Many of the most violent youths for the culture revolution came from families that had been considered actually to be of lower status in the revolutionary hierarchy. In december of 19 66, the first year of the culture revolution, you would have seen a hundred and 20 thousand red guards fighting for control of shanghai. Even more terrifying, some red guards and the so called revolutionary masses managed to get some radioactive material from a research lab, and were experimenting with creating their own private atomic bomb. And again, we've heard rightly about now, torture of teachers and people wearing foreign clothes,.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Chairman Mao and the revolt he led within his own party from 1966, setting communists against each other, to renew the revolution that he feared had become too bourgeois and to remove his enemies and rivals. Universities closed and the students formed Red Guard factions to attack the 'four olds' - old ideas, culture, habits and customs - and they also turned on each other, with mass violence on the streets and hundreds of thousands of deaths. Over a billion copies of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book were printed to support his cult of personality, before Mao himself died in 1976 and the revolution came to an end.
The image above is of Red Guards, holding The Little Red Book, cheering Mao during a meeting to celebrate the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution at Tiananmen Square, Beijing, August 1966
With
Rana Mitter
Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China and Fellow of St Cross College, University of Oxford
Sun Peidong
Visiting Professor at the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po, Paris
And
Julia Lovell
Professor in Modern Chinese History and Literature at Birkbeck, University of London
Produced by Simon Tillotson and Julia Johnson