Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

Chang writes that to achieve maximum fear among the “capitalist-roaders” (Party officials) and “reactionary bourgeois authorities” (professionals, intellectuals, etc.), Mao needed something akin to a private army. He found it in China’s youth. In the summer of 1966, millions of young people, many of them teenagers, joined Mao’s Red Guards. Abuse of teachers intensified. Acting under the Cultural Revolution Authority’s broad mandate, the Red Guards unleashed terror and violence against everything “old”—"old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits” (288). House raids became commonplace. Much of China’s culture, including books, paintings, and centuries-old artifacts, was destroyed.

Intoxicated by their newfound power, Mao’s Red Guards behaved like a paramilitary organization with one objective: to destroy. Children redirected traffic in Chengdu (Why should “revolutionary” red mean “stop”?). Roving bands of Red Guards shut down restaurants and other “decadent” establishments (294). Chang herself, not yet 14 years old, participated in the forced shuttering of a local teahouse, the sort of place which, in saner times, she would have loved to frequent.

Predictably, just as Mao had turned one segment of the population against others, the Red Guards now began to turn against their peers.