Um actually for a late August day it's actually quite chilly. So um I would definitely say that we can uh I'll say here in Xi’an that the worst of the dog days of summer are over. And let me tell you, I am more than happy about that. And let me tell you, Xi’an is - all of northern China, northwest China, northeast China is just magical in winter. So the fall seasons here, uh no matter where you go, in China are just brilliant. Uh so let me tell you once the borders open up if you can come visit China in the fall cuz it is amazing.

Uh you know I've had a pretty wild summer to be honest. I uh you know there was a reason I didn't give you guys a full episode last month. I moved into the Northwest University faculty apartments. Uh, I went to Xinjiang for a little while, which was great. Uh, went to a few raves and nightclubs parties, and, uh, now we're just a few days away from beginning the new semester at my new university.

Uh, but before I get back to teaching today, I'm going to serve you up a hot and fresh episode filled with rebellion, class struggle against counterrevolutionary traitors, and complete and utter chaos under heaven. So today's episode will situate us with the cultural revolution now kicking into high gear with Red Buckle up, my friends, cuz this is where you might say, well, pardon my French. I, you know, I try to keep academic on this podcast and limit profanity, but there's really no other way of saying it. This is the part of 1966 where the kids go fecking apeshit. That's it. They go fecking apeshit.

The work teams had pissed the radical Maoist students off. And by the time Mao ordered the work teams to pull out, the students who had been snubbed, sidelined, and even tortured or killed by Liu and Deng's cronies were ready to go completely and utterly berserk. You know, it's like uh you guys remember that uh song from the '90s uh by the Offspring - ‘the kids are not all right’. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the offspring would have said the kids are not all right.

But Mao brazenly said it is fine. So with such tension and rancor filling the air as it was in August of '66, Mao decided to let the floodgates open. And oh boy did he end up kicking the hornets's nest. Honestly, a lot of historians would argue that Mao got more than he bargained for. So, as the whirlwind of big character posters or dazibao kept piling on to what seemed to be every flat surface across Beijing, Mao decided that it was time to write his own Dazibao, which he titled Bombard the Headquarters.

He wrote it during the 11th plenary session of the central committee of the communist party on August 5th and he distributed it to all high-ranking members of the party pasting it around Zhongnanhai and the inside of the great hall of the people. In it, Mao said it’s China's first Marxist Leninist big character poster. Uh, I assume he's referring to Nie Yuanzi’s dazibao, uh, the one that we talked about in episodes 1 and two, and the editorial articles on it in People's Daily are indeed superbly written.

Comrades, please read them again. But in the last 50 days or so, some leading comrades from the central committee down to the local levels have acted in a diametrically opposite way. Adopting the reactionary stand of the bourgeoisie, they have enforced a bourgeois dictatorship and struck down the surging movement of the great proletarian cultural revolution. They have stood facts on their heads and juggled black and white, encircled and suppressed revolutionaries, stifled opinions differing from their own, imposed a white terror, and felt very pleased with themselves. They have puffed up the arrogance of the bourgeoisie and deflated the morale of the proletarian. How poisonous. Viewed in connection with the right deviation in 1962 and the wrong tendency of 1964 which was left in form but right in essence, shouldn't this make one wide awake?

While Bombard the headquarters was not officially publicly published in People's Daily until August of '67, a year later, the news of Mao's big character poster, which he had posted around the Great Hall of the People and other government offices, did end up leaking out to lower level cadre, into the army, and into the trade unions quickly, and it only fueled the rebellion.

It was quite obvious that the big character poster was a snub at Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping given how the document spoke of the quote right deviations of 1962 and 1964. Either way, it was a sign that Mao was ready to fully endorse the current Red Guard movement as he was beginning to emulate the Red Guard's actions on the campuses within his own halls of power.

3 days later on August 8th, Mao drew up yet another groundbreaking declaration. This time it was called the decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, better known as the 16 point decision or the August 8th Declaration. The 16 points were, and I'm going to go through all of them because I think it's important that you guys know about them because it'll give you a sense of a lot of what's to come over the next few episodes.

Uh number one, the Chinese Revolution has reached a new stage in the development of socialism.

Number two, the cultural revolution will inevitably meet resistance.

Number three, put daring above everything else and boldly arouse the masses.

Number four, let the masses educate themselves in this movement. Cast out fear. Trust the masses. Rely on them and respect their independent initiative. Don't be afraid of disturbances.

Number five, firmly apply the Marxist class line of the party.

Number six, and this is interesting, correctly. Handle the contradictions among the people. Conduct debate through reasoning and not by force as much as possible. And distinguish between antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions among comrades. This is kind of, this is an aside, this is kind of funny how Mao stressed 6 so emphatically. And yet, uh, as we'll see, the Red Guard movement fell into factionalism so quickly.

