This book opens with a chapter on factional violence in Chongqing. I showed that in a social world of enchantment and danger, and through the uncertain processes of the Cultural Revolution, a hallowed revolutionary culture became the currency of status and prestige and decisively shaped the behavior of the Red Guards and rebels. Factional violence in Chongqing was the result of youth striving to enact an imagined revolution.
From there, this book traces a history of two transformations, the transformation of the Red Guard generation and of Chinese political culture and popular protest.
As the first cohort socialized in the People’s Republic, the Red Guard generation was cultivated as “flowers of the nation” and endowed with the mission of carrying on the Chinese Communist revolution. In 1966, when small groups of highschool students in Beijing launched the Red Guard movement pledging their loyalty to Mao and the revolutionary cause, and when Mao publicly supported these students in his own clarion call to launch the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a political process was set in motion in which students competed to show who were the true revolutionaries. Death being the ultimate proof, the competitive process led inexorably to the radicalization of factionalism and eventually to violence and death.
Ironically, the same process of revolutionary competition also led to political dissent. The passions for revolutionary practice that led to violence were matched by passions for revolutionary theory. It was in the pursuit of revolutionary theory that small groups of youth expressed ideas of dissent, the most radical of which challenged the legitimacy of the Chinese political system by arguing that Chinese communist elites had formed a new privileged class to be overthrown. There began to appear 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.
The transformation of the Red Guard generation continued during the sent-down period, when the necessities of making a living under harsh rural conditions confronted and eroded their political idealism. In tandem with a growing disillusionment with their political idealism, they came to reaffirm the values of ordinary life and personal interest. They began to appreciate what they had attacked and to doubt what they had held sacred. The fundamental transformation came at the end of the Cultural Revolution and was expressed in the wave of protest from 1976 to 1980. It was a rejection of the sacred symbols of Mao and a hallowed revolutionary culture and with it the expression of aspirations for a new enlightenment.
Ultimately, the historical transformation of the Red Guard generation was full of paradoxes. Launched with a pledge of loyalty to Mao, the Red Guard movement caused untold violence and ended by shaking the beliefs of the true believers. The sent-down experiences tempered this generation further, creating many more skeptics and critics of Chinese politics and society.
For the individuals in these historical processes, a generational transformation was nothing less than a history of perpetual disruption of personal lives. It is hard to imagine what kind of social and psychological traumas individuals had to go through. The proliferation of memory narratives produced by members of the generation attests, perhaps only in a small way, to the depth of their historical experiences.1
Amidst these endless disruptions, however, members of the Red Guard generation retain a sense of optimism and hope. For some, the Maoist ideals of a socialist revolution still hold appeal at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Surely, the lingering appeal of past ideals may have a great deal to do with dissatisfactions with contemporary realities, but this does not negate the influences of the past. Generational change, like social change in general, is not a linear process, but is uneven, contradictory, and necessarily complicated by new social conditions.
The Red Guard Generation and Protest Cultures
The transformation of the Red Guard generation is intertwined with the transformation of Chinese political culture. As political culture molds people, so people change political culture. The chasm between the political culture at the beginning and end of the Cultural Revolution was the result of the mutual making of culture and people. The desacralization of the holy categories of revolution, class struggle, and Mao and the corresponding ascendance of new values of life, work, family, and the self took place as the Red Guard generation encountered fundamentally different life experiences after being sent down. These new values laid the foundation for new forms of protest from the end of the Cultural Revolution until 1989.
A distinct feature of the Red Guard generation’s trajectory is its deep entanglement with political activism and protest. The Red Guard movement that gave its name to this generation was a decisive, liminal experience with long-term influences on the cultures of protest ever since. The spirit of rebellion, however destructive its consequences were, has been an inspiration to protesters at home and abroad in the decades after. Many of the repertoires of collective protest in the Red Guard movement continue to be used, in their original or adapted forms. Outside China, the Red Guard movement influenced the worldwide student radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s and the cultural politics of the new left more broadly.2
Yet there are clear disruptions to the history of this political culture. The history of political protest from 1966 to 1989 is like a long funnel. The funnel narrows gradually, screening out all but the most radical members of the Red Guard generation. Thus the number of protesters in 1976 was significantly smaller than in the Red Guard movement and smaller still in the Democracy Wall and democratic campus elections in 1980.
