The factional warfare in Chongqing was so complicated that one chapter can hardly do justice to it. Besides the violence, for example, Chongqing was home to one of the “big five” articles of dissent that appeared in the Red Guard movement. In the language of the Cultural Revolution, they were called counterrevolutionary “poisonous weeds” (du cao). One of the editorials published in August Fifteenth Battle News caused Mao’s personal displeasure and was declared heresy. Nationwide, there were other such Red Guard writings that were denounced as “poisonous weeds.” These writings expressed heterodox thoughts, or ideas of dissent, and are the subject of this chapter.

While factional warfare was prevalent across the nation, voices expressing dissent were more limited in scale or influence. This chapter therefore moves out of Chongqing to survey the broad landscape of Red Guard dissent. If a case study of factional warfare in Chongqing reveals much about the logic of revolutionary performance in the Red Guard movement, it takes a broader survey to bring to light the less visible currents of dissent.

Theoretically, my argument is consistent with the thesis about factional violence in Chongqing developed in chapter 1. I argued there that the escalation to factional violence was the result of Red Guards and rebels consciously enacting a hallowed revolutionary culture in response to political circumstances that called for such enactment. This chapter will show that, besides a commitment to revolutionary practice, Red Guards and rebels were also 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. I will show that the same myth of revolution that fired Red Guard passions for revolutionary practice and led to violence also fed their passion for revolutionary theory. And it was in the pursuit of revolutionary theory and in attempting to apply theory to the analysis of Chinese reality that a small minority of youth began to formulate and express ideas of dissent.

The major texts of dissent in the Cultural Revolution are collected in a volume edited by Song and Sun.1 These are arranged under nine groups of essays. Eight of these groups of essays appeared during the Red Guard movement, whereas the last one, a wall poster by Li Yizhe, appeared in 1974. The nine groups of essays are as follows:

1. Bloodline theory

2. Theories of family origin

3. “Doubt everything”

4. The April Third new trends of thought

5. The May Sixteenth trends of thought

6. Shengwulian in Hunan

7. Bei-jue-yang in Wuhan

8. New trends of thought in Shanghai

9. Li Yizhe’s wall poster

This chapter does not intend to offer a comprehensive analysis of all expressions of political dissent in the Red Guard movement. My analysis will focus on four clusters of heterodox essays: 1. theories of family origin, 2. “Doubt everything” or the “December black winds,” 3. the April Third faction and new trends of thought, and 4. Shengwulian in Hunan. These four groups of heterodox writings contain both the key ideas of dissent expressed in the Red Guard movement and well represent the conditions and dynamics under which dissent was expressed. An analysis of these samples will be sufficient to demonstrate that dissent, like violence, was the result of factional competition to perform the revolution.

The Meaning of Red Guard Dissent

An important feature of the Red Guard movement was the mutual attacks between opposing factions conducted through wall posters and factional newspapers, leaflets, handbills, and other such publications. In these publications, rival factions would accuse each other of spreading counterrevolutionary ideas, “poisonous weeds,” “counterrevolutionary black winds,” or “ultraleftist thoughts.” Some of these fall under what I refer to as dissent, but most do not. While rival factions challenged each other, they both subscribed to the same regimes of truth as represented by Mao and the official theories of the Cultural Revolution. I will consider as dissent only those ideas that either challenged Mao and the rationale of the Cultural Revolution or were denounced as such by Mao and his lieutenants.

Dissent is a form of heterodoxy, and heterodoxy is what it is through its relationship to orthodoxy.2 The orthodoxy about which dissenting ideas were expressed in the Red Guard movement had many components. Foremost among them were Marxism and Maoism. The core idea taken from Marxism was class struggle. Mao’s main contribution was the idea of ceaseless class struggle even after a proletarian revolution. Enunciated as the theory of “continuous revolution under the conditions of proletarian dictatorship,” it provided the theoretical basis for launching the Cultural Revolution. For the practice of the Cultural Revolution, these abstract ideas were translated into concrete political terms in the official party document “Decision Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” known as the “Sixteen Points.”³

The “Sixteen Points” set out two basic rules of the game for the Cultural Revolution. One is that individual party leaders may be attacked, but not the party itself, not the socialist system, not Mao Zedong or his ideas.⁴ Further, the raison d’être of the Cultural Revolution was beyond doubt because it was launched by Mao Zedong as a new stage of the Chinese socialist revolution.⁵ Dissent, then, refers to ideas that violated these terms of the Cultural Revolution, or, as Xu Youyu puts it, “all attitudes, ideas, theories that disagreed with officially promulgated doctrines.”⁶

To the extent that ideas of dissent were not isolated slogans but formed “trends of thought” (yi duan si chao), they had a systemic nature, aiming at more or less systemic critiques of the political system and the official establishment. If individual party leaders were denounced, it was mainly in order to attack the system and orthodoxy that the individuals represented. It is in this sense that Andrew Walder considers these subversive ideas as dissident radicalism and their authors as dissident radicals: “Dissident radicals were descended from heterodox radical groups that came to dissent from the officially defined orientation of the Cultural Revolution. . . . These radicals developed a systemic critique that did not place blame on degenerate individuals within the Party. . . . Rather, there was something about the Party system that encouraged this degeneration, and so the system of power and privilege must be restructured in order to prevent similar degeneration in the future.”7

Ideologically oppressive atmospheres anywhere have chilling effects on voices of dissent. How was dissent possible in a movement whose zealous participants pledged themselves to be the loyal red guards of “red power” and fervently performed their loyalty even if it they had to resort to violence?

It is worth emphasizing that almost all the heterodox writings appeared in small waves of a sequence of essays. Such was the case of the “December black winds,” Yu Luoke’s “On Family Origins” series, the Bei-jue-yang manifestos and investigation reports, and Yang Xiguang’s series of essays discussed below. It seems that these young authors could not, or would not want to, stop writing. They seemed to be driven by an imperative to theorize.