Number seven, guard against those who brand the revolutionary masses as counterrevolutionaries or denouncing the rebels as opponents of the cultural revolution.

Number eight, distinguish between good cadres, decent cadres, cadres with incorrect lines but who are not capitalist roaders and cadres who are now firmly in the camp of the new bourgeoisie and to try to remember that the vast majority of cadres are in the first two categories.

Number nine, embrace the new systems of power such as mass committees, mass organizations, and rebel congresses.

Number 10, carry out educational reform in schools and universities to do away with the old feudal systems of thinking.

Number 11, Criticize counterrevolutionaries by name in the press, but only after proper discussion and line struggle within revolutionary organization and rebel aligned party committees.

Number 12, Apply unity criticism unity when dealing with scientists, technicians, and lower middle class intellectuals so as to transform them into revolutionary intellectuals ready to serve the people and take proletarian leadership.

Number 13, pay attention to building cultural and educational units to eradicate bourgeois and feudal ideology in both city and countryside.

Number 14, grasp revolution, promote production. Understanding Mao Zedong thought and Marxist political economy will allow the economy to continue to innovate and grow even in the midst of violent class struggle.

Number 15, cherish the People's Liberation Army and support the Central Military Commission in raising the militant class consciousness of all soldiers.

And finally, number 16, put Mao Zedong Thought in command of all things.

So, if the May 16th circular was a declaration of war against the bourgeoisie within the party and it was the launch of the cultural revolution officially and ‘Bombard the headquarters’ was Mao's official endorsement of the red guard movement, the 16 points of the cultural revolution was meant to be the guidelines and objectives of the post-work team rebellion in the campuses, workplaces, and communes.

It called for what was previously a student movement, mostly confined to the Beijing city limits, to become a nationwide mass campaign that would unleash all workers, farmers, soldiers, as well as Maoist aligned lower level party functionaries to rise up, challenge authority, hold directions on every level, quote, in the spirit of the Paris Commune, and to reshape the superstructure of society.

Uh by the way, we'll be talking a lot more about the whole economic base versus superstructure in later episodes, where we'll be talking about the deeper aspects of the philosophical underpinnings of the cultural revolution.

We did get into it a little in episode one, but I think that sometime later we should do another episode or two where we dig a little deeper into it. And I'll probably bring in some guests who are a little better trained in uh materialist dialectics than I am for that. Uh but yeah, that was the 16-point decision. And you know, it's funny.

Many mainstream western scholars say that the 16 point decision was the real beginning of the cultural revolution as we think of it in popular culture and feel that it was far more important than the May 16th circular in terms of bringing the cultural revolution out of the halls of power and out of the campus and turning it into a broad movement that mobilized the entire population.

Uh, although just as an aside, it would still take a few months before the Red Guard movement became the major form of rebellion in the factories and farms outside of Beijing. Well, I definitely wouldn't say that the 16-point decision was the true beginning of the cultural revolution, though I've gotten into some very heated discussions at academic conferences and history department mixers over the matter at uh it definitely was a gamechanger and shaped the cultural revolution as it panned out until I guess I'd say the 9th Congress of the Communist Party of in April of 69.

And I would definitely argue that the 16 points broadcast nationally on the radio and its publication in People's Daily the next day helped really spring the Red Guards across the country into action to flood Tiananmen Square on August 18 to take part in Mao's big reception of the Red Guards which uh we'll talk about here in just a few minutes. But before we get to the big Tiananmen Square Red Guard receptions, let's cut back to the university campuses of Beijing.

Across the first two weeks of August, Red Guard organizations blossomed across China, but particularly in Beijing. Here we see the students who had been sidelined or punished by the work teams organized together in fevered militancy. At the same time, we see the majority of students who, while maybe not overtly having supported the work teams, maybe, you know, they at least cooperated with them, they, those students, end up joining what are called cultural revolution preparatory committees.

Now, cultural revolution preparatory committees were essentially bodies of students that were left behind by the work teams to continue guiding the cultural revolution on a more orderly basis. Although, what's interesting is many preparatory committees ended up swinging to the left across the months of August and September and became rebel mass organizations themselves.

Um, uh for example, I've I know that here in Xi’an, the Xi’an Jaotong University Cultural Revolution Preparatory Committee became a part of the left wing of the rebellion on Jaotong campus by uh late autumn of ' 66. Outside of the preparatory committees though, the Red Guards, who initially made up the minority, so to speak, of students, despite being endorsed by Mao and the Central Cultural Revolution Group, were out for blood.

They wanted to take the fight off the campuses, find the work team leaders, drag them back to the schools for interrogation and struggle sessions, and get revenge on the party cadres and faculty members who had supported them. Vengeance against the former work teams was going to be thorough and brutal, and it was going to take the entirety of the city of Beijing by storm.

