Um, first off, I just want to apologize for the late coming of this episode. It was supposed to come out in November or December, but unfortunately, um, we did not—something went wrong with the recording, more or less, and we kind of just ended up, uh, having, you know, and then I was stepping on a plane to go spend winter vacation back in the United States for 40 days.

So, you know, it was just one thing after another, one thing after another, and, uh, well, you know, here we are. But, um, Spring Festival was good for us. I was glad to see my family and all that. So, you know, because you guys have, um, been waiting for this episode for long, so long, I'll cut the chitchat and what's been going on in my life lately and, uh, let's just get on into it. Let's just get on into it.

So anyways, today I want to talk to you guys about a very interesting topic. We're going down south to the Balmy Pearl River Delta, to the city of Guangzhou, or Canton as it used to be called in English, China's third-largest city and one of the most important port cities in the world.

It is known as the City of Flowers for its beautiful lush greenery and botanical gardens, thanks to its subtropical climate. It's the birthplace of Dim Sum and the Cantonese dialect of Chinese, which was made so popular in the West thanks to immigrants from Guangdong and thanks to the popularity of Hong Kong cinema on foreign shores.

When combined with Hong Kong and Shenzhen, the Guangzhou metro area is home to tens of millions of Chinese people and is an economic and technological powerhouse both regionally and globally. It really is a place where, as the meme on social media says, incredible things are happening in China. Well, during the Cultural Revolution, incredible things were happening in Guangzhou, just like in Beijing or Shanghai. So let's begin our story.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Guangzhou was a city filled with sharp contradictions. The Municipal Party Committee and Municipal People's Government were both strongholds of conservative elements within the party who were keen to implement Liu Shaoqi's ideas about profit-driven market reforms, one-man management in the state enterprises, and expanding foreign investment within the city and more broadly in Guangdong Province.

The Guangzhou military region was a mixed bag, with some officers leaning towards Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, others leaned more toward Mao Zedong and Lin Biao. In the high schools and universities of the city, there was a distinct rift between the children of party cadres and bureaucrats and students whose parents were either workers but who were not politically active during the revolution, or who came from middle-class or bad-class backgrounds.

The main universities in Guangzhou, Sun Yat-sen University, aka Zhongshan University as I will call it sometimes during the podcast, South China Normal University, Guangzhou University, and Jinan University, had all become places where students of party and youth league cadre background strove to get lucrative jobs and make big bucks rather than to use their brains to serve the people.

And many people and students of both proletarian and quote-unquote "black" cadre class backgrounds felt like they were being shut out of the opportunity to get an education. All that was to change, however, on May 16th, 1966, when Mao Zedong wrote the May 16th circular, which was immediately distributed to the all party committees and PLA units on a municipal and provincial level, including in Guangzhou and Guangdong Province.

The May 16th circular lit a fire within everyone in the city. It was a call to rebel against the stuffy and increasingly capitalistic status quo that had overtaken the City of Flowers. One thing that is important for us to note is that rightism was a major problem specifically in the high schools and the universities of Guangzhou.

As Stanley Rosen, Anita Chan, and Jonathan Unger all point out in the paper that they did together about Guangzhou's Red Guards, quote, "the children of the pre-liberation working classes and peasant classes were not coming off very well. The new tilt towards class favored the revolutionary cadre students considerably more than the proletariat. And being from semi-literate homes, the working class students could only attain an average or below average showing on the selection examinations."

This wide gap was continually exacerbated across the 1950s and early 1960s, and many students whose parents were proletariat or peasantry but not party members or war veterans were beginning to resent being left behind educationally and organizationally in mass organizations and movements like the Communist Youth League. So when the Cultural Revolution was unleashed, it was like pulling off the lid of a boiling over pot. Pretty, pretty tough stuff here. Pretty tough stuff here.

So the first big action in Guangzhou was on June 6th, 1966. In the action, students and workers attacked the famous novelist and literary critic Qin Mu for anti-party and anti-socialist crimes. The charges that were heard were that, uh, his essays were discreet attacks on Chairman Mao.