I propose that these ideas of dissent did not originally appear as dissent, but rather as the efforts of sincere believers to theorize the Cultural Revolution. They were the product of the conscious imitation and enactment of what their authors imagined orthodox Marxists would do in these contexts. In their imagination, these young authors were playing the role of revolutionary theoreticians personified by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao. They were performing the revolution theoretically, just as their comrades were doing the same practically. And they were doing so consciously and passionately in order to provide guidance to practical revolutionary action. It was the same kind of emulation and enactment that characterized Red Guards’ performance of revolutionary violence discussed in chapter 1.

This interpretation would put our understanding of Red Guard dissent in a new light. Some scholars view these critical voices as prophetic thinkers who were ahead of their times. Thus in his study of the “new trends of thought” in the Cultural Revolution, Shaoguang Wang considers the theorists of new thought to be “clairvoyants who were trying not only to reshuffle the bureaucracy but also to create a new society, a society modeled after the Paris Commune of 1871.”⁸ They “sought to make fundamental changes in the existing social and political order.”⁹

The desire to create a new society modeled after the Paris Commune could be as genuine as the dissatisfaction with the existing social and political order. But it was also true that the Paris Commune was the only imaginable model for these young people and that was the model that had been planted in their minds in the years prior to the Cultural Revolution. Zheng Qian, a historian of the Chinese Communist Party, argues that there was such an obsession with the Paris Commune among both party leaders and the grassroots during the Chinese Cultural Revolution that there existed at that time a “Paris Commune” complex. The reason for the existence of this Paris Commune complex was that the Chinese Communist Party, before the Cultural Revolution, had conducted national campaigns to study the Marxist classic The Civil War in France, where the ideals of the Paris Commune were most powerfully stated and were made popular to Chinese youth through the promotion of the Marxist classic.10

Another important reason for the appearance of dissent was that it had an organizational context. Dissent had more of a collective than individual character. It was likely to be formulated in the context of a Red Guard organization, often as an attempt to thwart opposing factions ideologically and theoretically. For this reason, the appearance of dissent was related to another distinct feature of the Red Guard movement—the booming of a Red Guard press. Almost all the “new trends of thought” were publicized in Red Guard newspapers, handbills, or big-character posters, big-character posters so named because the posters were typically written in extra large calligraphy with traditional Chinese writing brushes.

The officially endorsed practices of voluntarily forming “mass organizations” and using “mass publications” to carry out the Cultural Revolution inadvertently provided the conditions for expressing dissent. These conditions allowed a small minority of individuals with intellectual aspirations to take what they imagined to be the historically unprecedented revolutionary movement to a new theoretical level by emulating Marx, Mao, and other revolutionary theorists. They enthusiastically imagined themselves to be revolutionary theoreticians, and it was in this process that they formulated and published ideas of dissent. It is essential, therefore, to examine how the Red Guard press was conducive to dissent.

The Red Guard Press

The voicing of dissent in the Red Guard movement was inseparable from the Red Guard press. Most Red Guard organizations or coalitions had their own newspapers or “little papers” (xiao bao). Red Guard newspapers were published and distributed without any official registration, although some were designated as “internal publications” not for public circulation. They were, by and large, distributed locally, but the most influential ones were distributed nationally through post offices.

The Red Guard press encompassed a wide variety of forms, including wall posters, leaflets, handbills, magazines, newsletters, pictorials, and newspapers. The contents of Red Guard newspapers resembled those of an official newspaper. Typically, they carried editorials, reprints of articles from People’s Daily or other national newspapers, news items, leaders’ speeches, essays, poems, cartoons, songs, letters to the editor, and so forth. Red Guard publications also carried much that would normally not appear in official newspapers, including grapevine stories about party leaders at the top and regional politics, which added popularity to the Red Guard press. Even in the middle of the Red Guard movement, there were underground black markets for trading Red Guard publications.

Red Guard publications exploded with information related to factional conflicts. Many papers carried detailed accounts of incidents of conflict in order to challenge and discredit opponents and justify one’s own action. Photographs of those wounded or killed in factional battles were published along with stories hailing them as heroes or martyrs. Polemics against rival factions were a staple feature.

The Shanghai-based historian Jin Dalu differentiates among four types of “mass newspapers and journals” (qun zhong bao kan) in Shanghai.11 The first type was the official newspapers, such as Liberation Daily and Wenhui Daily. In most cases these official newspapers were taken over by rebel groups after the 1967 January Revolution. In some cities the official newspapers were simply suspended, which affected the local print runs of national newspapers. This caused concern at the top and a central policy document was issued on January 3, 1967, to warn that even if it was OK to suspend the operations of local government newspapers, the local printing of major national news papers such as People’s Daily, PLA Daily, and Guangming Daily should continue.¹²

The second type was newspapers run by “mass organizations” at the municipal level or in major universities, while the third type included newspapers run by district-level or department-level and other grassroots organizations. Jin calls the fourth type “underground” newspapers (di xia bao kan) because they were run by miscellaneous social groups who did not belong to any legitimate “mass organizations.” Of these four types, the second and third were the largest in number and influence. Generally speaking, this Shanghai-based typology applies to the Red Guard press nationally.