The students who had come from quote ‘good class backgrounds’ or quote ‘red backgrounds’. So that's like children of Revolutionary or World War II veterans, children of high-ranking party members were actually some of the first targets of the Red Guards because they were seen as having gotten a little too comfortable resting on their mommy and daddy's laurels and were more likely to fall into becoming new red bourgeoisie. And uh another thing is many of the students who came from red backgrounds were strict proponents of the bloodline theory or Xuetong Lun.

Meaning that your ancestry determined whether or not you were a red element, an intermediate element, or a black element. And this became a major point of contention among various red guards across late ' 66 and early ' 67. And uh many of the leftist red guards who were officially approved by the CCRG were deemed black elements or the children of black elements by the preparatory committees or some of the quote unquote I guess you would call official red guards.

And in the next few episodes, I'll get into how the bloodline theory played out and how it often had very tragic consequences in both the left and right wing of the red guard movement up until the end of '66 when it began to become repudiated.

Well, at 5:00 a.m. on the morning of 18th of August, 1966, nearly 1 million youth flooded into Tiananmen Square so that Chairman Mao could receive his new army of young revolutionary generals, waving little red books, red flags, and gigantic portraits of Chairman Mao. The square was packed to the gills with a sea of youth, intoxicated with revolutionary fervor.

They were here to catch a glimpse of the man who not only had led the foundation of their new socialist society, the man who was the father of their country, but the man who had declared himself to be the leader of their rebellion against those who wish to restore capitalism. The cheers and chants of revolutionary slogans were deafening. When the sun rose over the square, Mao walked out of the Tiananmen gates and right into the square as if he himself was the morning sun, wearing a red guard uniform.

He walked among the crowd and shook as many hands of as possible of the attendees before returning to the gate where he ascended to the Tiananmen roster above his portrait with Marshall Lin Biao by his side. Beginning at 7:30 a.m. with a loud rendition of the East is Red playing over the loudspeakers.

For hours, Mao and his closest comrades waved to the crowd, led them in song, with the masses only growing more and more frenzied with their chance and patriotic songs, growing louder and louder. For hundreds of thousands of young Chinese, this was the moment that signaled to them that not only had a new revolution been launched, but that a new world had dawned and that Mao was going to be in the ideological trenches right alongside them in the fight for that new world.

After a couple of hours of sloganeering and singing, Mao invited 1,500 Red Guard leaders to join him and the rest of the party leadership on the top of the gates roster to watch the big parade. Chen Boda gave the keynote speech as Mao continued to wave to the crowd. Chen proclaimed Mao to be quote ‘the great leader’, the great teacher, and the great helmsman. Lin Biao piggybacked on the speech and called Mao the commander and chief of the cultural revolution and called upon the red guards to smash the four olds. Old ideas, culture, customs and habits in complete earnest and by any means necessary.

More speeches were given by various other leaders including Zhou Enlai and Jiang Qing except for one glaring and well obvious exception. Liu Shaoqi. Liu was present in the roster. Yes, but he was positioned at the far end of the lineup and was made to be as inconspicuous as possible across the morning's rally. By noon time, the rally had ended and the crowd within the square dispersed to continue marching and celebrating around the city of Beijing. But actually, Mao allowed for a few more red guard leaders to come to the top of the gate to meet him. There he approached a young lady named Song Bing Bin.

Upon meeting Mao, Song Bin Bin took her own red guard armband and pinned it to Mao's arm, signaling that Mao himself was now officially a red guard. Now, Bin Bin's name is interesting. She's got an interesting story because in Chinese, uh, Bin Bin means refined or ladylike. When Mao asked her name and she said," he shook his head and said, "No, no, no." And he said something along the lines of, "A revolution is not something to be refined. You should be named Song Yao Wu, which means to be a marshall." So from that point onward, Song became the poster girl for the most militant of red guards.

And this is actually uh Song Bin Bin. She is still alive today. And it's actually something that she feels very embarrassed about now because it elicited a mixture of both fanatical adoration and paralyzing fear of her among her classmates. But either way, the famous photograph of Sun Bin Bin or Sun Yao Wu pinning her armband onto Mao's arm is still to this day considered one of the most iconic photographs of the cultural revolution, despite Song's modern dislike for being known as the band girl. Actually, as an aside, uh this is interesting.

A comrade of mine and I were talking about the Red Guard reception rallies of August through November of ' 66 just recently and uh he pointed something out to me. Um the French postmodern philosopher Alain Badiou uh made an interesting point about these rallies. Um, as I demonstrated, while many Communist Party officials gave speeches that day, Mao himself virtually said nothing. He simply stood and waved.

