Abstract
How do we understand the political radicalism of the 1960s and its enduring impact on contemporary China? In his book The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China, Guobin Yang sheds light on the political culture of activism by putting the Red Guard generation at the very center of his study. By the Red Guard generation, Yang refers to the first age cohort raised and educated after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, those who were variously called the lost generation, the thinking generation, the zhiqing generation, the lao san jie, and the cultural revolution generation.
While social movement theories are strong for explaining organizational networks, mobilization of resources, social structures—or, in other words, the “form” of collective behavior—much less attention has been given to ideas, feelings, and ideology integral to those movements, partially because of the fact that it is much harder to study the “content” of collective violence. In this vein, Yang’s approach of tracing a group of people with clear generational identity has two merits. First, by borrowing from performance theory, it highlights ideas—or, in Yang’s case, articulations of sacred revolutionary scripts—as the driving forces of waves of political activism. Second, it also explains the sources of “agency,” that is, how these varying scripts are produced, preserved, and transformed alongside the political-cultural environment that is embodied in the everyday life experiences of the Red Guard generation.
The book is broadly divided into two parts: the first is the enactment of the radical revolutionary faith of the Red Guard generation in the 1950s and 1960s; and the second is the recession as well as remaking of the moral vision at the end of the 1970s and 1980s, followed by the fragmented memories and limited revival in the 1990s and the present. Three waves of political activism—the Red Guard movement, the Democracy Wall Movement, and the 1989 Tiananmen protest—stood amid these life trajectories of the Red Guard generation.
“What made these young people, who could have been classmates, schoolmates, lovers, neighbors, or fellow factory workers, willingly engage in deadly factional warfare at the cost of their own lives” in the Red Guard radicalism (p.2)? Yang opens with a case of violent factional warfare in Chongqing in 1966 and 1967. Rebel Red Guards rose against conservative groups, a conflict that later escalated into fierce confrontations between rebel factions and later into prolonged and deadly battles with heavy causalities. A major source of the violence, Yang argues, was the rebels’ competition for public proof of “true” faith: individuals and groups fighting against each other to show they were true revolutionaries. Political radicalism was thus the result of the competitive public performance of an imagined revolution in the uncertainty and ambiguity of Cultural Revolution.
A small segment of Red Guards also performed revolutionary theorizing during the Cultural Revolution. They utilized the lingering cultural resources of “class” and “class struggle” to proactively rethink the essence of cultural revolution. Different from the orthodox bourgeoisie/class enemy versus proletariat/people dichotomy, the authors of dissent redefined the “bourgeoisie” as a “red capitalist class” or a new class formed within the Chinese Communist Party while claiming children of “black” family origins as an “oppressed class.” The Red Guard dissent thus reoriented their criticism against the red capitalist class, that is, the authority of the Communist Party, which reinforced the violent factional warfare.
Both the heterodox “theoreticians” and the practitioners of radical revolution like in Chongqing shared a strong sense of idealism and passion for revolution and radical social change, which had its early origins in the political and cultural environment during the 1950s and 1960s when the Red Guard generation were raised and educated. Music, songs, images from posters, children’s picture books, biographies, and literary works in that era enacted their extraordinary identification with the brand-new Chinese socialist state, cultivating these Chinese youth into revolutionary successors. The celebration of revolutionary faith was accompanied by political uncertainties confronting the blockages from western societies and the international communist movement. The cultural work available to the young Red Guard generation in the 1950s and 1960s opened up a world of enchantment, mesmerization that combined a sense of infinite possibilities and hopes with a sense of danger, both expanding and limiting the political imagination of the Red Guard generation.
But their life story did not end with the RedGuard Movement and the Cultural Revolution. This brings up the other goal of Yang’s book, to use Red Guard radicalism “as the starting point for tracing the longer-term biography of the Red Guard generation from 1960s to the present” (p.2). During the “sent-down” campaigns, the urban youth had to embrace the destitute living conditions of the countryside and develop emotional attachment with the rural people. The abstract notion of “the people” and “class struggle” that those urban youth learned at school and practiced in the Red Guard movement receded into routinized daily life. They embarked on searching for personal interests in order to cope with concrete concerns of ordinary lives.
At the same time, underground cultural movements were going around. The sent-down youth circulated songs, stories, poems, books, and letters among small groups. For the Red Guard generation, experiences in underground cultural movements and the sent-down movement cultivated the negation and remaking of the self, which motivated their participation in the 1976 to 1980 Democracy Wall movement and 1989 Tiananmen Square protest later on. These three waves of political activism shared historical continuities in terms of the political repertoires and the Red Guards’ political romanticism, driven by visions of a strong Chinese nation, although the goals and demands changed dramatically.
Taken together, Yang is able to fulfill the third goal of the book: “to offer an account of the transformation of the political culture and political protest in the People’s Republic of China” (p.2). This book may lack structural explanatory power in the manner of a typical social science study. But a fantastic study on the historical trajectories of lived experiences provides much more nuance than overarching social science statements. It invites us to rethink the historical periodization of pre-reform and post-socialism divided by top-down state policies in 1978. By skillfully combining cultural meaning and the social practices of the Red Guard generation, Yang demonstrates lingering cultural codes of political activism throughout twentieth-century China and the extent to which those people may refer back to their past with nostalgia to make sense of the present.