Nationally, the Red Guard press produced enormous numbers of newspapers, tabloids, and journals. According to one source,¹³ the Chinese National Library has 2,611 different titles of Red Guard tabloids in its collection. From 1975 to 2005, the Center for Chinese Research Materials (CCRM) in the United States published 148 volumes of reprints of Red Guard Publications with a total of 3,155 titles.¹⁴ In the city of Chongqing alone, over 1,639 Red Guard papers were in circulation.15 In Chengdu there were about 200 different Red Guard papers.¹⁶ In Shanghai, according to a survey conducted in July 1967 by the city’s political propaganda department, there were 256 mass newspapers at that time. Of these, about 50 were newspapers and 65 were magazines or journals (kan wu). Twenty-five of the newspapers and 36 of the journals were printed by the municipal printing press.¹⁷

Reasons for the Explosion of Red Guard Publications

The crucial condition responsible for the blossoming of the Red Guard press was Mao’s support and the institutionalization of mass debate and wall posters in Chinese politics. During the Cultural Revolution, people were officially encouraged “to air their opinions in a big way, to contend in a big way, to debate in a big way, and write big-character posters.” The “Sixteen Points” states: “Make the fullest use of big-character posters and great debates to argue matters out, so that the masses can clarify the correct views, criticize the wrong views, and expose all the ghosts and monsters. In this way the masses will be able to raise their political consciousness in the course of the struggle, enhance their abilities and talents, distinguish right from wrong and draw a clear line between the enemy and ourselves.”¹⁸ After Red Guards newspapers began to appear, Mao took a special interest in them and reportedly read Red Guard papers every day. Wang Li, for example, told the personnel of Beijing Daily that “Chairman Mao pays special attention to the newspapers of rebel factions. You must run your newspaper well.”¹⁹ Such messages were undoubtedly an important legitimating factor for Red Guards.

Besides upholding the principle of using posters and mass publications for the Cultural Revolution, there were specific policies from time to time about “mass publications” that showed clear official support of Red Guard publications. For example, the “Recommendations About Improving Propaganda through Newspapers and Magazines Run by Revolutionary Mass Organizations” (“关于改进革命群众组织的报刊宣传的意见”) issued by CCP on May 14, 1967 has the following points:²⁰

1. The publications of mass organizations must follow the instructions of Chairman Mao, Vice Chairman Lin Biao, the CCP, and the Military Committee of the CCP. They should conduct their work with reference to the editorials of People’s Daily, Red Flag, and PLA Daily.

2. These publications must not publish the private writings and speeches by Chairman Mao and Vice Chairman Lin Biao. They must not publish the internal documents and minutes of meetings of the CCP or the speeches of leaders of the CCP.

3. They must not publicly attack the People’s Liberation Army in the newspapers.

4. They must not publish information that discloses state secrets.

5. The papers should focus on serious political issues and not publish trivialities, rumors, and “yellow news.”

This policy is revealing in that it attests to the messiness of the Red Guard newspapers, suggesting that in addition to the ongoing political debates, a great deal was published to appeal to readers’ curiosity about grapevine news and news of human interest.

Another reason for the explosion of Red Guard publications was official financial support, at least for those that were edited and published by major Red Guard and rebel organizations. Again, Jin’s study of the Red Guard press in Shanghai sheds light on this issue. He finds that by April and May 1967, there were so many Red Guard publications in Shanghai that they began to become a serious financial burden. A policy recommendation issued by the Politics and Propaganda Department of the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee (市革委会政宣组) recommended that it continue to financially support the publication of seven major papers. As for others, if they insisted on continuing publication, “we will not be responsible for providing the paper or the printing costs.”21 This shows that at least before publication costs and paper shortage became a serious issue, major Red Guard newspapers were financially supported with government budget.

There was a limit to how much financial support was available. As the Shanghai case indicates, Red Guard publications put such burdens on the city’s finances that eventually efforts were made to reduce their numbers after mid-1967.

Not all Red Guard newspapers were financed with government budgets, however; some papers had to raise their own funds and resources. In some cases, printing equipment and paper sheets used for printing were appropriated or forcefully seized from printing factories. And while in the earlier period most Red Guard publications were distributed for free, after mid-1967 more and more of them charged a subscription or retail fee. One newspaper in the city of Yangzhou ran an advertisement as follows: “This paper now wishes to expand its subscribers. All work units and revolutionary masses are welcome to take subscriptions at the local post office. We publish six times a month. The subscription fee is 12 cents for every month.”22 In addition to political and financial support from the top leaders, the most important reason for the proliferation of Red Guard publications was that they were crucial weapons in factional conflicts and their editors and authors threw themselves into the editing, production, and distribution of their papers with great passion and dedication.

Weapons of Factional Warfare

Red Guard publications served many functions. A few classmates could proclaim the founding of an organization by putting up a poster or by launching a “small paper,” much as an organization today might declare its existence by setting up a website. More established Red Guard organizations had editorial offices with a staff, much as regular newspapers did, and their newspapers would serve as hubs of information and organization, publicizing organizational activities or announcements for a rally or demonstration.

The most important function of Red Guard publications, however, was as a weapon of factional warfare. Up until the Red Guard movement, posters had been used mainly for two purposes—they were a means of state propaganda and mobilizing public support for official policies. The major official wall poster campaign before the Cultural Revolution happened during the Great Leap Forward. As Chinese communication scholar Xu Jing details, the poster campaign in 1958 was an official effort to mobilize public support for the Great Leap Forward. In many places, individuals and work units alike competed to see who put out the most posters.²³

Posters had also been used for political debate and political dissent in earlier times. The earliest cases are traced to the Yan’an period in 1942, when Wang Shiwei wrote a poster challenging party leaders for suppressing dissent.²⁴ The most important case before the Cultural Revolution was the “Hundred Flowers campaign” in 1956–1957. Its background was similar to the Cultural Revolution in one crucial aspect: Both started with Mao’s support. And Mao himself lauded the wall poster as a “great development in our democratic tradition.”²⁵ A precedent was thus set for using posters as an institutional means of social and political criticism. Red Guards followed this tradition. Many posters were declarations of support for official policies, while others staked out positions in public debates. It was in the midst of these verbal battles that ideas of dissent found their channels of expression.