This funneling effect was the result of state suppression. At the end of the Cultural Revolution, zaofanpai leaders were prosecuted, imprisoned, and made the scapegoat of the violence and chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Even after their release from prison, they are watched by the police.3 The most active members of the Democracy Wall movement were prosecuted too, while the student movement leaders in 1989 were put on the most wanted list and forced into exile if not arrested.
Because of state suppression, the history of political activism in the People’s Republic is all but forgotten, if not totally denied. Among the younger cohorts, few know the social conditions of the Red Guard movement or the Tiananmen protests in 1989. Fewer would have even heard of the Democracy Wall movement, the sent-down youth protests in Yunnan, or the democratic elections in universities in 1980. These defining moments in the life course of the Red Guard generation are neither written into history books nor publicly discussed or debated. The result is the suppression and fragmentation of a protest tradition.4 It is against this background that a study of the Red Guard generation assumes special importance, because this generation provides biographical continuity to a broken tradition.
Mediated Activism, Real Communities
Another important characteristic of the political trajectory of the Red Guard generation is the extent to which its generational identity was defined by media. The Red Guard movement was associated not only with violence but also with the explosion of wall posters and “small papers.” In the underground cultural activities during the sent-down period, forbidden books and hand-copied manuscripts were sought after by sent-down youth who also produced large volumes of diaries, letters, verse, and notebooks of famous quotations. The wave of “new enlightenment” protest from 1976 to 1980 was defined first by verse on posters in the April Fifth movement and then by unofficial magazines in the Democracy Wall movement.
The explosion of activist alternative media was a characteristic of student radicalism in the global 1960s. The May Movement in 1968 France, for example, produced large volumes of media documents, as was the case with the American New Left.5 The most influential research on the media of sixties student radicalism, however, has focused not on alternative media but on how mainstream news media covers social movements. A representative work of this scholarship is Todd Gitlin’s landmark study of the “movement-media dance” between American news media and the student and antiwar movements from 1965 to the early 1970s. A key finding in Gitlin’s study is that mass media dramatize and simplify social conflict by personifying causes and groups through highly visible leaders, thus compelling activists to seek the limelight of the mass media even when such media exposure and framing may harm the cause. Sociologists have since examined mass media–movement interactions in great detail.6
While the interactions between the mass media and social movements are relevant to the history of popular protest in China, and may be becoming increasingly important today,7 the history of activism from the Red Guard movement to the “new enlightenment” wave was notable not for its interactions with the mainstream mass media but for its intensive use of alternative media forms. In China, if a protest movement is not recognized by the party-state, then the official media would simply ignore it until it can no longer pretend that no protest has happened. At that point, official media may shift to a mode of condemnation, which was what happened to the student movement in 1989.8 If a movement is recognized as legitimate, as was the case with the Red Guard movement, then movement-media interactions would take on features similar to those in the United States, with the mass media framing the movement in ways consistent with mainstream ideologies and policies.
What was remarkable about the Red Guard press was that it created a parallel universe alongside the official press. In some cities, important newspapers run by Red Guard organizations, such as those run by organizations in Peking and Tsinghua Universities, were as influential as official newspapers. In many other ways, the Red Guard press was nothing but a galaxy of alternative activist media. As I showed in chapter 3, a key function of the Red Guard press was to serve as a weapon of factional warfare. In this respect, the militancy and violence of its language were equaled only by the militancy and violence of the factional battles of their affiliated organizations.
In other ways, however, the Red Guard press resembled the alternative movement media of the student radicals in the global 1960s. The underground press in the United States, according to John McMillian, fostered a sense of community among the radical youth in American society.9 This was just as true of many Red Guard publications. The bustling editorial office of the August Fifteenth Battle News in Chongqing, as recounted by its editor Zhou Ziren, was full of comaraderie.10 The study groups and theory circles that gathered around Lu Li’an in Wuhan and Yang Xiguang in Changsha, which produced some of the most subversive political pamphlets and posters of that period, similarly demonstrated a strong sense of community and solidarity. It was only within such a community that individuals could trust one another and engage in risky political activities.