And I must say, I have my own personal problems with Badiou's interpretation of the cultural revolution overall, particularly his view of the later half of the cultural revolution. Badiou posits that Mao's silence was really a way of revealing the mass's own power to themselves through the creation of uh quote the space of these rallies. Badu says that this was very different from, say, a tyrant's theater for fanatics that you might see in footage of fascist rallies in Nazi Germany, fascist Italy or Ba’athist Iraq. It makes it seem that Mao deliberately made the rallies about the masses and about his comrades around him on the roster rather than about himself.

So, just a thought to chew on. Regardless, the August 18th reception of the Red Guards in Tiananmen caused a stir nationwide. According to Peking Review issue 34, smaller parades celebrating the reception were held in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Shaoshan, Urumqi, Xi’an, and Lhasa. In Shanghai, revolutionary music blared from every loudspeaker across the city and every factory stopped so that workers could parade through the streets in celebration of the events in Beijing.

Here in Xi’an, every university held a celebratory rally in which little red books and copies of the selected works of Mao Zedong were distributed in mass to every single student, faculty member, and campus worker. In Urumqi, way out in Xinjiang, university campuses became festival grounds of celebration with students dancing traditional Uyghur dances as they held up massive portraits of Mao and placards of his quotations. In Lhasa, Tibet, both Han Chinese and Tibetans alike flooded the streets, repeatedly chanting, "Oh, majestic Himalayas, how can you compare to the lofty spirit of Chairman Mao?"

So, uh, speaking of Shanghai, I really haven't talked about Shanghai yet, have I? Shanghai, China's second largest city and one of the major battlegrounds of the cultural revolution. Well, across the week after the Tiananmen reception, the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee and all the newly reformed Red Guard factions in the city held their own reenactments of the Tiananmen reception and called to destroy the old world, which was heavily emphasized by speakers at the Shanghai reception.

And four days later, the Shanghai Red Guards and rebel worker unions took to the streets to do exactly that. But actually, you know, let me get back to Shanghai in a couple of minutes. Sorry, I know I'm jumping all over the place in my script, but bear with me. I'm doing this for a reason because Red August is yeah, it's wild. So with the first of the Red Guard reception rallies out of the way, there would end up being seven more major rallies in Tiananmen between August 18th and November 26, not counting the countless rallies during that time across the rest of the nation.

The now sufficiently hyped up Red Guards were filled with revolutionary fervor and were ready to destroy anything and anyone they saw as getting in the way of building a more democratic, egalitarian, and communistic society. And so, Red August gained its other name, often used in history books, the Red Terror. The day after the August 18th rally, high school red guards flooded the streets and began to attack everything that had even a whiff of the old society. Department stores filled with western clothing like jeans and t-shirts or Hong Kong style fashion were ransacked.

The famous Quanjude Beijing Roast Duck Restaurant, which I've eaten at before, and it's good stuff, really, was attacked by a coalition of the 2nd, 25th, and 63rd Middle School red guards. They smashed all the old antique decor within the restaurant, demanded all the restaurant staff join them as rebel workers, and posted portraits of Mao and various big character posters all over the walls of the restaurant. While the duck was still uh supposedly quite delicious, Quanjude was now a revolutionary red restaurant, accessible to all citizens of the city and no longer an exclusive five-star dining establishment.

As the days went through, more and more teachers became targets of their students' wrath. Even as early as August 5th, before the 16points were even published, Vice Principal Bian Zhongyun of Beijing University's affiliated high school was beaten to death, making her the first civilian casualty of Red August. On August 20th, the superintendent of Beijing schools was dragged out of his office by Red Guard High School students and beaten within an inch of his life.

School district office buildings in Beijing and other cities were ransacked, their staff chased out of their offices and beaten. The school district and university administrative buildings were burned to the ground. Records that listed education officials who were either members of or had been supportive of the work teams were confiscated and distributed to the Red Guards who the high schoolers were allied with. And well, I'm sure you can deduce what happened to those who were listed in those rosters.

In Changsha, Hunan Province, Red Guards, who had just arrived back from the first Red Guard reception rally, got straight to work occupying their universities and putting all work team faculty and campus cadres through brutal struggle sessions and savage beatings. And uh in Guangzhou, one pro-work team teacher was forced to chug ink straight out of an ink well, after which red guards kicked him in the stomach until he vomited the ink backup.

On August 21st in Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian province, provincial party chief General Y addressed a 20,000 strong rally while wearing a red guard uniform and called for the students, youth, workers of the city to emulate the destroying of the four olds as was happening in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou,and Changsha.

Fuzhou, he proclaimed, was yet to be another battleground against any attempt at capitalist restoration inChina. And soon, Fuzhou was thrown into chaos as well. Across China, street names were changed at an alarming rate. Many street and square names were renamed things like anti-revisionist road, which was the street that the Soviet embassy was located on. So that was kind of the their little fuck you to the Soviet Union. Anti-revisionist road in Shanghai. New street names included Eternal Struggle Street and Eternally Red Boulevard. Tianjin's Golden Tripod Factory Square became Worker and Peasant Factory Square.

