The Cultural Revolution famously depended on college students and the Red Guards. The Red Guards began as an independent but politically-interested group of university students who supported a broadly Maoist cultural agenda. The formal alliance between Mao and the student movement began at Peking University with professor Nie Yuanzi, at the time a 45-year-old Party member in the Department of Philosophy. Nie vocally supported Mao’s removal of the mayor of Beijing and linked this to the struggle to remove bourgeois and capitalist elements from university administration. Once Mao officially blessed her statement, students began to organize and revolt against party authorities in universities across China. In this way, a political alliance was formed between the recently disempowered elite and educated youth and middle-class academics.
After the Red Guards had received official support, they expanded beyond their original constituency of university students to encompass high school students and more lower class youth generally. They took control of universities and engaged in purges and violence throughout the country. The army and police did not significantly interfere for the better part of two years, as the Red Guards were officially sanctioned by elements of the national government. Party journalist Chen Joda lended a raison d’être to the Red Guards, the abolition of the “Four Olds”: old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. None of these were well-defined, but the elasticity was the point. During the time in which this paramilitary group operated, art, temples, and religious icons were destroyed, cemeteries were desecrated, and university professors and intellectuals were persecuted or killed. Most universities were closed for several years, and it arguably took decades for China’s higher education system to recover. “Struggle sessions” dominated much of middle-class life in this period. People would be accused by Red Guards of anticommunist thought or action, adherence to one of the hated Olds, and subjected to intense questioning and forced confessions. These confessions, whether genuine or strategic, were no guarantee of safety: one might be kept for a period of repentance and hard labor, then later beaten or killed anyway. Once the paramilitary movement spilled out of universities, it targeted party headquarters and bureaucratic offices. The youth wing of the revolution became a para-governmental enforcement arm of the elite class (explicitly, Mao). This class alignment produced an inevitable outcome: the targets of this “revolution” were not the uppermost elites, but middle management, bureaucrats, and systems of social control that intermediated between elites and the populace. The Red Guards were eventually disbanded and suppressed by the government and the People’s Liberation Army. Despite occasional and even significant Red Guard-PLA clashes, the military was never replaced as the ultimate power in the country. Many of the eager young ex-Red Guards were sent into the countryside on an extended mission of spreading Maoist thought, far away from the centers of power and where they could do less damage, Nie Yuanzi, the Peking University professor who began the movement, among them. In a way, the Red Guards had served their purpose: the middle management of the country was properly chastened and afraid of their elite masters. The bureaucracies that mediated between elites and ordinary people were either in tatters or so cowed as to make direct control frictionless. In sum, an alliance between a disempowered elite and a mostly-young and educated lower-middle class (using the still lower-class youth as enforcers) upended the middle section of society’s bureaucracy, to long-lasting effect. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#5973): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/5973 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/80250914/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
