Red Guards

When Mao praised the very first big-character poster, which was posted by the “Leftists” in Peking University in May, as the “the first Marxist big-character poster in China”, along with the publications in People’s Daily, the Cultural Revolution officially started in the schools and universities, mostly among students. Those students claimed to be Red Guards who guarded Mao’s thought and expelled all the “reactionary rightists”. In fact, Red Guards played the most significant role during the first period of the revolution, and they facilitated the result of Mao re-controlling the Party and purging his enemies. As Mao and the official policy publicly supported the actions of Red Guards, asking even military forces to provide help (Schoenhals, 53), the revolution

Hong Yung Lee also points out that students from red social classes were likely joining the conservatives (Walder, 438).This view was somehow accurate after work team was assigned. However, during the first phase of the revolution, situation was quite different. According to Walder, students did not find opposed to the work team until they tried to preserve school power structure (441). In other words, there were no obvious factions of the conservative group and radical group. The truth is that at first phase, there were only those students with red social backgrounds were dare to challenge the authorities in the universities (Zheng, 8). By contrast, those with poor backgrounds stayed silent (Zheng, 8). The main targets for those students were their teachers or the party leaders within the universities, and they would never know that the true targets of their beloved Mao were their own