However, within a few months, Qin was off the hook. Many declared that the attacks on Chen were a plot by the work teams and loyalist Red Guard groups to turn the spears away from the capitalist roaders in the Guangdong Provincial and Guangzhou Municipal Party Committees. So yes, just like in Beijing and Shanghai, there was a great deal of mass struggle between the work teams and the Red Guards and then the conservative loyalist Red Guards and the rebel Maoist Red Guards.

And we will dig more into this distinction later because in Guangzhou there's some interesting nuances to this that Stanley Rosen discussed in his landmark study of the Guangzhou Red Guard movement. What's interesting is a couple of things.

First, the Guangzhou Red Guard movement developed very unevenly from school to school, and initially the Red Guard movement in Guangzhou had a tiered system. Students from revolutionary cadre backgrounds could join the Red Guards, but the middle-class and non-party working-class students could only join the Hongwaiwei, or Red Outer Circle, which was an auxiliary mass organization that could support the Red Guards but were not allowed to take part in decision-making activities or assume leadership in any red rebel movements.

That changed, however, during the Red August of 1966, when the Red Terror against rightist teachers and people of bourgeois or Guomindang background were targeted as dangerous remnants of the old society. Quickly, these students in the Red Outer Circle were either denounced as reactionaries due to their insufficient class origin, or they were quickly reabsorbed into the ranks of the Red Card groups. By the way, if you want to learn more about the Red Terror and, uh, Red August of 1966, please refer back to episode 3 of this podcast.

Red August in Guangzhou, while not nearly as bloody as Beijing or the provincial capitals, other provincial capitals, was certainly not a dinner party. High school Red Guards forced dozens of teachers into brutal struggle sessions that would often lead to death by exhaustion or beating or resulted in people committing suicide. In one instance, a teacher was forced to drink an ink well, after which the students started kicking his stomach until he died.

During late July through September, though, in the midst of the Red Terror, a stirring debate within the ranks of the Guangzhou Red Guards was happening. The official Red Guard groups were major proponents of the bloodline theory, which is to say that a student's parents' class background determined whether or not they were a revolutionary. They would chant the slogan, "When the father's a hero, the son's a jolly good fellow. When a father's a reactionary, the son is a bastard."

Many in the Red Guard ranks, however, believed in the traditional Leninist and Maoist position that class line, not class origin, determines whether or not one is a revolutionary. After all, Friedrich Engels was from a bourgeois family. Lenin came from a upper middle-class family, and so on and so forth.

This would slowly cleave the Red Guard movement into factionalism between the loyalist conservative Red Guard groups and the Maoist rebel Red Guard groups that were aligned with the Central Cultural Revolution group back up in Beijing, just like in every other city in China.

Needless to say, the slogan about fathers and sons was subject to many dazibao, or big character posters, pasted around the city, and many mass meetings were held to debate its validity. During the fall of 1966, thousands of students from Beijing and many other cities descended on Guangzhou as part of the Chunlian movement, the revolutionary networking movement where Red Guards would travel far from home and go and exchange experiences and learn from each other's struggles.

Many Red Guards from here in Shaanxi, according to former Red Guards I've spoken to, took part in mutual aid projects where they would go up and, uh, you know, they'd help fix up working-class neighborhoods, bring food and medicine to elderly who had mobility issues, volunteer to work in factories alongside rebel workers to, uh, you know, understand what Mao said when he said grasp revolution and promote production.

And the big-time Beijing factions from Tsinghua and BeiDa, um, all set up liaison stations in Guangzhou and helped coordinate material and ideological aid to factions in Guangzhou aligned with their particular line. In fact, uh, Kuai Dafu, uh, at one point visited Guangzhou to agitate for his particular line within the Red Guard movement.

It was also during this time that the rebel workers started creating organizations in the factories and workplaces, although initially rebel industrial worker groups tended to lean conservative as they wanted to continue supporting the All-China Federation trade union's top brass, who were more on the Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping side of things.

