The Red Guards and the Red Terror, 1966-68
Mao's Mass Movement
In May 1966, the Politburo issued the May 16 Notification, warning of ‘capitalist roaders’ inside the party and setting up the Cultural Revolution Group around Jiang Qing, Chen Boda and Kang Sheng. The directive called on young people to defend the revolution by their own action. The result was the Red Guards — secondary-school and university students, first organised in Beijing on 29 May 1966, then spreading nationwide. They wore red armbands, swore loyalty to Chairman Mao, carried the Little Red Book and attacked anyone they judged to stand for old China. By August Mao was ready to put millions of them on the streets.
Between August and November 1966, Mao reviewed roughly 12 million Red Guards in eight Tiananmen Square rallies. The first, on 18 August 1966, drew about one million teenagers. Free railway travel was provided so students could come from across China.
Mao's Hold on Young People
Why did the young respond so completely? Three reasons mattered. First, Lin Biao’s PLA cult of Mao had filled school curricula since 1964: the ‘three constantly read articles’ and the Little Red Book were already part of daily life. Second, the reform of education had told peasant and worker children that academic exams favoured the bourgeoisie — joining the Red Guards offered a different ladder of merit, based on revolutionary loyalty rather than test scores. Third, on 5 August 1966 Mao published his own big-character poster, ‘Bombard the Headquarters’, telling students that the enemies of the revolution were inside the CCP itself. For teenagers, attacking their teachers and even local party bosses was now rebranded as the highest form of patriotism.
The Four Olds
On 18 August 1966 Lin Biao called from the Tiananmen rostrum for an attack on the four olds: old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas. In practice this licensed a wave of cultural destruction. Buddhist and Daoist temples were smashed; Christian churches were boarded up; ancestral graves were dug up; classical novels were burned in piles in the street; traditional musical instruments and theatrical costumes were destroyed. Confucius’s tomb at Qufu was desecrated by Beijing Red Guards in November 1966. Names of streets, shops and even people were changed to revolutionary slogans — one Beijing road became ‘Anti-Imperialism Road’. Foreign-style clothing, ‘bourgeois’ haircuts and high heels were cut off in the street.
Students often picture 1966–68 as undirected madness. Frank Dikötter and Roderick MacFarquhar both stress a dual character: the agenda was set top-down, but the violence on the ground became uncontrolled. Mao chose the targets — capitalist roaders, the four olds, intellectuals, ‘black’ class backgrounds. Jiang Qing’s Cultural Revolution Group choreographed the press campaign. But once millions of teenagers were given the licence and the railway tickets, no one in Beijing could control which streets they swept down or which neighbours they denounced. Top-down direction, anarchy on the ground — both at once.
Jiang Qing and the Attack on the CCP
Jiang Qing — Mao’s fourth wife and a former Shanghai actress — turned the Red Guard movement against the CCP itself. As deputy head of the Cultural Revolution Group, she ran the press campaign that named senior officials as ‘capitalist roaders’. Liu Shaoqi was denounced as a ‘capitalist roader’, and his wife Wang Guangmei was paraded before a mass rally at Tsinghua University in April 1967; in October 1966 Lin Biao publicly attacked Liu at a Politburo work conference. Deng Xiaoping was sent to a Jiangxi tractor factory. Senior teachers and academics were forced to wear placards listing their crimes and stand bent over in the ‘jet plane’ struggle session. Beatings became routine. By the end of 1966 the existing CCP hierarchy was broken; by 1967 entire provincial governments had collapsed.
Cultural Destruction and Human Cost
The cost in lives and culture was enormous. Best estimates from Frank Dikötter and Yang Jisheng put the dead between 1.5 and 1.8 million across the wider Cultural Revolution decade, with most occurring in 1966–68 and again in 1968–71 when the army imposed order. Suicides among intellectuals were common: in Shanghai alone several thousand were recorded in 1966. The writer Lao She drowned himself in a Beijing lake after being beaten at a struggle session. Libraries, museums and family heirlooms were destroyed. Whole categories of people — landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, rightists — were collectively known as the ‘five black categories’ and treated as enemies whose children were routinely barred from schools and jobs.
The Slide into Anarchy, 1967–68
By early 1967 the movement turned on itself. In the ‘January Storm’ in Shanghai, radical workers and Red Guards seized the city government and declared a ‘Shanghai Commune’. Across China, Red Guards split into rival factions — ‘rebel’ groups attacking established power, ‘royalist’ groups defending it — and then split again. Many seized weapons from PLA depots. By summer 1967 there was open factional warfare in cities like Wuhan, where on 20 July 1967 (the ‘Wuhan Incident’) regional military commanders backed one faction and briefly detained two of Mao’s envoys. Mao now feared the chaos would topple the regime itself. He turned to Lin Biao and the PLA to restore order, beginning the de-mobilisation of the very Red Guards he had unleashed.
The orthodox CCP ‘Resolution on Certain Questions’ (1981) treats the Red Terror as a tragic deviation by an ageing Mao manipulated by Lin Biao and Jiang Qing — a way of preserving Mao’s pre-1956 reputation. Revisionist Western historians like Frank Dikötter and Roderick MacFarquhar argue that Mao deliberately used the Red Guards to destroy rivals he could not defeat through normal CCP channels. Sympathetic historians like Mobo Gao argue that the broader campaign against entrenched bureaucracy had genuine popular support, even as the violence on the ground became indefensible. Strong Paper 3 answers can hold all three readings at once and use them to explain why interpretations differ.
Once Red Guards split into rival factions and seized PLA weapons, Mao’s own movement threatened to bring down the regime. The Wuhan Incident of July 1967 marked the turning point: from late 1967 the PLA was sent in to restore order and rein in the Red Guards.