Red Guards used their publications as tools of propaganda in their factional struggle. They promoted their own political views and positions and attacked their opponents. For this reason, Red Guard newspapers often became the targets of attack. Opposing factions sometimes sabotaged each other’s publishing facilities and distribution centers. The May 22, 1967, issue of Xin Nankai, the paper of a rebel organization in Tianjin’s Nankai University, published a blank front page with only a notice and a slogan that reads: “Long, Long, Long Live Our Great Teacher, Great Leader, Great Commander-in-Chief, Great Helmsman Chairman Mao!” The notice says that their newspaper printing facilities had been destroyed by a rival faction, that they printed the current issue only with the assistance of another unit, and that the first page of the current issue had been seized by their opponent and therefore could not be printed.26 A July 1967 issue of Lu Xun Battle News (Lu Xun zhan bao) announced to its subscribers and readers that its distribution center had been attacked and the paper’s mailing list had been seized by “rioters,” which prevented the staff from promptly putting the papers in the mail for its subscribers.²⁷

Besides sabotage, Red Guards engaged in endless debates and polemics. It was in the middle of these polemics that the most radical heterodox ideas of dissent were published and disseminated. In the following section I will discuss some of the most influential cases of dissent in roughly chronological order.

“An Open Letter to Comrade Lin Biao,” November 1966

This open letter first appeared as a poster in Qinghua University on November 15, 1966. It was signed by Yilin-Dixi, a pseudonym for two students from the middle school attached to Beijing Agricultural University. The letter attacked a speech by Lin Biao that exalted Mao’s genius and placed Mao’s thought over any other Marxist thinker in history. It advocated a historical approach to understanding Mao Zedong’s thought, implying that it was not the absolute truth Lin Biao claimed it to be. This letter thus challenged two “sacred” symbols of orthodoxy—both Mao and Lin. Although mass criticism was an integral part of the Cultural Revolution, and Red Guards everywhere wielded the Marxist banner of “Doubt Everything!”, it was an unacknowledged rule that, besides Mao, his comrade-in-arms Lin Biao was also beyond doubt. Tao Zhu, the No. 4 person in the Chinese communist hierarchy, explicitly made remarks to that effect in an interview with Red Guards.28

Yet the letter was more than an attack on Lin Biao. It questioned the legitimacy of the Chinese political system since 1949:

You stressed the correct side of the dictatorship of the proletariat—that which needs no improvement. But you did not acutely perceive the problems that have become so prominent since the launching of the Great Cultural Revolution, e.g., the need to ameliorate the dictatorship of the proletariat and to improve the socialist system. It is necessary to change the organizational form of our Party and government in a major way. The People’s Republic of China with its people’s democratic dictatorship set up seventeen years ago is already obsolete.²⁹

This open letter was an important sample of the first wave of political dissent that directly challenged the orthodoxy of the Cultural Revolution. The context was as important as the content of the letter. This wave of dissent started among “old Red Guards” (lao bing) who had initially dominated the Red Guard movement but whose fortunes began to suffer with the campaign to “criticize the bourgeois reactionary line,” officially launched with the publication of an editorial in the thirteenth issue of Red Flag in October 1966. With Mao’s sponsorship, this campaign dealt a fatal blow to conservative Red Guard organizations and catapulted rebels groups into prominence and power.

These “old Red Guards,” as they were known then, were mostly children of high-ranking cadres and military officers. With a strong sense of their elite status, they supported the so-called bloodline theory, according to which they were the natural heirs of the revolution, whereas children from nonelite families were excluded. When the political winds turned against them in early October 1966, they launched daring attacks against all the key supporters of the Cultural Revolution by putting up anonymous posters.

This wave of dissent was quickly denounced as the “November black winds” or “December black winds.”³⁰ The “black winds” consisted of 1. slogans supporting Liu Shaoqi, who had already been publicly denounced as a capitalist roader; 2. a series of posters by conservative Red Guards attacking the Cultural Revolution Small Group; and 3. even an open letter to Mao himself questioning the “criticism of bourgeois reactionary line” campaign.

The December black winds was thus a counterattack launched by the “old guards” against the rising rebels. As such, it was part and parcel of factional conflicts. The goal was to challenge and undermine their factional rivals, and political dissent appeared in the form of challenges against opposing factions. Thus factional struggles provided the organizational spaces for dissent.

Although the countermaneuvers of the “old Red Guards” against the Cultural Revolution Small Group may have been motivated more by a desire to undermine the radical Red Guard organizations than to challenge the Cultural Revolution orthodoxy, their opponents, not surprisingly, framed their ideas as premeditated attacks against the revolutionary orthodoxy. A whirlwind of counteroffensives from the rebels quickly overwhelmed the “black winds” stirred up by the “old guards,” denouncing their ideas as “poisonous weeds” and “reactionary,” “opportunist” and “bourgeois” trends of thoughts.31

Again attesting to the complex circumstances of dissent, public denunciations of these “reactionary thoughts” inadvertently helped to spread them to a wider audience. At Beijing University a liaison station was formed to criticize To the Tiger Mountain (hu shan xing), one of the many old guard organizations associated with the December black winds. In a lengthy editorial the liaison station named the five members of Tiger Mountain and enumerated their “reactionary crimes.” Their first “crime” was that they “malignantly attacked Chairman Mao and Comrade Lin Biao.” As evidence of their “crimes,” one of the five members was accused of saying, “I’m currently at a stage of doubt about Mao Zedong Thought.” Another allegedly said, “I am afraid what’s happening now is a replay of the late Stalin.” Members of Tiger Mountain were also charged with the crime of viciously attacking the Cultural Revolution and the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group. Thus a third member had reportedly written the following in a letter: “I think [the Cultural Revolution] has a pretty dark side. The first two months were devoted to mobilizing the masses, the next four months to letting the masses fight among themselves. . . . I would say that in a sense the Cultural Revolution is a failure.”³² These were the unpublished “heterodox thoughts” among some of the “old guards,” yet, in exposing their “reactionary crimes,” the rebels gave publicity to these ideas.

“On Family Origin,” January 1967

Another powerful expression of dissent was a series of essays that systematically critiqued what was then referred to as the “bloodline theory” (xue tong lun). All these essays were authored by one person, Yu Luoke, who was a twenty-four-year-old worker in 1966. The most important of these essays was titled “On Family Origin” (chu shen lun).