This kind of gets funny because Guangzhou really wasn't an industry town like say Shanghai was.

It was a port town where most people were dock workers, [c-word for Asian 'unskilled' labor], the service industry like restaurants and hotels, you know, jobs like that. And the workers in the non-industrial industries tended to side more with the rebel Red Guards and the Central Cultural Revolution group and broke away from the trade unions.

Unfortunately, unlike in Shanghai and Beijing, there is not like a lot of super deep-level scholarship or available archival resources about the rebel workers and rebel cadres and rebel soldiers in Guangdong Province during the first year of the Cultural Revolution, and we mainly have to rely on textual readings of rebel periodicals, the state-owned press like Guangdong Daily, and eyewitness interviews done in the 1980s in Hong Kong for any further information about them. Across September and October, the Destroy the Four Olds campaign, or Smash the Old World campaign, swept through the city.

The aim of the movement was to destroy old ideology, old culture, old habits, and old customs, which included, unfortunately, a great deal of vandalism of cultural heritage sites, particularly Buddhist and Taoist temples, Muslim mosques, and included the invasion and looting of the homes of those suspected of possessing quote-unquote "bourgeois" objects like flashy jewelry and things like that, old antiquities, things like that.

Quickly, however, the movement became more organized, and the students were told to turn away from looting, smashing, and rioting, and instead use line struggle and debate to struggle against superstition, patriarchal ideas, Han chauvinism, and other conservative or outdated beliefs among the masses, as well as to work against capitalist viewpoints in the United Front mass organizations like the trade unions, Women's Federation, and Youth League. Speaking of the Youth League, there's something interesting about that.

Although the Communist Youth League continued to limp along for several more months, by the middle of December, it was clear that the birth of the Red Guards had sounded the death knell of the League in Guangdong Province. It was also seen as a den of the privileged children of revisionist party leadership, and this was no longer seen as trustworthy custodians of the Cultural Revolution.

It was also during this time that the Red Guard movement in Guangzhou began to coalesce further into distinct factions. In the high schools, the conservative students created the Guangzhou Mao Zedong Thought Red Guard headquarters, more popularly known as the Thought Guards or the Doctrine Guards. The Maoist rebel students and moderate centrist students created the coalition known as the Red Guards Congress. Unfortunately, according to my research, the high school Red Guards in Guangzhou were rather conservative, and Maoist rebels and moderates usually were the minority in most school districts.

By October 1966, the faction in Guangzhou's universities stood as thus. And bear with me, guys, 'cause this gets a bit confusing. So if I slip up, please forgive me. There's a lot of factions to go over. They kind of split and merge, and they often have very similar-sounding names.

But for the most part, for the most part, the primary rebel Maoist pro-CCRG organizations were Zhongshan University Red Flag, Zhongshan University August 31st Red Guards, Guangzhou Medical College Red Flag, and Jinan University East is Red Red Flag, which were all formed in late nineteen, uh, August of '66 and played a leading role in opposing the work teams sent to the schools to bring the situation under the control of the party organization.

By December, these groups had either consolidated into or split into three distinct headquarters: the first, second, and third headquarters.

The first headquarters was Maoist and was founded on October 28th, 1966, and called for an overthrow of the municipal and provincial government.

The second headquarters, founded a few days later, supported the current party committee and was mainly made of loyalist Red Guards who had been loyal to the work teams.

The third headquarters, found on November 11th, 1966, was founded at South China Engineering College and was headed by their Red Flag Red Guards. And they basically had the same politics as the first headquarters, but were made up of children of veteran cadres who had sided with the rebels rather than with their parents and with the work teams.

The first and third headquarters immediately grouped into a coalition, and the second headquarters collapsed in the last week of December. Among rebel workers, in December 1966, there were four citywide rebel worker organizations: the Workers Alliance, Red Flag Workers Headquarters, the Earth General Headquarters, and the Red General Headquarters.

