Uniformed Rebellion, Fabricated Identity: A Study of Social History of Red Guards in Military Uniforms during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and Beyond

Abstract

This case study investigates, from the perspectives of politics, ideology, social psychology, and culture, the many layered meanings interwoven into the quasi-uniform that Chinese Red Guards invented and donned during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), one of the biggest political tragedies of the twentieth century. The Red Guards were inspired and encouraged by Mao Zedong and a few of his cohorts, and were essentially self-invented urban adolescents with various social backgrounds and political motivations. The Red Guard's attire that took form by mixing some parts of the uniform of the People's Liberation Army—grass-green jacket, soft cloth cap with red star insignia, belt with a broad metallic buckle, and the self-made red armband—served as a crucial means of inventing and shaping their group identity and their ideological pursuits. Politically, their attire signaled the Red Guards’ support of Mao in his war against the “capitalist roaders.” Ideologically, it symbolized the Red Guard community's favor of utopian, egalitarian, socialist ideals exemplified by the army; socio-psychologically, the quasi-uniform was a trope of those young rebels’ repressed cravings for authority through imitation. Culturally, this set of sartorial signs simultaneously figured many submerging desires for heroism and pleasure seeking, hero worship and self-fulfillment, collective narcissism and revolutionary romanticism. By retracing and reconstructing historically nuanced messages that are interwoven into the quasi-uniform of the Red Guards, this study helps us to understand the unique role that clothing plays in forging a mass political identity and movement.