The systematic use of social and political labels by the Chinese socialist state was a major cause of symbolic immobility.33 Among these labels was a category based on class origin. Three broad types of class origin, good, middle, and bad, respectively dubbed “red,” “gray” and “black,” were distinguished on the basis of the head of household’s economic and political status in the years before the Communist Party took power.³⁴ Different class origins bestowed different political and social statuses on their incumbents. Thus the good ones ranked highest socially, the bad ones were condemned and stigmatized, and the middling ones occupied a limbo space between the red and the black. Like a caste system, class labels both divided the society and put its members under strict control. Class labels, once assigned, went into everyone’s dossiers and would permanently affect almost all aspects of one’s life, from educational opportunities to careers. Labels like these created and perpetuated ascribed statuses or social stigmas.

Before the Cultural Revolution, this “class line” controlled the nerves of Chinese society, giving those from red categories a sense of superiority and treating those from nonred categories as second-class citizens, if not criminals. This class line cast its dark shadows over the education system. The first contingent of Red Guard organizations in Beijing consisted of students from “red-category” families. Their core members were the children of high-level party, government, or military leaders. To show and sustain the sense of superiority of these elite students, these early Red Guard organizations recruited members on the basis of the bloodline theory. On this theory, only students from families of “red categories” were eligible to join Red Guard organizations. Those from “black categories” were not only excluded, but in many cases became the targets of attack. Whereas before the Cultural Revolution such a theory was in de facto effect but not publicized as a party doctrine, the Red Guards lost no time in pronouncing it publicly, and they did so in the most blatant manner. The whole theory was condensed into the following notorious couplet, which spread nationally in June 1966:

If the father’s a hero, the son’s a great fellow;

If the father’s a reactionary, the son’s a rotten egg.

This was merely a cruder version of the theory that implicitly guided the official practice of dividing Chinese society into various class categories. Just as the class categories had been a political yardstick used by the party-state in evaluating individuals, so the ideas expressed in the couplet became widely adopted by some Red Guards as the basis for excluding certain groups of students from Red Guard organizations, making them vulnerable to political persecution.

Yu Luoke wrote the long essay “On Family Origin” in July 1966 to refute the bloodline theory. The essay was first publicized and distributed in a leaflet by his brother Yu Luowen, a student in Beijing’s No. 65 Middle School. Initially only several hundred copies of the leaflet were printed and distributed. It was not until it was published in the Middle School Cultural Revolution News (zhong xue wen ge bao) that it gained wide influence. This “little newspaper” was launched on January 18, 1967, through the joint efforts of Yu Luowen, Yu Luoke, and Mu Zhijing, a student in Beijing’s No. 4 Middle School.35 The paper ran six issues before it was forced to shut down in April 1967. The sixth and last issue was published on April 1, 1967. Each of the six issues carried a major article by Yu Luoke, all attacking the “bloodline theory,” but authorship was attributed to a “Beijing Family Background Study Group,” and Yu Luoke was never named.

“On Family Origin” argued that a new hereditary caste system (zhong xing zhi du) had formed in China that resembled the feudal caste system. In this system, Yu Luoke argued, social groups that belonged to the so-called seven black categories of family origins became the oppressed class, while those in the red categories were the ruling class. Yu further argued that the criteria for making this distinction was entirely arbitrary and based on ascribed and not achieved status. He contended that the reason for the appearance of the new caste system in China was political. It was for the more effective ruling of the people, as he wrote in another article, “On the Life and Death of Zheng Zhaonan the Martyr.” On the basis of these analyses, Yu Luoke called on all oppressed youth to rise up in struggles against the injustices of politically imposed social inequality.

These essays struck a chord among many. In a 1996 interview, Mu Zhijing, the original editor of the newspaper that carried Yu Luoke’s essay “On Family Origin,” described the popularity of his little paper:

Thirty thousand copies of the first issue of the paper were printed. Later, sixty thousand more were printed. Altogether, 110,000 copies of “On Family Origin” were printed. The newspaper became very influential. We received large numbers of letters from readers. . . . Because too many letters were sent to us, the post office refused to deliver them. Everyday, we had to go to the post office to bring back two big bags of letters. The price of our paper was set at two fen [equivalent to pennies], but it could be sold as high as five yuan in the street.36

The diffusion of Yu Luoke’s “On Family Origin” owed much to the chaotic political conditions of the Cultural Revolution, which provided relative freedom for people to form organizations and publish their views in small papers. It was a typical case of a small group of people voicing dissent through a small paper. At a time when thousands of such small papers were mushrooming, dissenting voices such as those carried in the Middle School Cultural Revolution News found their outlets.

Yet the movement-countermovement dynamics were also essential. As a refutation of the “bloodline theory” of the “old Red Guards,” Yu Luoke’s “On Family Origin” provided theoretical support to the insurgent zaofanpai, many of whom had suffered persecution in the hands of the “old guards.” Not surprisingly, although his essay was written in July 1966, its widespread circulation through the publication of Middle School Cultural Revolution News happened only in January 1967, after the old guards had lost their domination of the Red Guard movement. In this sense, the voicing of dissent became possible because the insurgent rebel ranks needed these voices to challenge their rivals.

As soon as the voices of dissent had spread, however, their power became a threat not only to the “old Red Guards” but also to the political establishment. Yu Luoke’s challenge against the bloodline theory could be easily interpreted as a challenge to China’s political system. Thus, before long, in April 1967, Yu’s “On Family Origin” was denounced by top leaders as “counterrevolutionary” and the Middle School Cultural Revolution News was shut down. Yu Luoke was arrested on January 5, 1968, and ruthlessly executed on March 5, 1970.

Such was the irony of radical mass action during the Cultural Revolution. Sponsored by the very center of political power in China, mass action inadvertently provided the conditions for political dissent that challenged the same power that had sponsored the mass action.