They would all enter into a coalition with the first and third headquarters Red Guards and led a major general strike and public struggle session against the Provincial and Municipal Trade Union Federation. Across December and early January, struggle sessions and rallies demanding the resignation of Guangdong leaders Tao Zhu and Zhao Ziyang kept the people of Guangzhou in the streets and united in the struggle to keep their city on the socialist road. Remember those two names: Tao Zhu and Zhao Ziyang.

They were the two head honchos in Guangdong Province. On January 22nd, 1967, as events in Shanghai captured the imagination of the Chinese masses in the January storm, the rebels decided to go for it and seize power. The rebels built a mass coalition called the Proletarian Revolutionary Alliance, or PRA.

The PRA led a massive march of thousands onto the Guangdong Provincial Party Committee headquarters and presented Zhao Ziyang, secretary of the party committee, with a declaration of a power seizure. Zhao Ziyang immediately surrendered and told all police, militia, and army personnel to stand down, and told all government offices to recognize the PRA's leadership. However, the PRA and Zhao's administration had to make a compromise.

All officials could continue working in their current capacity but with rebel supervision. To say the least, this did not go over well with many within the rebel ranks. Already a few days before the power seizure, many groups within the first and third headquarters walked out of the power seizure planning meeting because they felt the power seizure was too premature or that post-seizure power structure wasn't properly mapped out enough. Indeed, many felt that the PRA had acted in an adventurous manner and not with mass support, unlike the power seizure in Shanghai.

Some said that it was a phony power seizure meant to protect the emperors and that it had led to a conservative restoration of revisionism. Many rebel worker groups split from the PRA and called it a scholars' power seizure that had left the proletariat and peasantry on the sidelines, while Red Guard students and rebel teachers manned the main position.

Zhou Enlai telephoned the party committee offices and told them that he and the CCRG approved the power seizure and that General Huang Yongsheng of the Guangzhou military region was to align with the PRA. Huang, however, declared neutrality over the power seizure initially, leaving it uncertain which faction of the rebel movement, the PLA, in Guangdong was going to support.

In response, on February 5th, the Proletarian Revolutionary Alliance raided the Guangzhou military region's offices and ransacked them. Chairman Mao was vague in his response. He simply told the Guangzhou military region to, quote, "support the left." But, well, just like in the rest of China, that question remained: who was the left?

On February 19th, a 50,000-strong rally was held to denounce the supposed, quote, "sham power seizure." Three days later, the third headquarters and the Red Flag Workers HQ founded the United Headquarters of Revolutionary Rebels of Guangdong Province and declared war on the Proletarian Revolutionary Alliance. Zhou Enlai, in response, retracted his public endorsement of the PRA. But things were still up in the air. The PRA still wasn't on great terms with the PLA.

And with the February adverse current going on in Beijing, the CCRG decided to put a wedge between the Red Guard movement and the PLA in Guangzhou by continuing to endorse the PRA against the army. On March 15th, the Guangdong Military Control Committee, with Huang Yongsheng as chairman, of course, was established as the highest authority at all levels of administration in the province.

A close associate of his former superior, Lin Biao, Huang maintained firm control of Guangzhou and tried to lord himself over all the rebel factions in the city. By the end of March, the rebel movement in Guangdong had once again consolidated into two factions and would remain that way until August of 1968. The conservative East Wind faction supported by the PLA, due to their opposition to the power seizure, and the Red Flag faction, which were the radical rebel faction made out of the remnants of the PRA.

Whew, quite the alphabet soups of organizations and coalitions, wasn't it? Um, well, you know, though I will still say that while conventional wisdom is that the East Wind were the conservatives and the Red Flag faction were the radicals, there was some, there has been some recent challenging of that framework in the scholarship.

Yan Fei at Tsinghua University asserted in a 2015 study that the two factions had almost entirely identical lines and that they only aligned with their respective backers over differences about the logistics of the power seizure. While an interesting point, I will still say that Stanley Rosen's 1982 study of the Red Guards in Guangzhou, which utilized a large amount of Red Guard periodicals and internal documents and interviewed about 100 eyewitnesses who were former Red Guards and rebel workers, seems to make a more compelling case for the quote-unquote "conventional" narrative of radical versus conservative.

