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Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement by Andrew Walder
On 25 May 1966, Nie Yuanzi and six other instructors in Marxism-Leninism in the Philosophy Department at Beijing University put up a big character poster attacking the leadership of the university. This is now generally recognised as the opening shot of the Cultural Revolution. For the next few months Red Guard factions blossomed and collapsed with extreme rapidity. In his new book, FRACTURED REBELLION: THE BEIJING RED GUARD MOVEMENT, ANDREW WALDER manages the difficult task of giving a clear picture of a very complicated and fast changing situation.
Debate about the Red Guards has oscillated between two broad positions: that they were the willing tools of elite factional power struggle; or that they represented real social forces, previously suppressed by a repressive political apparatus but now given free rein by the collapse of political institutions. There is, as Walder points out, a great deal of evidence to support either case. Leading figures on the Central Cultural Revolution Group, including Jiang Qing and Kang Sheng, sought to direct the activities of particular Red Guard groups, usually to attack other leaders. In turn Zhou Enlai tasked aides to liaise with factions which thought the violence had gone too far. But on the other hand, Red Guard groups had their own agendas and often stubbornly refused to do what they were told. The CCRG, composed of individuals relying on Mao's authority to overthrow existing structures, repeatedly tried to cajole groups to form alliances, but in vain.
Walder argues instead that the Cultural Revolution was not a mass movement so much as a form of mass participation in bureaucratic politics. The purge of the Beijing Municipal government on 28 May created a vacuum in political authority at the top. Nie's poster at Beijing University and its reprinting in the People's Daily on 2 June led to unrest on campuses across Beijing in what became almost literally life and death struggles. Any accusation of political deviation was enough to destroy an individual. Walder's conclusion is that far from defending or attacking a status quo the Red Guards "were, quite simply, fighting not to lose."
Walder provides an admirably clear guide to the complex and confusing proliferation of Red Guard factions. He has analysed the events surrounding the arrival of the work teams in twenty seven of the fifty four higher education institutions in the capital, covering 76% of the city's university students. Taking this as his starting point, he gives a clear sense of the momentum of action, reaction and counter action which drove the Red Guard movement through its successive stages. The arrival of Work Teams in the universities in the middle of June created sets of winners and losers. The latter then initiated campaigns for rehabilitation, taking their demands to the parent institutions which had sent in the Work Teams in the first place, leading to escalations of demands and violence. The centre's verdict at the end of June that the Work Teams had been a failure served to create another set of winners and losers. Groups seeking to have the damaging verdicts on them overturned had to move ever higher up the bureaucratic chain, at each level coalescing with or fighting against groups from other institutions. At the beginning of December 1966, this process reached an inevitable conclusion when groups which had been marginalised by the CCRG fought back, accusing Jiang Qing and others of seeking "capitalist restoration" and implementing a "bourgeois reactionary line". We could describe this as viral revolution.
Walder has not been able to find any evidence in support of the argument that different factions represented different social groups or that the Red Guards were lined up in battle over the status quo. Consistent with this, ideology plays only a supporting role in his account. Red Guard factions took different positions on the role of violence and on the degree of importance to be attached to class as a basis for faction membership but all were united in their commitment to Mao's brand of revolutionary socialism. And for all the efforts of various senior leaders to direct either various Red Guard factions or in its later stages the entire movement the fact that ultimately in July 1968 Mao handed control of Beijing to the security apparatus demonstrates how conclusively they failed. This was not the sort of revolution they had wanted.
In an intriguing development of his theme Walder suggests that the CCRG's denunciation in December 1966 of its Red Guard critics as neofascists who were using torture and violence to defend class privileges has served as the basis for all subsequent misreadings of the history of the period. Put crudely historians ever since have been trying to prove that the CCRG was right. Walder does not pursue the theme at any great length and it is difficult to see how one could make a solid case in support of it. After all class and revolution was not just the dominant discourse at the time, it was the only discourse. Everybody was using this sort of language and writing today we have to remember that they meant it.
As he was dying, Mao said that he had managed two major achievements in his life, the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek and the Cultural Revolution. Nie Yuanzi's moment in the sun came to an end in August 1968, although she was allowed to make periodic public appearances for show. In November 1969 she was sent for labour reform. After the fall of the Gang of Four she was tried and sentenced to eight years in prison. In 2005, the then eighty five year old Nie had still not recovered her political rights or her pension. Interviewed by the Times correspondent in Beijing she said, "Chairman Mao used what I wrote to set alight the Cultural Revolution, but I never knew it would play such a huge role... I was very happy at the time, but I did not understand the deeper significance".
It is fair to say that we still do not understand that deeper significance. In writing this clear and thoroughly researched account of the Red Guard movement, ANDREW WALDER has done both scholars and general readers with an interest in the subject a great service and pushed us forward on the road to gaining that understanding.
Peter Wood
05/12/2009
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Dr. Peter Wood worked for the British intelligence service in Asia for many years before becoming HSBC's Chief Business Advisor for China. He is now an independent China Strategy consultant, based in Hong Kong. |
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