“On New Trends of Thought—A Manifesto of the April Third Faction,” June 1967

The notion of the existence of a specially privileged class was the theme of the manifesto of the “April Third” faction among Beijing’s middle school students. After party authorities issued orders in March 1967 for schools to resume class and sent military teams from the Beijing Garrison to provide military training to middle school students, rebel Red Guards in Beijing’s middle schools split into two factions. The April Third faction came to be known as such after Zhou Enlai, Kang Sheng, Jiang Qing, Xie Fuzhi, and other central party leaders met with Beijing’s college and middle school students on April 3, 1967.37 At that meeting, Jiang Qing, Kang Sheng, and Xie Fuzhi took the Beijing Garrison to task for suppressing rebel organizations in Beijing’s middle schools and supporting the conservative United Action (liandong). Encouraged by these speeches, the rebel students who had been the target of suppression by the military immediately launched a counteroffensive by putting up posters around the city the next day. These rebels came to be known as the April Third faction.

Perhaps to prevent the rebels from going too far in their counterattacks, but certainly reflecting the whimsies of the dynamics of the Cultural Revolution, several other members of the Cultural Revolution Small Group, including Wang Li, Guan Feng and Qi Benyu, met with rebel students in Beijing’s middle schools on April 4 and told them that although the military teams from Beijing Garrison might have committed mistakes in conducting military training, overall they had done a good job and should not be publicly attacked. These speeches were taken as words of support by April Third’s opponents, who became known as the April Fourth faction. After the conservatives or royalists were crushed at the end of 1966, the Red Guard movement in Beijing’s middle schools was carried on mainly between these two rival rebel factions.

Although April Third and April Fourth were both rebel organizations, as opposed to conservatives, there were several important differences between the two. First, there was a clearer class line dividing the two than that dividing rebel factions in colleges and universities. The more extreme and radical April Third faction gathered children from “ordinary families” (平民子弟), whereas the April Fourth faction was dominated by children of elite cadres or military families. Second, this difference partly explained their different attitudes toward students of Liandong, who were uniformly from elite families and had vehemently promoted the idea of born-reds in August and September of 1966. The April Third faction argued that members of Liandong were all counterrevolutionaries to be vanquished, whereas the more sympathetic April Fourth faction maintained that not all Liandong members were bad and at least some of them were redeemable and should be won over. The third difference was their attitude toward the army, the PLA. Because the April Third faction accused the PLA of suppressing rebel organizations, they were charged of being anti-PLA, whereas April Fourth had the support of the PLA.

The rivalry between the April Third and April Fourth factions was carried out both verbally through wall posters and little papers and through physical violence.38 “On New Trends of Thought—a Manifesto of the April Third Faction” was born in the middle of these conflicts. It was published in the first issue of April Third Battle News (si san zhan bao) on June 11, 1967.

Theorizing the revolution was just as important as conducting the revolution in the street. Much of the political dissent in the Red Guard movement was born as a result of such theorizing. The theorizing itself was deliberate, indeed often done in imitation of the great “revolutionary teachers” such as Marx, Lenin, and Mao Zedong, but the dissent was often accidental and expressed as the applications of Marxist theory to the analysis of Chinese realities.

Relatively little is known about the background of the writing of the April Third manifesto. According to Bei Dao’s recollections,³⁹ the author was Zhang Xianglong, whose elder brother Zhang Xiangping was a writer for a rebel group known as the “Commune of New No. 4 Middle School.” No. 4 Middle School was an important hub of rebel radicalism for Beijing’s middle school students. It was Mu Zhijing, a student there, who had started the Middle School Cultural Revolution News, which published Yu Luoke’s articles attacking the bloodline theory. Besides Middle School Cultural Revolution News, rebel students there published several other small papers. It was not surprising that the publication of the April Third manifesto was connected to rebel activities in No. 4 Middle School.

The manifesto tried to provide theoretical justification for the practical actions of the April Third faction. Its claim to a “new trend of thought” derives from its argument that the Cultural Revolution was a revolution to promote the redistribution of property and power, encourage revolutionary changes in the society, and break up the privileged class. At the beginning of the CR, the Sixteen Points had defined the main target of the CR as “those within the Party who are in authority and are taking the capitalist road.”⁴⁰ The question about redistribution of power and property was never mentioned. Yet the April Third manifesto argues that a privileged class had formed in the socialist period and that the Cultural Revolution should aim to achieve the redistribution of property and power. In this respect, the class theory in this document was consistent with Yu Luoke’s theory of family origin. Both provided theoretical support for students from marginalized social groups to challenge the “old Red Guards.”

The impact of the April Third Manifesto may be seen from the counterattacks it incurred. It was soon labeled and denounced as reactionary heresy. On September 19, 1967, a Red Guard newspaper in Huhhot of Inner Mongolia published an essay titled “Also on New Trends of Thought” (ye lun xin si chao), which was a denunciation of the spreading of similar ideas in Huhhot.41 Another kind of impact was that the manifesto inspired Yang Xiguang to produce his famous essay “Whither China,” which I will discuss.

“Whither China?” October 1967—January 1968

Both Yu Luoke’s essays and the manifesto of the April Third faction influenced Yang Xiguang’s thinking. Yang was an eighteen-year-old high school student in Changsha No. 1 Middle School and a member of Shengwulian, shorthand for Hunan Provincial Proletarian Revolutionary Alliance Committee. Shengwulian was an umbrella name for many rebel organizations consisting primarily of individuals from disadvantaged social groups. The social background of members of Shengwulian clarified to Yang Xiguang the class nature of the political struggles. Yang saw it as a struggle of the oppressed social groups against a ruling bureaucratic class, which he called “red capitalist class.” According to Yang’s own account, the idea of the existence of a “red capitalist class” first occurred to him when he was exposed to the ideas of the April Third faction on a linkup trip to Beijing in 1967.⁴² Back in Changsha, Yang traveled to the rural areas to study local social conditions. It was at this time that he began writing “Whither China?”

