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Students and Class Warfare: The Social Roots of the Red Guard Conflict in Guangzhou (Canton)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Anita Chan ,
Stanley Rosen  and
Jonathan Unger
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Extract

Until recent years, scholars of modern China had generally assumed that in the Cultural Revolution violence of 1966–68 young people were almost arbitrarily joining one or the other of the opposing Red Guard groups. Only within the past few years have researchers begun to unveil the antagonism among students early in the Cultural Revolution over “class” issues and the resulting differences in the composition, tactics and goals of the Red Guard factions.

Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 83 , September 1980 , pp. 397 - 446
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1980

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References

1. White, D. Gordon: The Politics of Class and Class Origin: The Case of the Cultural Revolution (Canberra: Contemporary China Centre, Australian National University, Contemporary China Paper No. 9, 1976)Google Scholar.

2. Lee, Hong Yung: “The Radical Students in Kwangtung during the Cultural Revolution,” CQ, No. 64 (12 1975)Google Scholar. Also Lee, Hong Yung: The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

3. The state was obliged to recruit from government offices and amongst primary school staffs, etc., to make up the difference. The state went so far as to offer applicants a quarter year's paid leave to prepare for the entrance exams.

4. Renmin Ribao (People's Daily), 25 April 1957.

5. Renmin Ribao, 4 June 1960; in SCMP (Survey of the Chinese Mainland Press) 2285, p. 17.

6. The 1949 figure is from a Reuter's interview with Guangzhou officials (Hong Kong Standard, 18 October 1965). The 1954 citation is from Vogel, Ezra: Canton Under Communism (Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 369Google Scholar.

7. Cited in “Youth to the Countryside – and Back Again,” Current Scene, Vol. V, No. 16 (1 10 1967), p. 5Google Scholar. This message, with almost the same wording, began to reappear somewhat frequently in the press, as in Zhongguo Qingnian Bao (China Youth News), 7 January 1965, and Jingji Yanjiu (Economic Research), November 1965, in SCMM 507, p. 17.

8. These Guangzhou regulations are described in China Background, No. 17/68.

9. As an example, a bad-class interviewee was told in 1965 that if she settled in a village she would be permitted to re-register from there for the next year's university entrance exams.

10. Yangcheng Wanbao, Guangzhou (19 September 1962); Nanfang Ribao (Southern Daily), Guangzhou, 23 April 1963.

11. Guangzhou Radio, November 19 1964; in News front the Chinese Provincial Radio Stations (U.K. Government). They were accompanied by 10,000 of Guangzhou's “social youths,” i.e. youths who were long-time unemployed.

12. Nanfang Ribao, 5 January 1966, p. 3.

13. The time they were supposed to spend in the countryside varied from two to four years. For those willing to go to hardship areas, say to help wipe out blood flukes, a shorter two-year “contract” was drawn up.

14. For the different perspectives adopted by the young people who were rusticated at different times during the 1960s, as well as their divergent behaviour during the Cultural Revolution, see Rosen, Stanley: The Role of Sent-Down Youth in the Chinese Cultural Revolution: The Case of Canton (Center for Chinese Studies, University of California, Berkeley, forthcoming)Google Scholar. See also White, Gordon: “The Politics of Hsia-hsiang Youth,” CQ, No. 59 (07 1974)Google Scholar; Gardner, John, “Educated Youth and Urban-Rural Inequalities,” in Lewis, John W. (ed.), The City in Communist China (Stanford University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; and Anita Chan, Richard Madsen and Jonathan Unger, Chen Village (forthcoming), Chapter 4. On the perspectives of urban young people towards the post-Cultural Revolution rustication policies, see also Bernstein, Thomas: Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Unger, Jonathan, “China's Troubled Down-to-the-Countryside Campaign,” Contemporary China, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Summer 1979)Google Scholar.

15. On this debate up to the present day, see Unger, Jonathan: “The Chinese Controversy Over Higher Education,” Pacific Affairs, Vol. 53, No. 1 (Spring 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16. So far as we can tell, our over-all results would not have been appreciably altered had we used the questionnaire responses that were culled. Their results are largely in line with the 74 that were used. With two of the classrooms that we did use, moreover, we had an opportunity to cross-check; we received independent responses from two sets of former classmates, and in both cases the correspondence between their recollections was quite close.

17. Some of the academically good students turned this to their “political” advantage, since by coaching poorer students in their studies they could chalk up a political good deed to their own credit. It was moreover a political merit that the students weaker in their studies could not compete with them over. Later, in the early months of the Cultural Revolution, some of the academically poorer working-class students expressed resentment at this, and resentment also for the help they had had to receive.

