the enemy, yet except for that they were very similar. They would condemn the cruelty and fierceness of the enemy, extol the bravery and fearlessness of their own fighters, and end with expressions of determination to defend Mao and the cause of the revolution and avenge the martyrs.

The narratives were invariably interspersed with quotations from Mao’s verse or prose works, which seemed to have a fitting quote for praising all heroic and revolutionary behavior and condemning every reactionary act. Some examples were “Be resolute, fear no sacrifice, and surmount every difficulty to win victory”⁵⁹ and “Wherever there is struggle there is sacrifice, and death is a common occurrence. But we have the interests of the people and the sufferings of the great majority at heart, and when we die for the people it is a worthy death.”⁶⁰ Mao quotations, which had become a treasured household possession in China since they were first issued in the form of the Little Red Book in 1964, were core elements of the sacred tradition of the Chinese revolution. They were memorized by people and in turn had a mesmerizing effect, close to that of Scripture.⁶¹

The narratives in these two cases usually contain descriptions of battle scenes. These battle scenes bear such close resemblance to those in Chinese war films and fiction of the revolutionary romantic style that one might argue that these factional battles were mimetic. They provide convincing evidence for my argument that Red Guard factional warfare was the enactment of an imagined revolution based on scripts familiar to these youth.

Here is a description of the battle scene at the Southwest Teachers’ College on June 6, 1967. It is from a story in the June 16, 1967, issue of August Fifteenth Battle News, the leading newspaper of the August Fifteenth faction, to which the Spring Thunder group at the Southwest Teachers’ College belonged. The first part of the story describes how ruthlessly Spring Thunder’s opponents, August Thirty-first, had attacked Spring Thunder. Now a day’s battle had come to an end:

Night fell on the campus of Southwest Teachers’ College. The situation is getting more and more serious. “Looking up, we see the north star, in our heart we think of Mao Zedong . . .” Spring Thunder fighters could all be wiped out. But to die, what is so scary about that! Spring Thunder fighters have all made up their mind. “When called upon to die, then be brave enough to die, including losing your own life. To hell with death! On the battlefield, once fighting starts, old-man me just gets ready to die on the battlefield!”62

Besides narratives about battle scenes, Red Guard papers devoted to these incidents contained photos, obituaries, diaries, and occasionally letters of the dead, as well as memorial speeches. These mnemonic genres similarly glorify the dead and exalt heroism and sacrifice for the cause of revolution. The standard scripts used in these remembrances were Mao’s remarks about the need to memorialize the dead in the Little Red Book. Coming from “Mao the storyteller,” in the words of Apter and Saich, these remarks seemed to cast a spell on their readers like incantations inviting them to act.⁶³ The following passage from “Serve the People,” for example, was printed in the middle of the page devoted to the “martyrs” of the July 25 battle in the August 8, 1967, issue of August Fifteenth Battle News: “From now on, when anyone in our ranks who has done some useful work dies, be he soldier or cook, we should have a funeral ceremony and a memorial meeting in his honor. This should become the rule. And it should be introduced among the people as well. When someone dies in a village, let a memorial meeting be held. In this way we express our mourning for the dead and unite all the people.”

Another quotation from Mao, which appeared at the end of the story reporting the August Fifteenth memorial service for its martyrs, is a famous eulogy of martyrdom: “Thousands upon thousands of martyrs have heroically laid down their lives for the people; let us hold their banner high and march ahead along the path crimson with their blood!” As factional warfare intensified and casualties increased, these Mao quotations became staples in the Red Guard press.

About forty years later, one of the August Fifteenth members who participated in the battle, Zhou Ziren, recalled the battle scene in his memoir. In the evening of June 7, 1967, Zhou was in his student dorm in Chongqing University. Two of his friends came and asked: “Do you dare to go fight the Smashers?” Zhou’s answer was terse: “Dare I? Let’s go and fight!” In the darkness of the rainy night, they joined truckloads of their comrades-in-arms and drove to the Southwest Teachers College to the rescue of Spring Thunder. Zhou recalled that people on the truck were all soaked in the rain, but no one showed any fear. It was as if they were on the way to a carnival.64 Once they arrived at the battle scene in Southwest Teachers College, what Zhou saw startled him: “The final attack had just started. The battle trumpet blew out sad but loud sounds. Tall ladders were pulled to the third floor using a long rope. The armed fighters dashed to the building from all sides like a flood and began climbing up the ladder. Most of them were students. They had no equipment of any kind. Bare-headed . . . they dashed forward like flying locusts. . . . I watched from afar and was instantly moved by wild impulses. I could not control myself and dashed forward with stick in hand.”⁶⁵