But I don't know, what do you guys think? Let me know in the comments on Twitter or in my Discord server. Anyway, on April 14th, Zhou Enlai and a delegation from Beijing flew down to Guangzhou and called the east wind and Red Flag factions to the negotiating table. He said that the East Wind comrades were revolutionary but made conservative errors, but declared the Red Flag faction to be the leftists holding Chairman Mao's red line.

By smoothing over genuine differences, however, Zhou actually made things worse, and both sides left the negotiation table even angrier with each other. Bloody clashes in the streets of Guangzhou ensued, and soon the entirety of Guangdong Province was engulfed in a brutal civil war between the two factions that lasted through the entirety of 1967 and 1968.

And let me tell you, things got really nasty in the countryside counties surrounding Guangzhou and into, like, northern and western Guangdong Province. For example, in September of 1967, 2,000 people in Yangjiang County and Yangcheng County were killed by pro-PLA, pro-East Wind, peoples' militias units.

And in one instance, the Guangzhou prison was the scene of a brutal massacre when false rumors of a prison break caused local people to go into a panic and attack the prison, resulting in 197 deaths.

Overall, it is estimated that 8,000 people were killed in the factional civil war in Guangdong, making it one of the bloodiest provinces alongside Guangxi. And in my research, I counted somewhere around 11 major massacres that resulted in more than 100 dead.

So, yikes. What is interesting, though, is that one major positive event kept happening annually in Guangzhou. On November 15th, the biannual Guangzhou Exports Fair, aka the Canton Fair, was held. And to understand what the Canton Fair is, it's this gargantuan trade show which still goes on today. I kind of want to go to it someday just to see it. Um, so, yeah, it's really interesting. It was the only international trade import and export show still going on in China during the Cultural Revolution.

And it was where the Chinese government could buy and sell goods with foreign capitalists on the Chinese government's terms.

Foreign businessmen were faced with tons of revolutionary art, books, Mao badges, and much, much more. It was obviously a very heavily politicized event meant to export the revolution across the world. Anyways, having the Canton Fair back was a major boost to the economy of the city, especially in the time where factional fighting was disrupting production so much.

Across December of '67 and January of 1968, major problems began to happen within the ranks of the Red Flag faction. There came about a split between the moderates and the ultra-radicals within the rebel organization, with the moderates ready to negotiate with the East Wind faction and start holding elections for the Guangzhou Municipal and Guangdong Provincial Revolutionary Committees. The ultra-radicals, however, wanted nothing to do with the sort.

They believed that the revolutionary committees could only be established after the complete and total defeat of the rightists on the battlefield and the dragging out of every single capitalist roader from the party and army. The ultra-radicals, uh, within the Red Flag faction kind of began to uphold politics similar to the Hunan Shengwulian, if you guys remember that, but they didn't entirely split from the Red Faction, but they kind of, kind of, how should I say, they created their own internal caucus of sorts, which was called the August 5th Commune Red Guards.

Despite the lack of an organizational split, though, this still weakened the left in Guangzhou greatly, right on the eve of the Revolutionary Committee elections. Well, on February 21st, 1968, 600,000 locals and soldiers gathered to witness the proclamation of the revolutionary committees for both Guangzhou and Guangdong Province. General Huang Yongsheng was elected as chairman of the Guangdong Provincial Revolutionary Committee, to no one's surprise, mainly because he was a devoted ally of Vice Chairman Lin Biao.

However, the Red Flag and East Wind factions both did surprisingly well, gaining almost an equal number of seats. Speakers at the Guangzhou rally denounced the double dealer Tao Zhu as Liu Shaoqi's agent, as well as denouncing Zhao Ziyang, and proclaimed that Guangdong had thoroughly defeated the capitalist roaders. Now, that's not to say that factional fighting was completely over. In mid-March of 1968, Zhongshan University rebels called for more chaos in Guangzhou and for rural youth to unite with the oppressed and to rise to revolt. Factional squabbles in the countryside sometimes still led to bloodshed.