And here in Xi'an, uh, just near the drum tower, we have a,uh, street called Bamboo Market Street, but at that time, it became Revolutionary Street. And that really is just a tiny fraction of the amount of name changes given to various streets, workplaces, cities, and schools during that time. For the youth of China, even the most innocuous of things had to be wiped away to remove, erase any reminder of the old feudal and capitalist world, even if it meant the street you grew up on or the name of your favorite noodle shop.

On August 22nd,1966, Mao sent a document to the Ministry of Public Security ordering, quote, "do not police force, no exception, to intervene or suppress the movement of revolutionary students." He also sent a similar proclamation to the central military commission of the people's liberation army saying that the armed forces were to stand down from any engagement with the red guards whatsoever no matter how excessive or fatal the students actions might be. The next day, Mao gave a talk at a workconference of the central committee, publicly backing the students movement and opposing any intervention to the cultural revolution of the students.

In other words, all law enforcement bodies were to let the Red guards do as they please. And actually, frankly, Mao didn't have to ask twice because you see, uh, Xie Fuzhi, the minister of public security at the time, he was already an adamant-supporter of Mao's line. And he was more than happy to give the Red Guards carte blanche to destroy the old world and wreak vengeance on all their enemies like right-wing intellectuals, non-red guard youth league members, and any party cadres who had supported the work teams.

Heck, in uh many instances, the police gave over the keys to the local jails and police stations to the Red Guards and just let them go hog wild on whoever they saw fit. I mean uh you know for us Americans living in the era of widespread police misconduct and systemic violence against marginalized peoples you know it seems completely foreign the idea of the entire police system of a country siding with a revolutionary communist rebellion

but uh hey it happened like okay I guess imagine if you lived in America and the people decided to go all out and beat the crap uh or even kill every Republican politician or right-wing professor or right-wing high school teacher and every police department and military unit just stood by watching. That's basically what Red August was like.

That same same day, red guards in Zhengding, Hubei province went crazy or hog wild and proceeded to ransack and burn down as many Buddhist and Daoist temples and Muslim mosques as they could. 100 red guards stormed the Zhengding Mosque, dynamited the centuries old dome, and then put the mosque's imam through a brutal struggle session in which he was forced to wear a necklace made of pig’s tails.

While I personally find this tobe very insensitive towards the cultures of the national minorities of China, and as a historian, the idea of centuries old buildings being wantingly destroyed hurts me greatly. I can't help but admit I sympathize with why the so many kids enthusiastically took part in such things because I mean while for me as an academic I view these religious sites as places of historical significance to Chinese youth of that particular time period they represented ancient oppressive belief systems that had caused their ancestors untold amounts of suffering for millennia. So, you know, perspective, perspectives, perspective.That's the name of the game.

Meanwhile, here in Xi’an on August 22nd, a small group of red guards called the Red Terror Brigade dragged one of their teachers into a busy intersection, tied him up, poured gasoline on the poor man, and burned him alive. The Red Terror Brigade, however, later got exposed as a group of rightists tied to the provincial military authorities and were suppressed by the other Red Guards in Xi’an shortly before the January 1967 power seizures. But I'll retell and expand upon the Red Terror Brigade story in a little more detail in my future episode about the cultural revolution in Xi’an.

Okay, anyways, let's head back to Shanghai. On August 23rd, Red August in Shanghai truly went into full rampage mode. While the rebel workers, revolutionary intellectuals, and the left wing of the Shanghai Party apparatus quickly became the main force of the cultural revolution in Shanghai and stayed in that position once the January storm of ' 67 happened. And indeed historians often point out just how brief the Red Guard movement lasted in Shanghai compared to the rest of China. But for the time being in August, the Shanghai Red Guards were the ones to fire the first salvos of the Red Rebellion.

The morning of the 23rd, inspired by the news out of Beijing, the newly formed Red Guard factions in Shanghai paraded through the streets of the city, chanting, "We are the creators of the new world," and posted up big character posters and propaganda posters everywhere they went. According to one source, some high school red guards ransacked every flower shop they could find and proclaimed ornamental plants to be bourgeois decadence. Um, I myself have only read that in a single source. So, while I can't discount that as being untrue, I do encourage my listeners to take that little factoid with a grain of salt, but I still found it kind of funny.

Much like their counterparts in other cities, the Shanghai Red Guards marched into the famous waterfront Shanghai Bund and renamed it Revolutionary Boulevard while proceeding to vandalize shops and buildings built in the European colonial style. On August 26th, a delegation of 170 red guards from 14 Beijing universities arrived by train and declared their intention to help their comrades make Shanghai into a battleground against the old world. Chen Pixian, the Shanghai party chief, and several other communist officials came to greet them at the train station.