Similarly, the cultural pursuits of sent-down youth were as much about community as about knowledge-seeking or politics, and in these they relied on media forms that would appear primitive by our contemporary standards. As I discussed in chapter 5, letter writing, note-taking, copying and circulating hand-copied manuscripts, borrowing books from friends, telling stories—all these seemingly “primitive” forms of media took on special meaning for a generation in the doldrums. The same may be said of the editorial collectives that produced unofficial journals and subversive commentaries in the Democracy Wall movement.11 In these social practices, media was not just a bare technology. Each media form became a reservoir of historically specific meanings. A letter carried friendship and care, a shared notebook with a hand-copied version of a forbidden novel carried a sense of adventure and trust; singing a love song together was an act of transgression and emotional connection. There were elements of activism in all these acts, but there was also a longing for community and expression. The media forms in these actions were not just used to achieve some other goal, but were integral to a cluster of social practices that would not have existed in the first place without the various forms of media. One might call these practices the making of “real” communities, real in the sense that those involved were likely to know one another, as opposed to imagined communities, whose members can only imagine one another’s existence. Yet even “real” communities are mediated, as much as imagined ones are. In short, the mediated activism of the Red Guard generation proves the one-sided nature of some common propositions about the character of face-to-face or mediated communities. For a community is mediated almost by definition. The mediated activism of the Red Guard generation also shows that activism itself cannot be separated from sociality. To the extent that activism is a collective endeavor, it is rooted in sociality and sometimes aims explicitly to build sociality.
Political Culture and Political Violence
The study of factionalism in Chongqing shows the centrality of ideas and ideals to collective violence. The most important factor in influencing participation in the Red Guard movement was not class interests, nor manipulation of the masses by the party leaders, but the sacred culture of revolution that had formed prior to the Cultural Revolution, which had come into full play during it. The case demonstrates that human beings are capable of, and, indeed, may be attracted to, death to prove their devotion to an idea. And the more sacred the idea is made to be, the more deadly it may become.
In a way, the Chinese case merely proves an old theory, one that was articulated, for example, by theorists like Crane Brinton, Michael Walzer, and Barrington Moore in their studies of religious zealots and revolutionary radicals in modern world history.12 It may be sobering to recall some long-forgotten insights from Brinton’s analysis of revolutions, when he writes that “all these revolutions have at their crisis a quality unmistakably puritanical or ascetic or, to use an overworked word, idealistic.”13 He continues: “Our orthodox and successful extremists, then, are crusaders, fanatics, ascetics, men who seek to bring heaven to earth. No doubt many of them are hypocrites, career-seekers masquerading as believers, no doubt many of them climb on the bandwagon for selfish motives. Yet it is most unrealistic to hold that men may not be allowed to reconcile their interests with their ideas.”14
In this respect, my study of violence in Chongqing may merely have reaffirmed the centrality of ideas to collective violence and collective action more broadly. It is a point, however, that cries out for attention. An earlier tradition of scholarship emphasizes values, ideologies, and beliefs in social movements and revolutions, yet that tradition has been sidelined in the scholarship on social movements and contentious politics in recent decades.15 This is unfortunate. For the rampant violence in our contemporary world, committed by nation-states, ethnic groups, or terrorist organizations in one form or another, in the name of one sacred slogan or another, cannot be fully understood without understanding the ideas and passions that motivate them.
Naturally, my argument is not that ideas alone can kill. Without a context, even the most sacred ideas would be hollow, empty, and useless. Social and political context provides the soil for sacred ideas to thrive. It is context that makes ideas work. In the Chinese Cultural Revolution the context of domestic threat and international hostility during the cold war era gave the myth of revolution a reality. Across the uncertain and fluid atmospheres of the Cultural Revolution, that context provided Red Guards and rebels with the material for imagining a revolution.
Strangely, however, deadly ideas seem to seek out or create their own context, just as a social and political context seems to take shape precisely at the moment when deadly ideas begin to emerge. There is no shortage of such deadly “coincidences” in modern world history. The cold war was a perfect case, when everywhere there was violence committed in the name of sacred ideas, and when sacralized ideas, such as freedom in some countries and communism in others, had curiously powerful grips on the human imagination. But even the post–cold war era and our own world today remain hostage to such violent tendencies, and the social and political environments for the domination of certain deadly ideas continue to thrive.
The lesson for our contemporary world is twofold: on the one hand, a healthy suspicion of everything our own society holds sacred—indeed, an internal mechanism for the desacralization of our own sacred institutions; on the other, determined efforts to pluralize and diversify the values and experiences of members of our societies.
What is happening today to the revolutionary tradition and experiences that enchanted the Red Guard generation in the 1950s and 1960s? In chapter 7 I explored this question in my analysis of the red culture revival under Xi Jinping. Instead of recapitulating that analysis, let me conclude this book with two stories that I believe point to both the intransigence of past politics and a note of hope for the future.
