Explaining the Red Guard Movement During the Cultural Revolution

Chairman Mao first initiated the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966 in order to expel capitalist influences within the Party and solidify his position as the supreme leader of China. In his " 16 Points, " Mao called on the masses and youth of China to rise up and " strike at the handful of ultra-reactionary bourgeois Rightists and counter-revolutionary revisionists, and expose and criticize to the full their crimes against the Party, against socialism, and against Mao Tse-tung's thought " (Decision of the central committee of the communist party of China concerning the great proletarian cultural revolution, 1966). Almost immediately, students in middle schools, high schools, and universities across the country formed revolutionary groups known as the Red Guards in order to carry out Mao's revolution. What soon followed from 1966 to 1969, however, was anarchy, as fighting between the Red Guards and state-appointed work teams sent by Premier Liu Shaoqi to lead the Cultural Revolution in the schools, factionalism between conservative and radical Red Guard organizations, and attacks by students on fellow citizens resulted in massive purges, beatings, and armed conflict. Infighting among the Party elite also contributed to this sense of mass confusion. Once set loose by the elite the Red Guards brought China into chaos, forcing the government to periodically suppress various Red Guard factions despite having previously supported them. With such a confusing time period, scholars and participants in the Cultural Revolution have attempted to explain the factors that contributed to the Red Guards' formation, factionalism, and violent conflict by analyzing the motivations of both the Red Guards and the Party elite and the social and political conditions that existed in China. This paper will show that there are observable trends in the types and complexity of theories about the Red Guard movement developed during a given time period. Specifically, these theories have been