In this essay Yang Xiguang argued that in the seventeen years of communist rule after 1949, a “red capitalist class” consisting of over 90 percent of the high-ranking officials had formed in China. The relationship of this class with the people was that of rulers and ruled, oppressors and oppressed. Because of the existence of this antagonistic relationship, the author further argued, the struggles of the Cultural Revolution were between the oppressed class and the oppressors:

Facts as revealed by the masses, and the indignation they brought forth, first told the people that these “Red” capitalists had entirely become a decaying class that hindered the progress of history. The relations between them and the people in general had changed from relations between leaders and followers to those between rulers and the ruled and between exploiters and the exploited. From the relations between revolutionaries of equal standing, it had become a relationship between oppressors and the oppressed. The special privileges and high salaries of the class of “Red” capitalists were built upon the foundation of oppression and exploitation of the broad masses of the people. In order to realize the “People’s Commune of China,” it was necessary to overthrow this class.43

In targeting a “red capitalist class,” Yang argued that the Cultural Revolution was not an internal party struggle for purging a few power holders. Rather, it was the struggle of an oppressed class against the oppressors, who were none other than the communist party leadership. The essay proposed to establish a new political party “that will lead the people to overthrow today’s class enemy–the new Red bourgeoisie.”⁴⁴ In a separate essay, Yang suggested that this new party could take the incipient form of “Maoist groups.” The mandate of these groups was to unite all those who were “willing to learn and bold enough to think, and think independently,” so that they could openly and critically analyze the conditions in China and reach their own conclusions instead of accepting wholesale the theories promulgated in official newspapers (“Suggestions About Establishing Maoist Groups”). Yang suggested that Shengwulian could be viewed as the prototype of such a party. As Jonathan Unger puts it,

Shengwulian . . . was a congeries of groups that held one element in common: they all had been persecuted and shortchanged by the state and Party apparatus before and during the Cultural Revolution. . . . To be sure, elsewhere in China, too, there were obvious distinctions in the overall social composition of the Rebels as against the Conservative faction. But, by 1967, these differences had become partially obfuscated by the twists and turns of the Cultural Revolution, as the alignments of various subgroups and organizations shifted and split and recoalesced in accordance with the vagaries of local repressions, desperate efforts to secure vengeance and to end up on the winning side, and subsequent alliances of convenience.⁴⁵

Yang Xiguang’s articles drew immediate condemnation from the authorities. Yang himself was charged by party authorities as a “counterrevolutionary,” arrested in February 1968, and imprisoned for ten years.

Scholars generally agree about the radical nature and significance of Yang’s ideas as expressed in “Whither China?” In particular, Yiching Wu’s book analyzes the tortuous trajectories of Shengwulian and the radicalism of “Whither China.”46 Still, an important question remains: Why the imperative to theorize the revolution?

The stylistic features of Yang Xiguang’s radical essays suggest that he was consciously imitating the style of Mao the revolutionary theorist. He borrowed Mao’s words both in the title of his essay “Whither China?” and in its opening sentences. Yang’s use of Mao’s classic texts was an act of emulation and reenactment of an ideal, namely, Mao and his revolutionary practices, and it was by means of such emulation that the young radicals wished to become the revolutionaries of their own times. Yang Xiguang’s borrowing of Mao’s words was not limited to “Whither China?” Another important essay he wrote, titled “Report on an Investigation of the Youth Movement in Changsha,” was modeled on Mao’s famous “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan.” Here is a famous passage from Mao’s 1927 essay:

“IT’S TERRIBLE!” OR “IT’S FINE!” The peasants’ revolt disturbed the gentry’s sweet dreams. When the news from the countryside reached the cities, it caused immediate uproar among the gentry. Soon after my arrival in Changsha, I met all sorts of people and picked up a good deal of gossip. From the middle social strata upward to the Guomindang right-wingers, there was not a single person who did not sum up the whole business in the phrase, “It’s terrible!”⁴⁷

Below is a striklingly similar passage from Yang’s 1967 essay:

“IT’S TERRIBLE!” OR “IT’S FINE!” Educated youth who returned to the city to make rebellions disturbed the sweet dreams of the bourgeois masters, mistresses, young masters, and young misses. From the middle social strata upward to the rebels’ right-wingers, there was not a single person who did not sum up the whole business in the phrase “It’s terrible!”

The emulation of the young Mao was not just a matter of prose style, though the significance of style must not be underestimated. The young radicals of the Cultural Revolution emulated Mao’s whole way of being a revolutionary, his method of social investigation, his boldness and ambition, and his theoretical vision. In the steps of the young Mao, reading Marxist and Maoist theories and applying them to Chinese realities became a way of clarifying the goals and methods of the Cultural Revolution when many young people began to entertain doubts and ambivalences about the gaps between the Cultural Revolution and Chinese realities. Hence the rise of what Yang Xiguang calls “theoretical movements” in the second half of 1967. Yang saw such a “theoretical movement” happening when he was studying the educated youth and preparing his report on the educated youth movement:

Financially, educated youth had the most difficulties, yet they ran the largest number of newspapers. Whenever a new view appears which offers an explanation of the conditions of educated youth, in less than a day’s time it can spread to every educated youth. Therefore, when you visit the educated youth, you will find a special characteristic, that is, that their views about the educated movement was almost entirely the same. Among educated youth, theory has become a flourishing movement.48

Unger’s detailed study of Yang Xiguang’s intellectual trajectory explains this well:

On the one hand, Yang Xiguang was seeking out such complaints at the bottom of society, while on the other he was searching feverishly for explanations and, idealistically, for alternate ways of organizing society that would avoid inequalities and repressive hierarchy. In particular, he and two other students of like mind ruminated over Lenin’s “State and Revolution,” and discussed the 1966 Cultural Revolution articles commemorating the 95th anniversary of the Paris Commune.⁴⁹

