From revolutionary rebels to a thinking generation: a reflection on China's Red Guard movement of the mid‐1960s

Abstract

China's Red Guards fundamentally differed from the radical youths in the West in the 1960s. Whereas the youth rebellions in the West were largely “from the bottom up,” the Red Guard movement in China was an integral part of the Cultural Revolution – a political campaign organized “from the top down” by China's paramount leader Mao Zedong. Consequently, the Chinese youth movement of the 1960s did not entail “generational conflict” as happened in Western societies. On the contrary, it involved a dynamic of generational relations specific to Communist China. But the Red Guards in the course of their “revolutionary” experiences saw aspects of Chinese society that they could have never learned about in school; this exposure caused them to doubt the rosy picture of socialist China painted by state propaganda. As an unintended consequence, many of them ended up questioning the Communist faith, setting the stage for the rise of an independently “thinking generation.”