18. The selections of Mao's works for use in high-school classes, Mao Zedong Zhuzuo Xuandu, Types A and B, were first published in 1964 and 1965.

19. At some of the schools early in the Cultural Revolution, many of the children of revolutionary-cadre families joined the middle-class non-League members in supporting this view. Since the cadre youths had the reddest of red family backgrounds, an emphasis upon a person's main aspect rather than the “petty details” of their day-to-day behaviour would serve such youths best of all.

20. This theme and the other themes in this section of the paper are handled in greater depth in Anita Chan: Children of Mao: A Study of Politically Active Chinese Youths (forthcoming book).

21. As the Party Secretary at Guangzhou's foremost “key point” high school noted in an address to League members, “If a member's grades aren't good and he's failing exams, even if he enters the League he can't be effective there … To study diligently is the struggle-mission of the League.” (Xiaobing [Little Soldier], a Guangzhou Red Guard newspaper, 9 November 1967.) Also see Tao Zhu's remarks as quoted in the same issue of the newspaper.

22. As if to emphasize their claims to a superior political status, the military cadres' children developed their own status symbol – the wearing of old army clothes handed down from their fathers. Any other youth who dared wear such garb would have been accused of attempting falsely to associate with the PLA's glorious past. Later during the Cultural Revolution, when the cadre children's monopoly in this wearing of old uniforms broke down, such military clothes became an immediate fashion of the “masses.” (On the cadre children's belief in “natural redness” see Beijing Ribao {Peking Daily), 26 November 1964; in SCMP (Supplement) No. 133.

23. See, e.g., Zhongxue Luntan, 11 March 1967, p. 3.

24. One such group of “activist” bad-class youths who later started their own Red Guard group in Beijing put out a newsletter defensively asserting their political devotion: “Thanks to the sarcastic taunting of … writers and the ceaseless prompting of those comrades of ‘good intention’ in past years, youths of bad family backgrounds are always on guard against their families, and the great majority [sic] of them want to draw the line between themselves and their families. They are often subconsciously opposed to what their fathers say. We should have faith in their ability to drag out their fathers when the latter sharpen their knives. We have faith in them because they have also been cultivated for 17 years by the Party like you.” (In SCMP Supplement No. 183.)

25. The predicaments of a number of bad-class youths are sensitively portrayed in Raddock, David: Political Behaviour of Adolescents in China: The Cultural Revolution in Kwangchow (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977)Google Scholar. Almost all of Raddock's interviewees were of distinctly bad-class backgrounds.

26. The press disapprovingly cited some of the slogans they allegedly devised: “Now the primary question is one of revolution, not of studying”; “The more you study, the deeper the influence of capitalist ideology”; “If you study poorly, then and only then are you red ”; etc. (China Youth, No. 8, 16 04 1965, pp. 12–13Google Scholar; also Shanghai's Wen Hui Bao, 3 June 1965, p. 4).

27. Unger, Jonathan, Education Under Mao: A Study of Canton Schools 1960–1980 (Columbia University Press, forthcoming), Chapters 7 and 9Google Scholar.

28. Zhongguo Quignian Bao (China Youth News), 18 September 1965. Also see China Yough News, June 3 1965 (SCMP 3478).

29. Renmin Ribao, 31 January 1965; in SCMP 3395.

30. In 1965, a large number of essays and readers' letters in China Youth Monthly reiterated this point. See Townsend, James: “Revolutionizing Chinese Youth: A Study of Chung-kuo Ch'ing-nien,” in Barnett, A. Doak (ed.), Chinese Communist Politics in Action (University of Washington Press, 1969)Google Scholar.

31. The Diary of Wang Jie (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967)Google Scholar. For Wang Jie's comments on his class background, see especially p. 59 and pp. 81–82.

32. e.g. even later, during the Cultural Revolution, a pronouncement by a Red Guard group composed of non-good-origin young people argued “Nobody can say that Wang Jie's glory was below that of Lei Feng.” (“Origin Theory,” translated in White, D. Gordon: The Politics of Class and Class Origin, p. 81.)Google Scholar

33. For the contents of Nie's poster see Renmin Ribao, 2 06 1966Google Scholar; translated into English in SCMP, No. 3719 (16 06 1966)Google Scholar.

