Chinese Cultural Revolution

Document A: Mao’s “Little Red Book”

Mao’s “Little Red Book” is a collection of Mao Tse-Tung’s quotations that were

used as a source of inspiration and guidance for members of the Red Guard

during the Cultural Revolution. These are two excerpts from the book.

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The world is yours, as well as ours, but in the last analysis, it is yours.

You young people, full of vigor and vitality, are in the bloom of life,

like the sun at eight or nine in the morning. Our hope is placed in you.

The world belongs to you. China’s future belongs to you.

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Mao, 1957

We must help all our young people to understand that ours is still a very

poor country, that we cannot change this situation radically in a short time,

and that only through the united efforts of our younger generation and all

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our people, working with their own hands, can China be made strong and

prosperous within a period of several decades. The establishment of our

socialist system has opened the road leading to the ideal society of the

future, but to translate this ideal into reality needs hard work.

Mao, 1957

Document B: Red Guard Song

Patriotic songs and slogans were common characteristics of the Cultural Revolution.

This song was written by the People’s Liberation Army Songs Editorial Department

sometime around 1967.

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Red Guards, Red Guards.

Burning with revolutionary zeal,

Tested by the storm of class struggle,

Tempered for battle our hearts are red,

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Standing firm, direction clear, our vigor for revolution strong,

We follow the party with full devotion,

We are Chairman Mao’s Red Guards.

Red Guards, Red Guards.

We want to be the successors to Communism.

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The revolutionary red banner passes on from generation to generation,

We want to try on the glorious tradition.

Loving the country, loving the people, loving the collective, loving to work.

Connecting with the workers and the peasants,

We are Chairman Mao’s Red Guards.

Document C: At the Center of the Storm

Rae Yang was a young girl in the spring of 1966, when she became a part of the Red

Guards during the Cultural Revolution. In 1997, she published a memoir retelling the

story of her life and her family in China throughout the political turmoil of the 1950s

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through the 1980s. In this excerpt she writes about her early experience in the Red

Guards.

When the Cultural Revolution broke out in late May 1966, I felt like the legendary

monkey Sun Wukong, freed from the dungeon that had held him under a huge mountain

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for five hundred years. It was Chairman Mao who set us free by allowing us to rebel

against authorities. As a student, the first authority I wanted to rebel against was

Teacher Lin, our homeroom teacher. A big part of her duty was to make sure that we

behaved and thought correctly.

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Now the time had come for the underdogs to speak up, to seek justice! Immediately I

took up a brush pen, dipped it in black ink and wrote a long dazibao. Using some of the

rhetorical devices Teacher Lin had taught us, I accused her of lacking proletarian feeling

toward her students, of treating them as her enemies, of being high-handed, and of

suppressing different opinions. My classmates supported me by signing their names to

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it. Next, we took the dazibao to Teacher Lin’s home nearby and pasted it on the wall of

her bedroom for her to read carefully day and night. This, of course, was not personal

revenge. It was answering Chairman Mao’s call to combat the revisionist educational

line.

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Within a few days, dazibao written by students, teachers, administrators, workers, and

librarians, were popping up everywhere like bamboo shoots after a spring rain. Secrets

dark and dirty were exposed. Every day we made shocking discoveries. The sacred

halo around the teachers’ heads that dated back two thousand five hundred years to the

time of Confucius disappeared. Now teachers must learn a few things from their

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students. Parents would be taught by their kids instead of vice versa, as Chairman Mao

pointed out. Government officials would have to wash their ears to listen to the ordinary

people….

Document D: Under the Red Sun Memoir

Under the Red Sun is a memoir written by Fan Cao about her experiences during the

Cultural Revolution published in 2005. Here is an excerpt from the memoir.

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I was a 7th grader when the Great Cultural Revolution broke out.

Growing up in the “New China” we were fed with revolutionary ideas bathed

in the red sunlight of Mao. We worshiped Mao the same way pious

Christians worship their God, and we were completely devoted to him. I,

myself, really believed that we were working for a paradise on earth, and

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we were going to save the entire world. How glorious it was to have the

great destiny of liberating all humanity! In fact, we did not even understand

what revolution was and how other people in the world really lived…

I was not allowed to join the Red Guards simply because my

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grandparents were rich before the communists took away their land, and

my parents were considered “intellectuals,” which automatically made them

anti-revolutionists regardless of the fact that they had been following Mao’s

idealism since their early adulthood. As members of the university faculty,

my parents were obviously in trouble. I, of course, was guilty by

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association. Only a 13-year-old girl, I became a target of the revolution.

After that, I lost all my friends and lived in perpetual fear for several years.

Despite this unbearable life, I did not dare challenge my belief in the

revolution. Instead, I wondered if it might be my parents who had done

something wrong. I wrote a dazibao denouncing them to show my loyalty to

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Mao. My naivety deeply wounded the feelings between my parents and me.

As I grew up, I slowly learned the truth behind the so-called

“revolution.” I also realized that my family and I were relatively lucky

compared with hundreds and thousands of innocent people who died in the

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endless political movements. I am very remorseful, and I still feel shaken as

I think back on what happened during the Cultural Revolution.