Red Guards appeared in Tsinghua University Middle School and the movement quickly spread across the capital. On the 18th of August 1966 Mao met with Red Guard students in Tiananmen Square and donned a Red Guard armband to signal his support of the movement and its objectives to criticize the intellectual establishment in China.
The Red Guards came to Tiananmen Square literally by bicycle. By the mid 1960s bicycles were the major means of transportation in Beijing. For ordinary people bicycles were convenient, but not cheap. To have one they needed to save for months and even years. Most families could afford only one, and that bicycle was used primarily by the family bread-winner.
So in the summer of 1966 all those young teenagers were riding around on bicycles. But most of them probably were not the children of single-bicycle families whose head of household had to use their one precious bicycle to go to work. The families who could afford second or third bicycles for their children were not ordinary people. These Red Guards were the children of high-ranking officials and officers. Many of their parents probably had service cars provided so their children could ride the bicycles. You might not think that riding a bicycle as a teenager is anything special, but at that time, it indicated the high status of your family and a privileged and elitist background.
The children of such high-ranking families were the first ones who smelled the wind of something important about to be happening. China was now the powerhouse building the Communist world revolution. These restless teenagers wanted to be part of it. Their emerging in Tiananmen Square and gaining such a public show of support from Mao himself announced that there was now a new power on the Chinese political stage. The Red Guard movement, first started in a few aristocratic schools, including the 1st August School and the 1st October School, had within a few months grown into a vast national menace.
These bicycle-riding Red Guards were young, passionate and also naïve. They wanted something exciting, and Mao’s revolution delivered exactly the idealistic illusion they needed: building a paradise on earth, killing all evil elements of the society such as landowners, capitalists, old traditions, wrong ideas especially in books, or anything judged to be decadent by an intolerant teenage mind. Their dreaming was not restricted to China, for they passionately believed that one day Mao’s promised Communist society would be dominant all over the world. Their fanaticism lead many of them to even volunteer to go to Vietnam to fight against American imperialism. Unfortunately a lot of these teenagers sacrificed their lives in the rice patties and jungles of Vietnam without ever seeing a world-wide Communism revolution.
In Beijing, the Red Guards were now cruising around in the streets, targeting and attacking anyone they thought were a bad influence on their idealistic society. Former landowners and factory owners, writers, artists, singers, even people with relatives overseas were targeted. Anything related to pre-Communist Chinese tradition, old temples, books, antiques, paintings; all would be destroyed, whether held in public displays or private collections. In a few weeks’ time countless cultural treasures were smashed or burned by the Red Guards.
Recall that the first Red Guards came into being in several elitist schools where they verbally challenged their curriculum and teaching staff. The first wave of mass chaos also hit the schools, but this time it swept through the entire educational system in China. Teachers and professors were all verbally criticized, and as the teenagers grew more emboldened they began to physically punish and even torture the academic staff as though they were the hated capitalists and landowners during the civil war. Classrooms were trashed and most teaching materials, especially anything foreign, were destroyed as counter- revolutionary. Many schools had to shut down or if they remained open, they hardly resembled educational institutions any more.
1966 was a bloody time in Beijing. Innocent people were attacked, their homes were robbed, their properties were stolen or destroyed and their persons were beaten and humiliated in public. The structure of society had been turned upside-down. Roving teenage gangs on bicycles, with Mao’s blessing, were the new order of the day.
Most of the Red Guards were wearing their parents’ old uniforms, discarded since the ranking system was outlawed. This was indeed strange, for while their parents had been stripped of any external display of rank, their teenage children now wore their old uniforms displaying the rank of their father or mother. In addition to rank designations, the uniforms were of a different color and made of different materials. No one else wore them now, except for the Red Guard students, and so their presence and ultimately their class identity were easily discernible.
As elitist teenagers, these Red Guards were fearless, naïve, loud, and brash. Since Beijing was packed with high-ranking officials, there were an even higher number of their children, thousands of them. They were visible everywhere, especially in the west of Beijing where many of the People’s Liberation Army military headquarters were based, including the marines, air force, logistics and so on. It was an exciting summer for these students. By the middle of the summer semester, all studies were stopped. But for Mao the show was not big enough; he was planning something on a much grander scale.
On the 18th of August 1966, during a military parade, Mao shook hands with several Red Guards on Tiananmen Tower overlooking the famous square. His appearance with them proclaimed his clear support for the Red Guards. The photos of Mao with the Red Guards were front page news on the next day’s newspapers.
One of the most circulated photos was that of a young girl, wearing an old style yellow military uniform from her father, putting an armband with Red Guard characters on Mao’s arm. To the surprise of all veterans, Mao himself was wearing an old style green uniform. He had not worn an army uniform for ages. The signal could not be clearer. Mao was showing his generals that he was the real leader of the country’s military force. But what was he up to?
Mao asked the young girl’s name. Hearing her name, Song Binbin, which means in Chinese “polite”, Mao answered with a smile: “Be violent.”
The girl who was so lucky to be so close to Mao was not just any ordinary girl next door. Her father, Song Renqiong, joined the CCP in 1926 and followed Mao along the Long March. At that time in 1966 he was the Party leader in charge of three provinces in the northeast of China. The image of the daughter of such a high official placing a Red Guard armband on a similarly uniformed Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square was powerful indeed.
Song Binbin’s photo with Mao’s had a huge impact, not just on the internal politics of the Red Guards, but also on the Chinese and eventually world fashion industry. Old military uniforms became the latest in vogue fashion overnight and dominated the Chinese fashion scene for the coming decade. All Chinese young people craved the same fashion. But only the children of military officials had access to those old uniforms which made them so very proud. Soon mass produced copies emerged, and the rest of China had to be satisfied with these copies. As with today’s designer brand knock-offs, these copies would immediately give away the lower social status of their wearers within the Red Guard movement.
In Beijing, the summer of 1966 continued to be an exciting season. Millions of Chinese came to Beijing, wishing to catch a glimpse of their beloved Chairman Mao. Following the disastrous Great Leap Forward debacle, Mao had pretty much removed himself from public view. But now he generously let himself be seen by his millions of worshippers. Eight times that summer he appeared in public. His generosity drove the young people wild with excitement and they swore to follow Mao’s revolution. His special relationship with the nation’s youth to reinvigorate the Communist Party and its revolution, albeit with very conservative overtones, predated by just twelve years another long-reigning head of state coming from another Communist country, Pope John Paul II, and his ability to publicly rally millions of Roman Catholic youth into action by his charismatic presence.
Hoping to see Mao in person attracted millions of people to Beijing, and the majority of the more than 10 million pilgrims who arrived during that summer had their dream fulfilled. Of course, very few of them actually saw Mao. To do that in such vast throngs would require a telescope.