34. The 16 May directive has been translated in Current Background (Cfl), No. 852 (6 05 1968)Google Scholar.

35. Nanfang Ribao, Guangzhou (19 June 1966); also see a Canton Radio broadcast in Foreign Broadcast Information Service: China Daily Report (JFBIS) (22 June 1966), p. DDD 3.

36. Renmin Ribao (18 June 1966).

37. More than a year later, in the autumn of 1967, some of the good-class students temporarily revived the issue. They did so during a period when the Party centre in Beijing was attempting to dampen the students' activities in the streets and get them re-orientated once more towards their own schools. In such circumstances these good-class children had perceived that renewed discussion on educational policies would enable them to regain the initiative they had earlier lost to the middle-class-led Rebel Red Guards. On this see Lee, Hong Yung, The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 306–8Google Scholar. For greater detail, see Rosen, Stanley, Red Guard Factionalism in China's Cultural Revolution: a Social Analysis of Guangzhou (Westview Press, forthcoming), Chap. 6Google Scholar.

38. Nationwide the League felt it was gaining new responsibilities due to the campaign. The League Central Committee decided to start publishing China Youth News daily rather than thrice weekly starting 1 August. (Zhongguo Qingnian Boo, 25 07 1966; in SCMP, No. 3754.)Google Scholar

39. In Beijing, where many of the revolutionary-cadre children had inside information that there were splits within the ranks of the top Party leadership, some of them went against the workteams. In such cases, the workteams found it wisest to define the “reliability” of a student not so much in terms of family origins but rather in terms of a student's support for the workteam. In such schools, middle-class origin students who were enthusiastically willing to back the workteams were permitted into the Preparatory Committees. (In Guangzhou, several of the high-level cadre children in at least two of the elite schools similarly went against the workteams.)

40. This interviewee, in trying to explain why the teachers were locked up, reveals the naive worldview of teenagers at that time: “The teachers with problems were treated as class enemies. They had to be guarded at night to make sure they didn't sneak out to commit sabotage. They'd suddenly been regarded as people who might commit sabotage at any and every moment.”

41. The Beijing order withdrawing the workteams is contained in Current Background, No. 852, p. 8.

42. Mao Zedong Sixiang Wansui (1969), pp. 643–30.

43. In Current Background, No. 852.

44. A New China News Agency report of the ceremony described the Red Guards as “an organization established by secondary-school students from families of workers (former) poor and lower-middle peasants, revolutionary cadres and revolutionary armymen.” NCNA (18 August 1966); in SCMP, No. 3766 (23 August 1966). Also see White, D. Gordon, The Politics of Class and Class Origin: The Case of the Cultural Revolution (Canberra: Contemporary China Paper No. 9, Contemporary China Centre, Australian National University, 1976)Google Scholar.

45. China Youth Daily, the newspaper of the League, ceased publication 20 August 1966, for the duration of the Cultural Revolution and beyond.

46. Tan Lifu declaimed: “After seven or eight struggles, if you've transformed your thought, then we can have unity. First there must be isolation, to see if unity is possible. …” Quoted in Tan Lifu Jianghua Zhuze, a pamphlet published 16 October 1966 by Red Guards at Beijing Industrial University who were opposed to Tan's views.

47. Students of one Beijing high school also suggested that the “five bad elements” and their children be dealt with in ways not dissimilar to apartheid in South Africa: e.g. deny them all urban public services and drive many of them out of the capital into the countryside. (See White, D. Gordon, The Politics of Class and Class Origin, pp. 45–6)Google Scholar. By year's end, a great many bad-class residents had, in fact, been exiled to the countryside. As late as 1978, some were petitioning Beijing to return to their urban homes.

48. On this, see Anita Chan: Children of Mao: A Study of Politically Active Chinese Youths (forthcoming book).

49. Union Research Service, Vol. 48, No. 24, p. 339.

50. Current Background, No. 830 (26 06 1967), pp. 24–5Google Scholar. See also White, D. Gordon, The Politics of Class and Class Origin, p. 33Google Scholar.

51. The only partial exception to this was presented by the students of Over-seas Merchant background, some of whom before the Cultural Revolution had labelled themselves children of Overseas Chinese labourers. During the periods of 1967 when both factions were in need of manpower the Loyalist Red Guards were willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

52. Further numbers of working-class junior high school students attached themselves to the Rebel side because the Rebels seemed to offer a better climate for disruptive excitement.

