Red Guards

The Red Guards (Chinese: 红卫兵; pinyin: hóng wèibīng) were a mass, student-led, paramilitary social movement mobilized by Chairman Mao Zedong in 1966 until their abolition in 1968, during the first phase of the Cultural Revolution, which he had instituted. According to a Red Guard leader, the movement's aims were as follows: Chairman Mao has defined our future as an armed revolutionary youth organization .... So if Chairman Mao is our Red-Commander-in-Chief and we are his Red Guards, who can stop us? First we will make China Maoist from inside out and then we will help the working people of other countries make the world red ... and then the whole universe. Despite meeting with resistance early on, the Red Guards received personal support from Mao, and the movement rapidly grew. The movement in Beijing culminated during the Red August of 1966, which later spread to other areas in mainland China. Mao made use of the group as propaganda and to accomplish goals such as seizing power and destroying symbols of China's pre-communist past, including ancient artifacts and gravesites of notable Chinese figures. Moreover, the government was very permissive of the Red Guards, and even allowed the Red Guards to inflict bodily harm on people viewed as dissidents. The movement quickly grew out of control. Factions within the Red Guards frequently criticized one another showing that divisions amongst each other was a defining feature of the movement's development. The Red Guard had frequently come into conflict with authority and threatening public security until the government made efforts to rein the youths in, with even Mao himself finding the leftist students to have become too radical. By the end of 1968, the group as a formal movement had dissolved with many of the red guards sent to rural areas and country side...