The next day, another 900 Beijing red guards arrived at the train station. And by the end of the month, thousands of young rebels from cities around China had converged on Shanghai to aid their comrades in making the city into an epicenter of Red August. However, Chen Pixian and the Shanghai Parties Committee's welcoming of the out of town red guards was actually not accepted kindly. The newly arrived red guards claimed they had come to ‘dianhuo’ (light a fire) and immediately denounced the local party apparatus as having handled the revolution in the city as too restrained.

It makes sense though I guess uh you know in the eyes of the Beijing red guards there was the question of how could China's second largest city not launch its own cultural revolution until 3 months after the May 16th circular, one Shanghai Red Guard said of the out of town reinforcements and I'm quoting her here when the Beijing red guards came south wearing military uniforms with complete with leather belts They looked really awesome. They said to us, "Why are you folks here so civil without even a bit of revolutionary spirit?" At that time, I didn't understand what they meant by revolutionary spirit. A girl red guard from Beijing then took off her leather belt and started to demonstrate to me how to whip someone. This was my first look at the Beijing Red Guards.

Needless to say, the Beijing Red Guards were disappointed in their Shanghai comrades when it came to the current lack of bloodshed. And quickly, the Shanghai Red Guards began to emulate their Beijing counterparts in transforming line struggle into armed struggle. And the Red August of Beijing became the Red August of Shanghai. Indeed, one of the first joint actions of the Beijing and Shanghai Red Guards was to end the month of August by destroying Shanghai's oldest Buddhist temple, the Longhua Temple, resulting in the burning of 3,000 ancient scriptures. With Shanghai now an epicenter of rebellion, let's backtrack a couple of weeks back to the campuses of Beijing.

Now, you'd think with the 16 points and the August 18th rally being such a resounding success, the campus red guard movement in Beijing would be united in ironclad fashion, marching forward in unison under the banner of Mao Zedong thought in their common goal to defeat the rightists within the party and destroy the old world. Right. Right. No. In fact, the Beijing Red Guard movement fractured almost immediately at birth with Red August being a time of campus rebel groups splitting in ways that would make any group of British Trotskyists or Portland anarchists jealous.

On many campuses, splits between the original Red Guard groups would often be over things like, "Did so-and-so oppose the work teams militantly enough?" or should we work to rehabilitate pro work team students who have self-criticized and whose new preparatory committees are swinging to the left and other questions left unanswered in the aftermath of the work team pullouts. Red Guard groups split into majority factions and minority factions with the minority factions often being the most ferocious and militant. And frankly, they were usually the most likely to achieve endorsement from the central cultural revolution group.

It wasn't until Zhou Enlai gathered a large congress of red guard factions together at Qinghua University and urged the students to unite against the former white terror that things began to settle down uh for a few weeks that is. But no, seriously, it wasn't unusual for a university to have two, three, or even four competing Red Guard factions at any given time.There was one exception to the rule of Beijing campuses factionalizing so quickly, that of Beijing University or BeiDa.

A good part of this was because the work team dispatched to BeiDa in May of 66 did not take part in a mass attack against the rebel students thanks to Nie Yuanzi using her influence to effectively and quickly neutralize them and pull many work team members into the Mauist orbit by late July. Because of this, there was no serious split among the students when it came to pro and anti-team work team groups. And thus the BeiDa red guards were formed in a situation where there was no initial lingering of bad blood among anyone on campus during the month of August.

BeiDa campus actually became known as a quote model unit and a quote revolutionary tourist site where red guards from other campuses would try to learn how to unite amongst each other, build rebel coalitions, and handle contradictions in non-antagonistic ways.

However, BeiDa would also eventually begin to experience its own factional disputes across September and October, something we'll get into next episode. Well, things might have seemed hunky dory at Bay, but across the rest of Beijing, Red August was becoming a true red terror, filled with excesses and errors that made even Mao's closest allies a bit queasy.

While university and red guard rebel workers in the factories were primarily struggling against rightists with line struggle and fierce debate, the high school red guards were letting their teen angst get the best of them. Countless junior high and high school teachers were grabbed up by their students and tortured or killed. Schools were vandalized or burned to the ground and book burnings of textbooks and western literature became a daily occurrence in many cities from Xiamen to Karamay.

High school red guards turned their classrooms into makeshift jail sales and torture chambers, trapping teachers and school administrators inside until they self-criticized as counterrevolutionaries or confessed to having supported the work teams. Even teachers who were not tortured or beaten were so humiliated and frightened by their students that many hanged themselves or threw themselves off the top of school buildings as the red guards cheered them on. No matter where you went in Beijing, Guangzhou, or Shanghai, every junior high school and high school was a complete and utter bloodbath.

