Mao's China and after by Maurice Meisner

Author:Maurice Meisner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0684856352
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 1999-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Red Guards

The spontaneous mass movement from below was not long in coming, although it came with the generous assistance of Mao’s Cultural Revolution Group and Lin Biao’s army. University and middle school students were the first to respond to the Maoist call to rebel against established authority – some genuinely inspired by the announced ideals and goals of the Cultural Revolution, others in pursuit of their particular social interests in the academic and political hierarchies, and still others organized as “rebels” by the regular Party apparatus to deflect the radical thrust of the Maoist attack. That diversity of intermingling motives and aims was to result in a youth movement that was not only massive but also extraordinarily complex and fractionalized.

The chaos that soon engulfed the schools was signaled on May 25, when students at Beijing University led by a young philosophy instructor, Nie Yuanzi, posted on the campus walls a manifesto denouncing the university president for having suppressed student discussion of the Wu Han affair and calling upon “all revolutionary intellectuals” to “go into battle.” The first of the “big-character posters” (which were to become the main form of popular political communication during the Cultural Revolution) was immediately torn down by Party authorities, and those involved in the incident were duly punished. But a week later, when Mao hailed the poster as “the manifesto of the Beijing commune of the 1960s” (predicting, in apparent reference to the Paris Commune of 1871, that China soon would see “a wholly new form of state structure”) and had it broadcast on Beijing radio and published in People’s Daily, rebel student groups were organized with extraordinary rapidity and in bewildering variety at schools throughout the country. Encouraged by a June 18 decree postponing university entrance exams for six months in order to refashion the entire educational system, student activists mounted political – and sometimes physical – attacks against school administrators, teachers, and especially school Party committees.

The student rebels not only fought political and educational authorities, they also soon became locked in battle with each other. For at the very beginning of the student turmoil in early June, Liu Shaoqi hastily dispatched Party work teams to the campuses in an effort to keep the burgeoning movement under the Party’s organizational control. The work teams organized “rebel” student groups, led primarily by the sons and daughters of Party officials, which supported the school Party committees and attempted to deflect the Cultural Revolution attack away from the Maoist target, the “power holders,” to “bourgeois authorities” and those with “bad” class backgrounds. “Bourgeois authorities” were most obviously intellectuals, individual professors, teachers, waiters, and others who were virtually defenseless against political attack. Contrary to the current version of events, the terrible persecution of intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution was begun not by Maoist radicals but rather by Party-organized “rebels” intent on protecting Party bureaucrats from Maoist assaults. One of the first victims was Gao Yisheng, the president of the Steel Institute in Beijing, who was driven to suicide by the local Party work team in July 1966.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.