In July of '68, after the Hundred Day War in Tsinghua University in Beijing forced Mao to pull the plug on the revolutionary Red Guard movement, it meant the end of the Red Guard movements and rebel movements in Guangzhou, too, of course. The PLA in Guangzhou intervened in the first week of September, 1968, and forcibly dissolved the Red Guard movement, forcing them to give up their arms and return to their campuses.

When all of Guangzhou's secondary school students were forcibly herded back to their schools in the autumn of '68, the PLA teams that were placed in charge of the schools made them reenact the first class struggle phase of the Cultural Revolution. The same teachers who had been attacked two years before for bad class or historical faults were now to be targets once again, and for weeks there were lots of struggle session meetings.

While ostensibly these struggle sessions were pointed towards the rightists, these were actually mostly organized by East Wind-aligned students, with the point being hammered home: the rebels had been defeated in Guangdong. In December of '68, Mao Zedong called for educated youth to be sent down to the countryside to be rusticated and learn from the peasantry.

Guangzhou's published statistics show 75,000 students were rusticated in 1968 out of 108,000 school students, and university students also saw about 75 to 80 percent of their ranks sent to the countryside. They were joined by more than 17,000 unemployed or not-in-school street youths as well. It truly was a massive undertaking, and while many students tried to volunteer to get factory jobs in the city, the lack of industry in Guangzhou made that different and very difficult. Thus, Guangzhou had a much larger percentage of their youth sent to the countryside compared to other provincial capitals. So, thought that was interesting.

Um, Guangzhou, like I said before when I was discussing the Canton Fair, was a major point where China was able to communicate with the outside world, and it was where many foreign friends, diplomats, and business people did a lot of work across the early 1970s.

For example, June 23rd, 1971, a 15-strong friendship delegation from the U.S. Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars arrived in Guangzhou to commence a one-month visit. It was also around that time that many Maoist groups in the United States, such as the Revolutionary Union and October League, began to send delegations to Guangzhou to study the social and economic transformations that the Cultural Revolution had given fruit to. And I think it was, like, around this time that, like, a few celebrities actually traveled to China. Like, I think Mia Farrow. Yes, Mia Farrow. Mia Farrow went to Guangzhou during the Cultural Revolution. So, yeah, that's, it's pretty interesting.

On September 10th, 1971, British politician Tony Benn visited Guangzhou, and over dinner with city officials like Chen Yu, Benn suggested strategies for taking over Taiwan. Whoa, easy there, bro. Don't overstep your boundaries. On November 11th, a Scottish Council for Development and Industry group arrived in Guangzhou, which was the first Western trade European trade delegation to visit there outside of the Canton Fair since the 1950s. And this is interesting. Foreign trade at this point really started to pick up as well.

According to Gao Mobo's work, The Battle for China's Past, quote, "The 1972 entries of the Chronicle list the import of equipment for eight large chemical fertilizer and fabric factories. Other entries include the successful annual Guangdong Trade Fair and China's trading relationship with more than 150 countries."

Gao says, and I agree with him, this shows that Mao did not intend to close China to the outside world economically and that China did want to modernize its economy. But, you know, uh, we're going to get more into that in our June or July episode. Uh, we're, we're going to be discussing the Chinese economy during the Cultural Revolution, so that'll be fun. The class struggle in Guangzhou was far from over, however.

When Lin Biao made a little boo boo oopsie and had to run away, but then went boom boom in the middle of the sky and crashed in a field in Mongolia, a lot of the Guangdong Party and Revolutionary Committee leadership who were in Lin's camp were forced to resign.

So this meant that Zhao Ziyang, the man who had been declared Guangzhou's number one capitalist roader, was back at the helm, all right after a lengthy self-criticism session where he basically just went, "Come on, guys, I've changed. I swear I'm a rebel now, too. I'm a leftist now. I'm not a rightist anymore."

