China: Youth “Radicalism” of a Different Sort

For Chinese students, the 1960s was not a decade of progressive ideas towards any of the emergent themes in the West. Whilst Western youths experienced greater access to university, in China the early ‘60s denied the pre-established expectations of higher education for teenagers after secondary school[1]. Urban jobs became limited, and students faced the unappealing prospect of spending adulthood in the agricultural industry[2]. Additionally, most children were raised during an economic depression, and were absorbed in the communist rhetoric propagated throughout the country[3]. This helps explain why many movements common in Western states were absent from 1960s China.

But movements did exist. The Red Guards originated in Beijing in 1966 with students criticising their school for instilling a “bourgeois” curriculum[4]. Damning anyone who criticised Mao Zedong, they caught his attention by July[5]. Mao endorsed them[6], and the Red Guards quickly became a nationwide movement. Despite internal factionalism[7], they overwhelmingly followed the guidance of Mao[8]. This separates the Red Guards from Western youth movements, which typically followed more independent thought patterns and rebelled against established authorities.

Until 1968, the Red Guards destroyed and removed figures, symbols, and ideas that opposed Mao and the Cultural Revolution[9]. Yet, through this anarchy, some began to question Mao, and whether the Revolution was actually helping those it claimed were its primary interest[10].  Thereafter, they lost Mao’s support due to the growing level of ‘independent’ thinking they expressed[11].

Clearly, Chinese youth “radicalism” was very different from that in the West. Following the authorities’ doctrines, Chinese youth largely acted in an absence of independent values. When they expressed free-thought, the Red Guards were disposed of to prevent any challenge emerging[12]. Additionally, there was never a “generation gap” in China[13]. In fact, most Chinese youths were culture bound to their families and parents[14]. Nevertheless, the experience of the Red Guards encouraged free thought in a generation[15]. In the late 1970s, protests in line with those of the 1960s West began to make an appearance on the Chinese scene, realised in the Tiananmen Square protests a decade later.

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[1] David Dorman, “The Red Guards: A Planned Phase In China’s Revolution,” Social Studies 62, no. 6 (1971): 266.

[2] Anita Chan et al., “Students and Class Warfare: The Social Roots of the Red Guard Conflict in Guangzhou (Canton),” The China Quarterly 83, no. 3 (1980): 398-400.

[3] Yi-Xin Chen, “Lost in Revolution and Reform: The Socioeconomic Pains of China’s Red Guards Generation, 1966-1996,” Journal of Contemporary China 8, no. 21 (1999): 219.

[4] Luo Xu, “From Revolutionary Rebels to a Thinking Generation: A Reflection on China’s Red Guard Movement of the mid-1960s,” The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 3, no. 2 (2010): 144.

[5] Juliana Pennington Heaslet, “The Red Guards: Instruments of Destruction in the Cultural Revolution,” Asian Survey 12, no. 12 (1972): 1033.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Richard W. and Amy A. Wilson, “The Red Guards and the World Student Movement,” The China Quarterly 42, no. 2 (1970): 90.

[8] Luo Xu, “From Revolutionary Rebels to a Thinking Generation,” 145.

[9] Ibid, 145-148; Richard W. and Amy A. Wilson, “The Red Guards and the World Student Movement,” 102-103.

[10] Luo Xu, “From Revolutionary Rebels to a Thinking Generation,” 152.

[11] Ibid, 149; Alessandro Russo, “The Conclusive Scene: Mao and the Red Guards in July 1968,” East Asia Cultures Critique 13, no. 3 (2005): 549.

[12] Luo Xu, “From Revolutionary Rebels to a Thinking Generation,” 149.

[13] Ibid, 144.

[14] Yi-Xin Chen, “Lost in Revolution and Reform,” 222; Luo Xu, “From Revolutionary Rebels to a Thinking Generation,” 150.

[15] Luo Xu, “From Revolutionary Rebels to a Thinking Generation,” 152-154.