The Reality of the Role

Mao quotations and other imagery of revolution were not mere rhetoric with which Red Guards embellished their narratives. It would be difficult to imagine the violent warfare between opposing factions without this rhetoric. One need not have to argue that Mao quotations caused the factional violence to see their essential role, as part of the revolutionary script, in Red Guard factionalism. These young rebels were performing a role in a revolutionary drama, often in imitation of roles in the sacred script of the Chinese revolution. When they were in battle, they often consciously imitated the actions of soldiers in the battle scenes in the many Chinese war films and works of fiction they had grown up with. To argue that they were performing the revolution by no means implies that their action lacked authenticity. For them, performance and reality had become one and the same thing. Their role in the drama of the Cultural Revolution was their reality. We can get a sense of this unity of performance and reality from the story of one person who died several days after the battle on July 25, 1967.

On July 29 Li Shengpin, a member of the August Fifteenth of Chongqing University, was killed in an accident while training high school students to use self-made hand grenades. Li was one of the three people conferred “martyr” status in a decision published in the August Fifteenth Battle News. The same issue published excerpts of Li’s diaries, as well as a letter to a friend he wrote shortly before his death. Zhou Ziren, the newspaper’s editor, revealed in his memoir that the friend was in fact Li’s girlfriend. The letter provided a valuable glimpse into the inner world of the factional warriors at that time. Li Shengpin was fully aware of the dangers. His letter expressed intimations about possible death. He recalled the sufferings of his parents and grandparents in the “old society” and mentioned specifically that his mother had to beg for food in the streets when she was ten years old. After this, Li wrote, “I often thought, if our country doesn’t have a future, all talk about personal future is deceitful nonsense. . . . The question now is whether to carry the Cultural Revolution to the end or to let it die prematurely. . . . We must exert ourselves, struggle hard, and not fear death.”66 Li asked his girlfriend not to tell his family if he died. He ended the letter by saying that she should not feel too sad about his death and should look to the future. Li’s letter had a calm, intimate, and conversational tone, atypical of the Red Guard writing style at that time. It conveyed a sense of authenticity about the meaning of revolution and sacrifice to the young generation. True, the revolution was performed, yet this letter shows the difficulty and perhaps the meaninglessness of any attempt to separate performance from reality. One might argue that Li Shengpin, in writing the letter, in the use of language in his letter, and eventually in his death, was following a script that he had learned through socialization and education. Yet, if he was acting a role, he had certainly taken that role to heart. His role was his reality.

In the middle of such glorification of heroism and martyrdom, the factional warfare in Chongqing continued. The atmosphere of war in the Red Guard press and in the streets intensified, feeding upon each other. The diaries of Wu Mi, a well-known scholar of comparative literature on the faculty of the Southwest Teachers College who lived on the college’s campus at that time, contain his disinterested observations of the campus atmosphere. Below is an entry for July 1967:

July 6 Thursday

At 1 AM at night, I heard the sound of a cannon. I got up and got dressed just in case. Then I heard another cannon, slightly louder. Then August Thirty-first began broadcasting to gather its forces. It sounded like war. I opened a corner of the window and pricked up my ears. I heard it declaring war on its enemy, saying, “If you use guns, we will use guns; if you use cannons, we’ll also use cannons,” etc. Then I heard the explosion of a third cannon, slightly muffled. Then a fourth cannon, the loudest yet, making my windows and walls shake. At this point, the broadcast beamed out music of marching and war making and the slogan “overcome every difficulty, fear no sacrifice, win victory.”⁶⁷

Although factional warfare escalated gradually, its ending happened abruptly. This again attests to the performative character of the Red Guard movement. When the factional warfare ended, twenty-two had been killed in Chongqing University alone. Official records show that from the summer of 1967 to summer 1968 there were thirty-one factional battles. One list alone, compiled by He Shu, contains the names of twelve hundred deaths related to factional fighting.68

I have argued in this chapter that rebel violence happened as a result of the conscious enactment of an imagined revolution through the uncertain processes of the Cultural Revolution. But what made the young people rise to the occasion? Why would they embrace opportunities for violence knowing their own lives were in danger? Indeed, why did they actively create opportunities for violence? To answer these questions, it is essential to understand, in the words of Qian Liqun, “the way our generation imagined the world.”⁶⁹ The next chapter delves into the way the Red Guard generation imagined the world.