Well, we'll see about that. We'll see about that. The masses used the new ‘criticize Lin Biao and Confucius’ campaign to hit back at both the old pro-Lin clique and Zhao's new clique. So there was still a lot of mass struggle going on. Indeed, one prominent intellectual in Guangzhou became a superstar at the national level of the criticized movement.

Dr. Yang Rongguo from Zhongshan University had his article, Confucius, a thinker who stubbornly upheld the slave system, was endorsed by Mao, and got it published in the People's Daily on July 7th, 1973.

With that, he was inducted into the, uh, Pi Lin Pi Kong campaign in Beijing and received invitations to lecture on the subject of Lin and Confucius to audiences all over China. By spring of 1974, a number of the former leaders of Guangzhou's rebel Red Guards were meeting with Guangdong's old guard party leaders to negotiate a temporary strategic alliance.

Under the guise of criticizing Lin Biao and Confucius, the former rebels agreed to mount a wall poster publicity offensive in Guangzhou against the radical leadership group now known pejoratively as the Gang of Four.

Yes, this is interesting. In the end, in Guangzhou, many of the rebels went full circle. They were rarely throwing their lot in with the men and women they had tried to topple half a decade earlier because they felt betrayed by the Maoists within the party center. So, yeah, this all culminated into something very interesting on November 10th, 1974.

On that day, a 20,000-word long big character poster titled On Socialist Democracy and the Legal System was pasted up on a busy downtown street in Guangzhou. Its authors, three former rebel Red Guards from the Red Flag faction, writing under the collective pseudonym Li Yi Zhe, subjected what they call for tactical reasons the Lin Biao system to a thorough critique. It attracted big crowds and a great deal of sympathy.

In it, they said, quote, "The great proletarian Cultural Revolution has not completed its task. It has not enabled the powerful and popular masses to grasp tightly the weapon of the broad people's democratic dictatorship. In the summer of 1968, the rule of law under socialism suddenly did not operate, and what operated instead was political power to suppress."

"Across the length and breadth of the land, everywhere there were arrests, everywhere there was suppression and imprisonment of the innocent. Where has socialist legality gone? It was said that it was no longer of any use because it pertained to the old constitution, and the new people's congresses were still pending. It was a time of sheer lawlessness. This was a rehearsal for social fascism in our country, and Lin Biao was the rehearsal's chief director to betray Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution.”

The Li Yi Zhe letter did praise the socialist system and Cultural Revolution overall, as you guys can see, but felt that countless problems remained.

Addressing themselves to the upcoming National People's Congress, which would be first meeting in that assembly since before the Cultural Revolution, the authors maintained, quote, "In many cases, among the genuine revolutionaries who launched a fight against the Lin Biao system, the executed remain executed. The imprisoned are still in jail. The dismissed officials are still dismissed. The people are not fools. We demand democracy. We demand socialist legality and revolutionary and personal rights to protect the popular masses."

At this time, these were very highly provocative views, timed to coincide with the National People's Congress in Beijing in mid-January of '75. The Guangzhou Revolutionary Committee, at the orders of the central authorities, launched a citywide campaign to denounce those who held these views. Although Li-Yi-Zhe were eventually incarcerated by Zhao Ziyang for their dissidence, they were also able to hold what were nominally denunciation rallies, but it actually resembled public debates where they could enunciate their views further in front of a wide and often, uh, quite receptive audience.

Rumor has it that Mao did at one point read the Li-Yi-Zhe poster and declared it to be a defense of pluralistic bourgeois democracy and asked that key members of the Politburo if they thought they could help him write a credible refutation. None of them did, but the Guangdong Revolutionary Committee at least tried, describing the poster as, quote, and quote, "an attempt to gather together all the monsters and freaks and instigate the masses in a vain attempt to create chaos and reenact the Hungarian uprising of 1956 on China's soil." End quote.