The university age red guards, while not nearly as cruel as their teenage comrades, were in no mood to make the revolution into a dinner party either. Red guards stormed opera houses and museums and looted them of their ancient costumes and old imperial uniforms, then proceeded to burn them in the courtyard in the Confucian temple in Beijing.

In fact, uh it was only because Zhou Enlai and Mao agreed to send the PLA into the Forbidden City that the Forbidden City was not ransacked during Red August. In Lhasa, the Jokhang temple was ransacked and its statues, ancient manuscripts, and relics were dragged out into the streets by Tibetan red guards and local workers and burned as revenge for the past crimes of the pre-revolutionary llamaist regime. So, what were the authorities to think of all this mayhem?

Well, to quote Mao during his revolutionary days, it is fine. The party, army, police, and state media all gave their seals of approval to the red terror. People's daily ran an editorial called workers, peasants, and soldiers must be supported and that they must support the students. And they said that the students' actions were quite very good indeed. Liberation Army Daily said to the Red Guards, "What you did was right and you did it well." and ran an editorial, calling on PLA troops to quote learn from the Red Guards and respect the Red Guards.

Many local PLA commanders and local municipal police chiefs in the provinces began to encourage their troops to join the Red Guards in the rioting and looting. The Ministry of Public Security and other law enforcement agencies began passing on to Red Guard detachments the home addresses of people's houses in order to search for politically suspect items or documents proving people's connections to either Liu Shaoqi's faction of the party or even to the Guomindang in Taiwan.

As riots, labor strikes, campus occupations, and rural uprisings continued to spread nationwide, Mao called a work conference to discuss how to move forward from the current situation. Much of the left wing of the party, including much of the CCRG, was beginning to express concern that the Red Terror was losing focus on attacking the capitalist roaders and was attacking too many innocent people.

Was Mao concerned though? Not at all. In fact, he said bluntly, quote, "I do not think that Beijing is that chaotic. Beijing is too civilized. Now is not the time to interfere. It is right to rebel." Mao knew the people of China had a fever and the only prescription was more unbridled rebellion. But Red August kind of Yeah, Red August finally went off the rails to a screeching crescendo on August 26th in the Daxing Commune district of Beijing.

Uh just a warning folks, this is the part of the episode that's about to get really ugly.

So Daxing Commune is a district of Beijing that's just south of Chaoyong district. It's in southeast Beijing. Today, it's a lot more built up, but uh back in the 60s, it was essentially a rural suburb of the city.

The Daxing Commune was unique at that stage of the cultural revolution because it was a rural area that was already increasingly militant and already had a grassroots red guard movement that wasn't really connected to uh university campuses. So when Minister of Public Security Xie Fuzhi broadcast his speech about there being nothing wrong with red guards taking the law into their own hands and killing class enemies, it seemed to, uh, really strike a nerve with the young comrades in the district.

That morning, the district's police turned over to the Daxing Commune Red Guards a large list of people who were former Comprador Bourgeoisie, former Guomindang members, former nobles and landlords, and most importantly, people who were tied to the wing of the Communist Party supported by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. The cops basically told the kids, "Knock yourselves out. Search their houses for signs of counterrevolutionary activity. Show these people who's boss now."

The red guards began pulling people out of their homes and into the district squares. For hours, they subjected the quote black elements of society to brutal struggle sessions with a large crowd of angry peasants and local high schoolers whipped into a frenzy as they denounced their targets. Several people who were being struggled against died in the process of being beaten. And many of the older people being struggled against died from sheer exhaustion due to being put through hours of harassment and physical assault in the middle of a humid August day.

After the first wave of struggle sessions was over, the Daxing Commune Red Guards, the Daxing District People's Militia, and a section of rebel cadres of the district's communist party branch marched through the commune, going from house to house to rob and beat the families of those who had been struggled to death in that morning's struggled session.

Some red guards had become so intoxicated with rage that they began pulling children and infants out in the streets and bludgeoning them to death, citing the bloodline theory that I had mentioned earlier. For 5 days, the riots and looting in Daxing continued. And by the end of the riots, the county government counted 326 civilians dead, tens of thousands injured, and countless homes and workplaces destroyed.

A local Daxing rebel cadre leader realizing things had gone too far phoned the party center who had decided then that the pilgrims had been totally unnecessary and targeted too many innocent civilians unconnected with the capitalist roaders of the party or with the old regime. With that order was restored in the Daxing commune and the red guards of the district were officially reprimanded by the CCRG. When the party center received the full report of the Daxing massacre, it was a clear sign that the red terror had gone too far and had begun to target the masses rather than the capitalist roaders.

