These teen Red Guards were culled from the communist elite, and Mao wanted them to overturn the system he had imposed. To demonstrate his powers, Mao floated downstream for two miles of the muddy Yangtze river In the 1960s the generation of Chinese who had supported the Communist party after Mao seized power from the nationalists in 1949 were cowed into obedience. After confessing to crimes, they were beaten up and publicly humiliated, forced to wear dunce hats in front of jeering crowds, standing immobile for hours in the painful “propeller” position, a half-stoop that wrenched their arms out of their sockets. Teachers were subjected to notorious “struggle sessions”. It was necessary to destroy the bourgeois past, and this involved the wholesale looting of shrines, the destruction of books and parchment, the smashing of ornaments and the pillaging of homes belonging to the wealthy. But Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution also had a darker side. Like their western contemporaries who encountered the Beatles, they told each other that their lives were changed. He named his teenage followers Red Guards, and it was they who packed Tiananmen Square, waving copies of the Little Red Book filled with his sayings as they stood in their millions for a brief sight of him. “T o rebel is justified,” the Great Helmsman intoned.
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