There was, in Yang Xiguang and other self-designated young theoretians of the time, a confidence and audacity that was both the result of the idealistic education the Red Guard generation received and a mark of the times. Even in their most dangerous and difficult moments, these young people carried with them a strong sense of optimism and idealism. Thus Unger writes of how Yang Xiguang faced his arrest: “The turmoil of the Cultural Revolution thus far had provided him with an adventure in self-education, and he looked forward to more of the same. It was a reaction akin to that of other interviewees—Rebel Red Guards similarly crushed in 1968. Yang Xiguang recalls: On the way to prison, I felt excited, not scared. I felt I had been living in upper-class society. I felt I’d now have a chance to experience a fuller variety of society—what the bottom felt like. It was idealistic.”⁵⁰

Lu Li’an of Wuhan, another important author of essays of dissent, who was also imprisoned for ten years like Yang Xiguang, writes about a similar kind of optimism and sense of mission in his 2005 memoir. He said that he and his friends often proudly imagined themselves as belonging to the “young Mao Zedong group”: “At that time we were thinking: If the cannons of the October Revolution and the outbreak of the May Fourth Movement had led Mao onto a career of rebelling against the old society, then the Proletarian Cultural Revolution that he personally launched and led must lead us onto to the revolutionary road to accomplish the historical mission of ‘permanent revolution under the conditions of proletarian dictatorship.’”51 Lu wrote about how he and his friends gathered at the East Lake in Wuhan to discourse on the nation: “It was October on the East Lake. The autumn sky was high and the air was clear. It was refreshing and pleasant. The warm sunshine was as gentle as silk. We gathered on the lakeside, talking, laughing, and feeling so happy that we did not want to leave. We felt we were the pride of the nation, the brave swimmers in the tidal waves of the times. We sang [Mao’s poem] Pointing to our mountains and rivers, / Setting people afire with our words, / We counted the mighty no more than muck.”⁵²

The Historical Significance of Red Guard Dissent

The Red Guard movement was a period of intensive protest and counter-protest. Because of incessant conflicts and factional struggles, ideologically driven polemics were prevalent. Most of these polemics fell squarely within the party orthodoxy. In the vortex of political rhetoric, voices dissenting from the party orthodoxy formed only a minor current. They were eventually suppressed without exception.

Dissent was not a cause of the Red Guard movement, but its unintended outcome. As the movement progressed and conflicts escalated, dissent became more widespread and more radical. This progression indicates that the Red Guard movement itself was not about the voicing of dissent, but it unwittingly furnished the conditions for its expression. This attests to a paradox of the Cultural Revolution—the making of the revolution contained its own seeds of destruction. So far as the Red Guard generation is concerned, the paradox is that at the very moment when it imagined itself to be making a revolution it was undoing its own revolutionary convictions. The rise of dissent in the course of making a revolution shows that the transformation of the Red Guard generation was coeval with the revolutionary process.

What is the significance of Red Guard dissent? First were the new revelations and analyses of social conflicts in Chinese society. While the official decisions on the launching of the Cultural Revolution designated “bourgeoisie” as the revolutionary target, the authors of dissent redefined the “bourgeoisie” as the “red capitalist class,” a new class formation consisting of the majority of the leaders within the Chinese communist party itself. At the same time, the experiences of factionalism exposed and deepened the cleaveages between the chidren of the “red” elites and those from “black” or “gray” family backgrounds. Once formulated by Yu Luoke into a theory of social inequality and oppression, these class differences, which had already been in existence, became unusually threatening to the regime. At least theoretically, therefore, there was a perceptual shift of the locus of social conflict from between the people and the bourgeoisie to between the people and the privileged class within the party.

This new understanding of social conflicts and social relationships implied, however vaguely and incoherently, a new understanding of the self. In Yu Luoke’s writings this notion of the self was implicit in his theoretical defense of human equality and choice. He wrote, for example, that “human beings are capable of choosing their own directions for progress” and that “we reject any right that cannot be achieved through individual efforts.” In Yang Xiguang’s essays, this notion of the self was adumbrated in his championing of original and critical thinking. In a political context where the goals of national development were set by the party, Yang and his associates in Shengwulian called on all social groups to search for alternative routes based on independent analyses of China’s actual social conditions. The popularity of the essays of Yu Luoke and Yang Xiguang suggested that this notion of the self was not limited to a few individuals or small groups.

The subversive elements in the political agendas that contained this notion of the self were so obvious to the party authorities that politically divided factions within the party lost no time in joining forces to crush the proponents of these ideas. The harsh punishments dealt to Yu Luoke, Yang Xiguang, Lu Li’an, and others prevented them from developing their ideas further and for a short period of time even curtailed the spreading of their ideas. But, as we will see in later chapters, the seeds of dissent that were sown in the Red Guard movement would grow in new soil.

Despite the radical nature of political dissent, the heterodox “theoreticians” of the Cultural Revolution shared a fundamental commonality with the practitioners of the revolution who were engaged in violent battles like those in Chongqing, and that is that they had a strong sense of idealism and passion about revolution and radical social change. Their faith in the leadership of the Cultural Revolution may have been shaken, but revolution remained a sacred category in the heterodox thoughts in 1967 and 1968. It continued to be the linchpin of the meaning of a “good life.” It was only when the drama of the revolution came to an end that alternative visions of a good life began to emerge. Yet it is crucial to see the persistence of revolutionary idealism even in the middle of radical revolutionary theorizing, because it helps to understand a distinct trait in the formation of the Red Guard generation, that is, that whatever they became later in their lives, once upon a time they were true believers, and that experience of true belief decisively shaped their personal identities and experiences. Xu Xiao captures this trait quite well in her characterization of Mu Zhijing, who helped to disseminate Yu Luoke’s theory of family origin in 1967. In her memoir Half of My Life published in 2005, Xu Xiao writes:

Mu Zhijing is still a spiritual wanderer to the present day. To a great extent, his mental journey is a proof of the spiritual journey of our generation. Our spirit of doubt grew out of experiences of belief. Even if we rejected something, we must have first accepted it. This is our difference from the skeptics in the younger generation. They doubt and reject something for the sake of doubting and rejecting it. They do not care whether it is a kind of nihilism. Or maybe nihilism is precisely what they are after.53