On September 2nd, People's Daily published a decree saying urgent notice, struggle with words, not with violence. Jointly written by the Beijing Municipal Party Committee and co-signed by Nie Yuanzi, Wang Renzhong, Zhou Enlai, Lin Biao, and various prominent Red Guard faction leaders. The decree demanded an end to the terror and commanded that the Red Guard movement redirect itself back to the line of quote, "Bombard the headquarters," rather than taking up the ultra-leftist and anarchistic line of quote, "overthrow literally everything." A slogan that some red guards, particularly high school red guards, had begun to raise.

While Mao himself did not sign off on the declaration, it was obvious that his position earlier that Beijing was quote not chaotic enough had indeed changed. At the next million strong red guard rally in Tiananmen Square that same week, he sternly and tersely told the red guard representatives standing with him at the tan men roster to quote, "Refrain from physical violence and to remember to distinguish contradiction among the masses and contradictions among the enemy."

By September 1st, 1966, thousands were dead. According to an official Chinese government report in 1980, 1,772 people had been killed by the Red Guards that month. While a 1985 followup government report upped that number to 10,275 people killed by the Red Guards. Both the 1980 and 1985 Chinese reports cited that over 85,000 people had been displaced from the city and 92,000 homes, buildings, and workplaces had been ransacked or demolished. Personally, I have a feeling that the 1,772 estimate was referring to the death toll in Beijing and the 10,000 estimate was referring to the nationwide death toll. Uh, but if anyone could clarify for me, I'll gladly add it to next episode's corrections corner.

Well, while I am far from a pacifist, and I am a firm believer that any cultural revolution within a socialist society is going to require at least some bloodshed against reactionaries trying to restore capitalism. I can't help but feel, you know, just how many of those that died, be it a 1,000 or 10,000, were genuinely counterrevolutionaries wanting to overthrow the socialist system, and how many of them were just innocent folks caught in the crossfire of a mass campaign of young people who had lost themselves in the sound and fury of the new revolution.

But alas, excesses and atrocities are bound to happen in any violent historical event. Be it the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, Russian Revolution, cultural revolution. So while we should never ever ever excuse the killing of innocent people, we have to always put such mass killings into historical context. We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. And we should sum up revolutionary upsurges in ways so that we can learn to avoid such things in future cultural revolutions in future socialist societies.

I must say, you know, I can't bring myself to fully denounce Red August as some terrible and unforgivable atrocity, but oh well, it certainly was a learning experience when it comes to how to and how not to mobilize the youth in waging class war against right-wing intellectuals and party members. Uh well, on that dour note, I think it's time for us to wrap this episode up.

Next month is the first month of the new semester at my new job, like I said earlier. So, I can't promise you guys that I'll be able to deliver a full episode for September. In fact, what I'm thinking about doing is using the month of September to create a special National Day episode for the month of October where I can not only talk about the events of September and October of 66, but maybe bring on some special guests as well as tell you guys about some other Maoism related projects that I have up my sleeve. How does that sound today?

So, uh, but if you guys are too impatient for that, maybe I'll throw a little minisode up on Spotify and Anchor sometime in the third week of September. So, uh, do we have any corrections corner this month? No, no, no, no. Seems we don't. That's good. Of course, that means that episode two and the many so number one weren't filled with filthy dirty bourgeois lies and rattish deviations from which I must be dunce-capped and airplane’d by my listeners.

[Laughs] Oh, I've got a dark sense of humor. Seriously though, love you guys. Always appreciate when you guys correct my slip ups or my line problems. So, yes, please. If I screw up, corrections corner. It's here for a reason. Thanks so much for listening in once again. As always, until next time from the ancient city of Xi’an, zai jian. If you guys have any comments, corrections, or criticisms, send them my way at cultural revolutionodcast@gmail.com or my Twitter account at GPCR podcast. And as always, keep marching forward, be resolute, fear no sacrifice, and surmount every difficulty to win victory.

Special thanks once again to

Fractured Rebellion, the Beijing Red Guard Movement by Andrew G. Walder, particularly chapter 3,

Proletarian Power, Shanghai and the Cultural Revolution by Elizabeth Perry.

The Banned Thought website for their extensive archive of Peking Review issues, particularly Peking Review for August 19th, 1966, as well as these academic journals that are readily available on Jstor. (editors' note: or Sci-hub, if you ask me)

The brief tumultuous history of big democracy in China's factories by Joel Andreas and Yige Dong.

China's great cultural revolution by GP Deshpande.

Language and violence during the Chinese cultural revolution by Ji Fengyuan.

Local autonomy in China during the cultural revolution. The theoretical uses of an atypical case by Lynn T. White III and

Student attacks against teachers during the revolution of 1966 by Wang Youqin.

All right, that's it for the bibliography and the sources. Have a great day, comrades.