THE RED GUARDS: What are the Main Thugs in the History of the 20TH Century Remembered For

In the mid-1960s, the Cultural Revolution broke out in China. The Chinese youth willingly supported the changes. Acting in the spirit of their own understanding of the ideas of Maoism, the students did not disdain either torture, or murder, or even cannibalism.

Initiated by Mao

The leader of the Chinese communists, Mao Zedong, who fueled the fire of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, taught: “There is no creation without destruction …

Creation itself is inherent in destruction.” Many young people responded to his call, believing that only mass purges could rid the country of the dominance of revisionism, vestiges of the past and the pernicious influence of the West.

August 8, 1966, is usually called the birthday of the Red Guards (Red Guards). On this day, Mao Zedong held a mass rally of young people wishing to serve revolutionary ideals in Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

For the first time in 16 years (since the war on the Korean Peninsula), he appeared in public in military uniform, which was symbolic: the “great helmsman” recognized only forceful methods in achieving the goals of the proletarian revolution.

Mao stressed in every possible way that the Red Guards are one of his main hopes in transforming Chinese society.

The Red Guards, drawn from various strata of Chinese youth, most often from poor and dysfunctional families, soon began to justify the highest confidence placed in them.

Zealously following the implementation of new cultural norms, they cut girls’ long hair, tore too tight trousers on young men smashed shop windows selling cosmetics and jewelry, banned gourmet food and jazz music and other attributes of the bourgeois lifestyle.

More freedom

Two weeks after the beginning of the atrocities of the Red Guards, Mao Zedong addressed them with a new speech, reproaching the communist youth for lack of determination and excessive civilization. The leader urged them to be bolder and not be afraid of riots. In fact, the “great helmsman” sanctioned anarchy in his country.

It is no coincidence that in the Soviet press of those years he was compared with Hitler, and the “red guards” — with the assault detachments of the NSDAP.

On July 26, 1966, by order of Mao and his associates, all students were sent on a six-month vacation with the expectation that they would join the ranks of the revolutionary youth. This idea paid off — about 50 million adolescents additionally joined the Red Guards detachments.

Thanks to their efforts, the country has noticeably changed: almost all libraries, museums, and theaters were closed, creative teams were disbanded, promoting Western art. We even got to the Great Wall of China, dismantling part of it for the construction of pigsties.

The prohibitions imposed by the norms of the Cultural Revolution were one stranger than the other. So, lovers were forbidden to hold hands, and children were forbidden to fly kites.

It was not allowed to have furniture in the apartments. “If you have two armchairs and a sofa, then you are a bourgeois,” read one of the slogans. Under the pretext of freeing their homes from luxury goods, the Red Guards plundered hundreds of thousands of private houses.

But the radicals did not confine themselves to plunder, they could kill with impunity those whom they considered “opponents of Chairman Mao” or “supporters of revisionist ideas.” To extort confessions, the Red Guards did not allow suspects to sleep, starved people, and used the most sophisticated tortures.

The new Minister of Public Security of the People’s Republic of China Xie Fuzhi completely untied the hands of the “red guards”. “Is it worth arresting the Red Guards for the murder? This is not our business, ”the minister reasoned. And Xie Fuzhi urged the police to cooperate with the revolutionary youth in every possible way.

Anthropophagy in Chinese

The excesses that the Red Guards made sometimes crossed all sorts of boundaries. Chinese dissident Zheng Yi, a former Hongwei Bing, in his book The Scarlet Memorial, cites cases of cannibalism among the revolutionaries, which they have erected into a kind of ritual.

“The epidemic of anthropophagy spread like a plague,” wrote the dissident. Particularly shocking cases have been reported in Wuxuan County, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

According to Zheng Yi, usually, the killers came at night, cut the victim, and removed the heart and liver from it. If the wrong organ was taken by mistake, they had to return. And then, flavoring the boiled entrails with spices and washing them down with vodka, in the ominous silence, they arranged their dinner. The worst thing is that minor secondary school students took part in this.

Zheng identified three phases of the epidemic of cannibalism in China: the initial, when everything was done in secret, the advanced, in which the eating of flesh became open, and finally the stage of mass insanity, when cannibalism became the norm.

“Sometimes human meat was served with wine and beer, dishes from it were served in the dining room of the revolutionary the committee,” we read in Zheng Yi. connection in Beijing. The political elite of China was shocked by what they heard and immediately sent troops to the Guangxi Zhuang region to kill the cannibals.

Internal enemy

Gradually, serious contradictions accumulated among the Red Guards, which developed into inter-clan squabbles. The “red guards” sought out “oppositionists and deviators” in their ranks and brutally dealt with them: they beat them to death with sticks and stones, cut off their heads, buried them alive, drowned them, and even blew them up. The most large-scale clashes between the parties of the Red Guards took place in the aforementioned Wuxuan county. One of the parties, the April 22 Group, waged an implacable war against the provincial bureaucracy, led by political commissar Wei Guoqing.

The latter had an undeniable advantage since local security forces and officials were on his side. The Red Guards also had serious confrontations with the Chinese workers, who for the most part did not want to accept the ideology imposed by them. In Shanghai, for example,

The arbitrariness of the Red Guards had such consequences that already in August 1967, Mao himself was forced to intervene in the situation, who sent an army of 30 thousand soldiers to suppress the most obstinate groups in the Guilin city district.

For almost six days, clashes between youth gangs and government forces continued until the last rebel was destroyed. Now the leader denounced his followers as incompetent and in violation of the boundaries of what is permitted. True, Mao refused to disband the Red Guards. “Let the students fight for another ten years. The earth will continue to rotate. The sky will not fall,” was his answer.

And so it happened. Until the mid-seventies, the “students of the Red Guards” committed atrocities, albeit on a smaller scale than in the first two years of the “Cultural Revolution”.

According to Chinese historians, about 100 million victims and almost 2 million were killed as a result of the rampant youth groups. In 2016, China’s leading party newspaper, The People’s Daily, wrote: “The Cultural Revolution, initiated by a national leader and exploited by reactionaries, has grown into the chaos that has become a disaster for the party, country, and people.”