DBQ 2010 APWH-CK
I Was A Teenage Red Guard
Share this:
Issue 170 new internationalist issue 170 - April 1987
Photo: Rory Dell / Camera Press
I was a teenage Red Guard
Fanatics ready to commit violence and denounce anyone in the name of communism - or heroes who sacrificed personal comfort to work for the greater good? Conflicting images of the Red Guards summed up Western confusion about Mao's China. Mo Bo remembers what it was really like to be a Red Guard.
When the Cultural Revolution reached my school in 1966 I was 14. In the beginning, classes were interrupted from time to time; the teachers began to get worried and did not know what to do. Then, overnight, wall posters appeared everywhere. We all took it for granted that the senior students wrote the posters and that the only thing we could do was admire them.
Most of the posters were just empty slogans but one depicted our geology teacher as a 'dirty bourgeois intellectual' because he would make sure that the water temperature was exactly the same as that of his body whenever he washed. He was also criticized for his 'yellow' diaries which were searched out by the active 'rebels' (he was so eccentric that we all thought there must be something bourgeois about him). In one of his diary entries he recalled his experience of sitting beside a plump lady in a bus. The poor bachelor wrote that it was 'very comfortable' to feel that lady's flesh.
Then, following the example of the students in Beijing, we formed an 'Organization of Red Guards'. Everybody wanted to join the Red Guards because nobody wanted to be 'unqualified', 'backward' and 'non-revolutionary'. I was one of the first to join because, being from a poor peasant's family, my background was supposed to be 'clear'. We all enjoyed having no classes and degrading the teachers. 'The teacher takes the student as the enemy and uses examinations as weapons to attack the student' - the fact that it was Chairman Mao who had said this meant a great deal.
In
Share this:
Issue 170 new internationalist issue 170 - April 1987
Photo: Rory Dell / Camera Press
I was a teenage Red Guard
Fanatics ready to commit violence and denounce anyone in the name of communism - or heroes who sacrificed personal comfort to work for the greater good? Conflicting images of the Red Guards summed up Western confusion about Mao's China. Mo Bo remembers what it was really like to be a Red Guard.
When the Cultural Revolution reached my school in 1966 I was 14. In the beginning, classes were interrupted from time to time; the teachers began to get worried and did not know what to do. Then, overnight, wall posters appeared everywhere. We all took it for granted that the senior students wrote the posters and that the only thing we could do was admire them.
Most of the posters were just empty slogans but one depicted our geology teacher as a 'dirty bourgeois intellectual' because he would make sure that the water temperature was exactly the same as that of his body whenever he washed. He was also criticized for his 'yellow' diaries which were searched out by the active 'rebels' (he was so eccentric that we all thought there must be something bourgeois about him). In one of his diary entries he recalled his experience of sitting beside a plump lady in a bus. The poor bachelor wrote that it was 'very comfortable' to feel that lady's flesh.
Then, following the example of the students in Beijing, we formed an 'Organization of Red Guards'. Everybody wanted to join the Red Guards because nobody wanted to be 'unqualified', 'backward' and 'non-revolutionary'. I was one of the first to join because, being from a poor peasant's family, my background was supposed to be 'clear'. We all enjoyed having no classes and degrading the teachers. 'The teacher takes the student as the enemy and uses examinations as weapons to attack the student' - the fact that it was Chairman Mao who had said this meant a great deal.
In