With Chairman Mao's death in 1976, however, the great reversal in Guangzhou accelerated. In October of that year, waves of arrest of former rebel leaders, expulsion of rebel cadres from the party, demotions of rebel army officers swept through the political halls of the city, and by 1979, the Guangzhou Municipal Revolutionary Committee and Guangdong Provincial Revolutionary Committee were dissolved, and the old People's Government was reinstated with allies of Hua Guofeng and Deng Xiaoping strictly in command.

Guangzhou became a hotspot for foreign investment and foreign corporations to sink their claws into the newly re-vulnerable Chinese proletariat, and the city became notorious for its foreign-owned sweatshops.

Olive green fatigues gave way to blue jeans and t-shirts.

Revolutionary marches gave way to Hong Kong Canto Pop, and tea houses where Red Guards plotted power seizures became McDonald's and Starbucks franchises. And with that, the Cultural Revolution in Guangzhou became a distant and tragic memory.

All right, my friends, um, with that, I'm going to go see if I can convince my fiancée to go with me this weekend to get some Guangzhou-style roast goose and other dim sum delights at Shangxiajiu, Guangdong, one of our favorite Cantonese restaurants here in Xi'an.

Um, oh, I forgot to address something. I have seen some Hong Kong separatists and some Western liberals on Twitter and Reddit, Reddit mouth off, and say that the Cantonese language and culture was suppressed and outlawed during the Cultural Revolution, and that Mandarin and Northern Chinese culture were forced upon the Cantonese people.

In the scholarly sources and Chinese language resources I used for this podcast, and when I asked one old lady I know personally who traveled there when she was a Red Guard in college, I could find no source of this. So if you see someone saying such things on social media, you know, take it with a very, very, very hefty spoonful of, uh, salt.

All right, well, hey, my friends, it is great to be back. Um, so next month is going to be, uh, it's going to be kind of a thematic episode again. Um, the reason I'm doing that is because the April episode is such an, it's a research-intensive episode where I'm going to need to read some extra books up on the subject and, and, and read some of the, some extra documents on the subject.

So what we're going to do for our, um, March episode is we're going to finally get around to that Q&A ask me anything thing about, you know, about the author episode. So that should be fun. I'm going to tell you guys kind of how I developed a love for China and Chinese culture. You know, how did I become a Maoist?

What my life as a young man in the Revolutionary Communist Party and Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade was like? You know, how did, you know, what was it like working as a revolutionary internationalist movement activist in the United States? So, yeah, I think you guys are going to have a lot of fun with this one. Um, but I'm really, really, really excited about it, and I'm so glad to be back here.

One thing I learned, one thing I learned during my time in America is that America is my birthplace, but China is my home. Seriously, China is my home. This is where, where I want to be. This is where I want to be. I may not like the Communist Party of China's current economic policies, if you get what I mean, but at the end of the day, there's no other country I'd rather live in. There's no other country I'd rather live in, and I love it so, so much. All right, my friends, from the ancient city of Chang'an, modern-day Xi'an, zai jian, or in Cantonese, zoi gin.

Today's sources for this episode include

Red Guard factionalism in the Cultural Revolution in Guangzhou by Stanley Rosen.

The role of sent-down youth in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The case of Guangzhou by Stanley Rosen.

Students in class warfare. The social roots of the Red Guard conflict in Guangzhou by Anita Chan, Stanley Rosen, and Jonathan Unger.

Rival rebels. The political origins of Guangzhou's mass factions in 1967 by Fei Yan.

Guangzhou in the waning days of the Cultural Revolution by John Kamm.

The Cultural Revolution in images. Caricature posters from Guangzhou 1966 to 1977 database from the Chinese University of Hong Kong Library.

Mao's Last Revolution by Roderick Mcfarquhar and Michael Schoenhals.

The world turned upside down. A history of the Chinese Cultural Revolution by Yang Jisheng.

Collective killings in rural China during the Cultural Revolution by Su Yang.

Agents of Disorder Inside China's Cultural Revolution by Andrew G. Walder.

The Battle for China's Past. Mao and the Cultural Revolution by Gao Mobo.

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