One story was featured in the news. On February 3, 2015, about one thousand second- and third-generation children of China’s communist revolutionary leaders gathered in Beijing to celebrate the Chinese New Year. According to a news story, “the 1,000-seat auditorium was completely full. All the people present at the New Year gathering share the same common identity, which is that they are all posterity of old revolutionaries. Every year, at the beginning of the New Year, they hold such a group gathering to exchange New Year’s greetings. Several decades have passed, but they have maintained this fine style left behind by their fathers’ generation.”16 This “common identity” of the children of the “old revolutionaries” of the Chinese communist revolution serves as a fitting, albeit troubling, endnote to my account of China’s Red Guard generation. The only precedents for such massive public displays of an elite political status were the early Red Guard movement of the “old Red Guards” in 1966. It would not be surprising if, despite the time gap, many of the same individuals were present on both occasions. Considering that Xi Jinping, the representative par excellence of second-generation reds, now rules China with an ideology that is closer to Maoist than any of his predecessors, from Deng Xiaoping through Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, one cannot help but lament that, after all, the vows made by the “old Red Guards” in 1968 may have come true. Here again are their words, as remembered by the poet Bei Dao: “In twenty years’ time, we will know who the real winners are. . . . Let’s see who rules the tianxia [all under heaven] in the future.”17
And we know who rules now.
My other story has different characters.
Ms. Wang is a former sent-down youth I interviewed in August 1999. After many years, we reconnected in 2014 by e-mail while she was visiting her daughter in the United States. When we finally met again in Beijing in March 2015, I was struck by how little she has changed after fifteen years. She is a person with a quiet demeanor and amiable appearance, but extraordinary inner strength. Wang was working for People’s Daily in 1999. Since retirement, she has devoted herself to a project called Baoquan Tea House, named after the place where the founders of this tea house had been sent down during the Cultural Revolution. Not exactly a tea house, the project runs regular cultural events related to the history of the sent-down movement with a mission to “critically reflect on half a life’s road of passion, loss, and hardship” (审视半生激情之路、迷茫之路、艰难之路). At our meeting on March 12, 2015, five of her former sent-down youth friends involved in the tea house project were with her. In the middle of our conversations, I was surprised and moved to hear that they have been conducting a survey of the current conditions of former sent-down youth in Beijing, and the questionnaire they used for their survey was based on the one I designed and used for my own research in 1999. They even gave me a copy of my original questionnaire!
Their project holds “tea parties” at which scholars and former sent-down youth give talks about the sent-down movement. The convening of each such meeting is called “pouring a pot of tea.” Not long after I returned to Philadelphia, Ms. Wang e-mailed me to say that their tea house had just poured their twelfth pot of tea, meaning their twelfth gathering. This time, the theme was women’s perspectives on the sent-down movement, and the speakers were seven female sent-down youth and one young woman called Liu Lili whose father had been sent down to Heilongjiang. Ms. Wang provided me with links to the video of the talks and the online comments people left on Baoquan Tea House’s Internet forum. Especially thought-provoking was the talk given by Liu Lili. Growing up in Heilongjiang as the child of a sent-down father, Liu was seen as a Beijing girl by the locals. When she moved back to Beijing in 2000, however, she was surprised to find she was treated as an outsider. Now, at the age of thirty-five, Liu Lili still wonders where her home is and where her heart belongs. Liu’s personal story captures the feeling of disorientation shared by many people from the Red Guard generation.
Ultimately, I was most deeply touched by Ms. Wang herself. Ms. Wang’s mother was Bian Zhongyun. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Bian was the vice principal of the elite girls’ school attached to Beijing Teachers University. On August 5, 1966, she was beaten to death by Red Guard students in her own school. When I first interviewed Ms. Wang in 1999, she talked only briefly to me about her mother’s death. After last year’s controversy surrounding the public apologies given by Song Bin bin and others, which I discussed in the previous chapter, I have sometimes wondered how she might have responded to those acts of apology. But I did not ask her anything. Seeing how committed she was to her Baoquan Tea House project and to the experiences and stories of her fellow sent-down youth, and realizing how carefully she must have kept my questionnaire from about fifteen years ago, I seem to get an inkling of the deeper meaning of their project. It is a project of preserving and understanding history and memory with a silent bravery, the kind of silent bravery that I have seen in Ms. Wang’s attitude toward the history and memory of the traumatic experiences of her own family. Through their own example, Ms. Wang and her friends show how far they have come in the tumultuous journey of China’s Red Guard generation, how closely connected to that history they still are, and how courageously they bear the burden of the passions and traumas of the past.