Educational Indoctrination in China and the Red Guards
During the communist reign of Mao Zedong who achieved a personality cult of religious proportions, education in China was seriously disrupted.
Resulting from many years of failure of Mao’s communist economic policies especially the “Great Leap Forward” of 1958 which resulted in about 20 million deaths from starvation and economic chaos, Mao was concerned both for his own position and that of his revolutionary ideology.
Intellectuals, educators, teachers and even artists and musicians were therefore subjected to periodic “thought reform campaigns” to ensure that they adhered to Mao’s state doctrine.
At this time children, especially those from rural and peasant backgrounds, were taught a highly politicized curriculum with the objective of ensuring that the younger generation would continue the revolutionary zeal that Mao considered necessary to stop the country returning to capitalism. Children were encouraged to report to the authorities anything said by their teachers, parents or contemporaries that was considered in any way critical of Mao or government policy.
Following on from this, in 1965 Mao started what was known as the “Cultural Revolution” as a major campaign to “rectify” the intellectuals. First Mao had to overcome political opposition within the hierarchy of the communist party itself and once this was achieved the Cultural Revolution could go ahead unimpeded. Intellectuals across the board were then ferociously attacked for a variety of supposed ills, and no area relating to the shaping of public opinion was left untouched.
First to fall by the wayside were the educators. More than a dozen university presidents, as well as many university vice-presidents and party secretaries, were denounced and dropped. The entire system of higher education was revamped in order to allow more students of worker—peasant backgrounds to get into institutions of higher learning and to increase the political content of the curriculums. For this purpose, the regime took the drastic step of postponing the opening of classes for six months.
In 1966 Mao brought the indoctrinated youth of the educational system in to play with the creation of a new National Youth Organization, composed mainly of militant teen-age college and high school students of peasant— worker backgrounds.
Known as the “Red Guards”, they were organized, probably under the guidance of public security agents or the army's political officers, in order to spearhead the drive against 'old ideas, old cultures, old customs, and old habits' and against officials suspected of becoming mellow on the Maoist doctrine.
The Red Guards exploded on the national scene at a mammoth Peking rally and thereafter for several weeks conducted a rampage, sanctioned from above, which captured world headlines. In their fanatical and infantile zeal to erase all traces of things Western or traditional, they struck terror in the hearts of China's urban population. They desecrated Christian churches changed street names and shop signs (for example, the street leading to the Soviet embassy in Peking was renamed Street of the Struggle Against Revisionism); shut down stores selling items considered luxurious (cosmetics, flowers, and the like); forbade Western-style haircuts and dress and clipped people's hair in the streets; raided private homes and destroyed their possessions; ruined art objects and burned books deemed heretical to Maoist doctrine; humiliated and beat people; and so on1.
Side by side with the Red Guards campaign was a greatly stepped-up effort to indoctrinate the population with the “The Thoughts of Mao Zedong” otherwise known as the “Little Red Book”.
The incredible and childlike adulation of Mao's wisdom soared to new heights of absurdity. The infinite sagacity of this 'great teacher, great leader, great supreme commander, and great helmsman of the Chinese people' was praised ad nauseam, and his “sacred” sayings were credited with providing the magic solution to problems in all fields—from war to watermelons, from production to Ping-Pong2. The Little Red Book was carried and worshiped by every Red Guard, who by then were numbered in millions.
Conflict, often armed, between Red Guards and rural populations began to grow, requiring the intervention of local militia, as did armed conflict between various factions that had developed within the Red Guard organisation itself.
Eventually, with the Red Guard situation completely out of control and the country experiencing economic stagnation, the government ordered the military to restore order – this resulting in thousands of deaths in clashes between the Red Guards and the military.
Finally the government forced the dispersal of many youths between the ages of 16 and 19 from the cities to go to live in the countryside. These measures eventually brought an end to the two chaotic years of the Red Guard Movement.
From 1966 to 1976 the Cultural Revolution convulsed China, destroying any possibility of educational or career advancement for millions of people. Communist authorities had also discouraged romantic love and promoted politically correct marriages based on class background and revolutionary commitment.
1Note the similarity between Mao’s communist indoctrinated zeal, and the later Taliban’s religious indoctrinated zeal, and their virtually identical behaviours.
2Note the similarity between the absurdity of Mao’s sayings, and the absurdity of Mohammed Omar’s later Taliban edicts.
(For an idea of the dreadfulness of Mao Zedong’s communist regime on the ordinary middle-class family, see the award winning book “Wild Swans, Three Daughters of China - a biography of her family history by Jung Chang, a Chinese born British writer and journalist.
‘Immensely moving and unsettling; an unforgettable portrait of the brain-death of a nation.’ J. G. Ballard, Sunday Times.
Also available as a CD)
Charles