53. The specialist school attended by Dai Hsiao-ai was an exception to this general case. [Dai's school is described in Gordon Bennett and Montaperto, Ronald, Red Guard: The Political Biography of Dai Hsiao-ai (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1971)Google Scholar and Ronald Montaperto, “From Revolutionary Suecessors to Cultural Revolutionaries: Chinese Students in the Early Stages of the Cultural Revolution,” in Scalapino, Robert, Elites in the People's Republic of China (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1972)Google Scholar.] This was a provincially run school. Many of its students were from small towns and cities, and they considered the school their big chance for upward mobility. They were hoping for job postings in a big city rather than a county town or, better yet, the opportunity for further specialist training. Dai Hsiao-ai has read Part I of our manuscript and has informed us that, except for the fact that few high-level cadre children attended his school, the patterns of activism and the tensions which enveloped the pre-Cultural Revolution key-point schools were also largely applicable to his own school.

54. Sometimes, to protect their Red Guard group's reputation, the Rebel unit at a school put forward as their formal leader a young person of impeccably good-class origins, though in such cases the real leadership frequently lay with a middle-class second-in-command. Notwithstanding this manoeuvre, a disproportionately high percentage of the formal Red Guard leadership came from middle-class homes. (On this, see Rosen, Stanley: “Comments on ‘Radical Students in Kwangtung during the Cultural Revolution’,” CQ, No. 70, 06 1977, pp. 395–6Google Scholar.) For more detail on Rebel leaders, see Rosen, Red Guard Factionalism, Chap. 4.

55. Even though the formation of the Red Guards had made the League superfluous, it had not ended the debate on the League. If anything, there were increased pronouncements by good-class students on the “revisionist” member-ship policies and character of that organization. Thus in addition to their gratuitous attacks on the hapless bad-class youths, some of these good-class youths had given harsh treatment to any “veteran” middle-class League members who were slow to acknowledge the absolute authority of the Red Guards. Some of these “veteran” League members were told they would be denied admission to the Outer Circle even before they had shown active signs of dissidence.

56. Lee, Hong Yung, The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, pp. 312–22Google Scholar.

57. Additionally, a small minority among the Rebels had begun arguing that their attacks were not merely upon individual Party backsliders but rather a new “privileged elite.” In the famous formulations of the Hunanese Red Guard group Sheng-Wu-Lian, the Party bureaucracy itself became redefined as a perpetually dangerous “new class.” For a translation and analysis of the Sheng-WuLian proclamation, see Mehnert, Klaus, Peking and the New Left: At Home and Abroad (Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, China Research Monograph No. 4, 1969)Google Scholar.

58. The interesting developments in the Red Guard movements of 1967 and 1968 are analysed in the books by Hong Yung Lee, Stanley Rosen and Anita Chan.

59. Nanfang Ribao (7 March 1968); in SCMP, No. 4144, p. 9.

60. Guangzhou's published statistics show 75,000 student rusticants in 1968 out of 108,000 high school students. They were joined by more than 17,000 unemployed “street youths.” [Nanfang Ribao, 18 January 1969, in SCMP (Supplement), No. 246, p. 18; also Canton Radio, in FBIS (24 January 1969), p. D12.] The figure of 108,000 secondary-level students for the school year of 1965–66 is contained in FBIS (18 January 1974), p. D6.

61. Anita Chan: “Introduction,” in Chan, Anita and Unger, Jonathan, editors: “The Case of Li I-che,” Chinese Law and Government (Autumn 1977), pp. 1–112Google Scholar and Stanley Rosen, ed., “The Rehabilitation and Dissolution of Li Yizhe,” Chinese Law and Government (forthcoming). Also Chan, Anita, Rosen, Stanley and Unger, Jonathan: On Socialist Democracy and the Chinese Legal System: The Li Yizhe and Wei Jingsheng Controversies (White Plains: M. E. Sharpe Inc.)Google Scholar, forthcoming. Details of these intricate political manoeuvrings are described also in a serialized article, “Li Yizhe and I” (in Chinese), in Bet Dou (Hong Kong), in the June, July, August, September, November and December 1977 issues. For a more recent discussion, see Dong Xiang (Hong Kong), No. 5, 1979Google Scholar.

62. On the urban high schools and student peer groups after the Cultural Revolution, see Unger, Jonathan, Education Under Mao: A Study of Canton Schools 1960–1980 (Columbia University Press, forthcoming), Chaps. 7 and 9Google Scholar.

63. See e.g. Renrrin Ribao (3 March 1978), p. 4 and Renmin Ribao (11 March 1978), p. 4.