Born Red

Gao Yuan · 1987

Thesis

The Cultural Revolution was carried out in large part by ordinary teenagers, and its cruelty came less from ideology than from the logic of the situation: students handed the power to attack authority, divided into rival factions and drawn into escalating violence that no one, including the participants, could control.

The main ideas

The violence of the Cultural Revolution was carried out by ordinary schoolchildren, mixing play, idealism and cruelty.
Once students were licensed to attack teachers and officials, authority collapsed quickly and completely.
The movement split into rival factions whose conflict became an end in itself and escalated to armed fighting and torture.
A good family background, being born red, offered no lasting protection when the targets kept changing.
Escape came not through reform but by leaving: for the author, by joining the army.

Born red

Gao Yuan was born in 1952, the son of a county official in north China. Being born red meant having the right class background: a family of revolutionaries and Communist officials rather than landlords or capitalists. In the China of his childhood it was a mark of privilege and political reliability.

His memoir, written while he was a graduate student at Stanford and published in 1987, covers 1966 to early 1969, the first and most violent years of the Cultural Revolution, Mao's campaign to purge the Communist Party and society of supposed enemies of the revolution. It is set mainly in the Number One Middle School of a county town in Hebei he calls Yizhen, four hours by train south of Beijing, where he was a boarding student. It opens in the spring of 1966 with an earthquake that sends the boys running from their dormitory; the vice-principal, Lin Sheng, organizes relief for the victims, and within months he is one of the students' targets. He changed the names of places and classmates because, he explains, everyone, innocent or guilty, had been caught up in a movement beyond anyone's ability to control.

The book reconstructs those years from his diary. The historian Gail Hershatter noted that it never abandons the voice of someone on the edge of childhood.

Implication: to understand how a society turns on itself, look at the experience of ordinary participants, not only the decisions of leaders.

Making revolution

When the Cultural Revolution reached Gao's school in 1966, students formed Red Guard groups and turned on their teachers and administrators, denouncing them as capitalist roaders, officials accused of steering China back toward capitalism. Students wrote posters attacking them, held mass rallies at which they were humiliated and marched them through the streets. Some were driven to suicide.

The reviewer Lucian Pye, writing in the China Quarterly, described the book as a step-by-step account of how a bright middle-school student went about making revolution, the name Red Guards gave to their blend of high jinks and vicious cruelty.

The mechanism the book shows is that adolescents, given license from the highest authority to attack every lesser authority, experienced the campaign as a liberation and an adventure as much as a political cause. The adults who might have restrained them were the first targets.

Implication: when legitimate authority is suddenly removed and the young are given power over their elders, expect cruelty to be committed by people who think of themselves as idealists and rebels.

Factions

As the movement went on, the students split into two factions. Gao's was the Red Rebels; their rivals called themselves East-is-Red. Both claimed to be the true followers of Mao, and the conflict between them soon mattered more than any original cause.

The rivalry escalated. The school and then the town became armed camps, with the factions fighting with weapons. Even after the military took control, rival factions captured and tortured each other's members, sometimes to death. The scholar Jonathan Unger, writing in The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, who had interviewed many former Red Guards from Canton, wrote that the violence Gao describes was more horrific than anything recounted to him.

The mechanism is that once groups define themselves by their opposition to each other, each act of violence justifies the next, and members who hesitate risk being treated as traitors.

Implication: in any conflict between factions, watch for the point at which defeating the other side has replaced the stated goal, because escalation tends to follow.

Father and son

Running through the book is Gao's relationship with his father, a veteran Communist and former guerrilla leader who headed the county government. At the start of the campaign he came under attack for paying too much attention to economic matters instead of class struggle, and he was in and out of trouble for the rest of these years as the political winds shifted. The status that had protected the family could become a liability overnight, as officials became targets and accusations changed with each new phase of the campaign.

Gao's own position was precarious in the same way: a participant in the attacks on others, he could become a target himself if his faction lost or his family's standing fell. At the end of the book he finds safety by enlisting in the People's Liberation Army.

Pye wrote that the book drove another nail into the coffin of the once-popular theory that the Cultural Revolution was an idealistic, consciousness-raising movement.

Implication: in a campaign of denunciation, past loyalty and good background offer no lasting protection. Look for a way out before the targets reach you.

Limits

It gives little political context or new history. Stanley Rosen, in the Journal of Asian Studies, noted that the text does not provide enough chronological or political detail to anchor a general reader, though William A. Joseph's foreword fills most of the gaps; Pye judged that it adds little new knowledge of the movement, though it is excellent at showing how slogan-shouting gave way to torture and fighting.
It is a reconstruction. The narrative was recreated later from a diary, with all names and places disguised, so details cannot be checked against other sources.
It describes one county town in north China. The course of the Cultural Revolution varied widely across the country, and the experience of a well-connected official's son was not that of children from bad class backgrounds.

Mao: The Unknown Story — the leader who launched the Cultural Revolution, in a hostile biography.
River Town — a provincial Chinese town a generation later, after the revolution's ideals had faded.