Red Guards

Red Guards
Propaganda poster depicting Red Guards
Founder	Chairman Mao Zedong
Leaders	Cultural Revolution Group (until 1968)
Foundation	1966
Dissolved	1968
Country	China
Allegiance	Mao Zedong (ceremonial figurehead)
Motives	Preserving the revolutionary ideology of Mao Zedong and his position within the Chinese Communist Party
Active regions	Throughout much of China, particularly in Beijing and other urban areas
Ideology	Maoism
Political position	Far-left
Notable attacks	Red August (including the Daxing Massacre, the Guangxi Massacre, the Inner Mongolia incident; the Guangdong Massacre; the Yunnan Massacres; and the Hunan Massacres)
Status	Forcefully suppressed by the PLA
Size	11 to 12 million high school and university students, among other followers or supporters[1][2]

Red Guards
Red Guards on Tiananmen Square in Beijing. They were holding the "Little Red Book" containing quotations from Mao Zedong.
Simplified Chinese	红卫兵
Traditional Chinese	紅衛兵
Hanyu Pinyin	Hóngwèibīng
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Hóngwèibīng Wade–Giles Hung2-wei4-ping1 Yue: Cantonese Jyutping Hung4wai6bing1

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Variants Maoism–Third Worldism Mao-spontex Marxism–Leninism–Maoism Gonzalo Thought Prachanda Path
People Mao Zedong Faiz Ahmad Louis Althusser Samir Amin Bob Avakian Alain Badiou Mohan Baidya Afzal Bangash Charles Bettelheim Biplav Bo Xilai Chen Boda Chin Peng Pushpa Kamal Dahal Saroj Dutta Norm Gallagher Abimael Guzmán Harry Haywood Ted Hill George Jackson İbrahim Kaypakkaya Jiang Qing Kang Sheng Li Minqi Lin Biao Charu Majumdar Pierre Mulele Huey P. Newton Nie Yuanzi Qi Benyu Muppala Lakshmana Rao Narayan Sanyal Siraj Sikder Jose Maria Sison Wang Hongwen Yao Wenyuan Akram Yari Zhang Chunqiao
Theoretical works Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan (1927) On Contradiction (1937) On Practice (1937) On Guerrilla Warfare (1937) On Protracted War (1938) On the Ten Major Relationships (1956) On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People (1957) A Critique of Soviet Economics (1960) Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (1964) Historic Eight Documents (1965—1966) Bombard the Headquarters (1966) Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat (1983)
History Chinese Soviet Republic Jiangxi Soviet Long March Chinese Communist Revolution People's Republic of China 1949–1976 1976–1989 1989–2002 2002–present Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries Korean War Sino-Soviet split Great Leap Forward Black Power movement Cultural Revolution 16 May Notification Red August January Storm Down to the Countryside Movement New Communist movement Cambodian Civil War Naxalite–Maoist insurgency Naxalbari uprising New People's Army rebellion Sino-Albanian split Maoist insurgency in Turkey Death and funeral of Mao Cambodian–Vietnamese War Two Whatevers Internal conflict in Peru Nepalese Civil War Chongqing model
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Related topics Anarchism in China Big-character poster Feudal fascism Hoxhaism Guevarism Juche Left communism in China Mao's cult of personality Nanjie National Democracy Movement Naxalite Nazi-Maoism New Left Chinese Japanese Red Guards Red Star Over China Socialist ideology of the Kuomintang Thought reform in China
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The Red Guards (Chinese: 红卫兵; pinyin: hóng wèibīng) were a mass, student-led, paramilitary social movement mobilized by Chairman Mao Zedong in 1966 until their abolition in 1968, during the first phase of the Cultural Revolution, which he had instituted.^[3]

According to a Red Guard leader, the movement's aims were as follows:

Chairman Mao has defined our future as an armed revolutionary youth organization .... So if Chairman Mao is our Red-Commander-in-Chief and we are his Red Guards, who can stop us? First we will make China Maoist from inside out and then we will help the working people of other countries make the world red ... and then the whole universe.^[4]

Despite meeting with resistance early on,^{[citation needed]} the Red Guards received personal support from Mao, and the movement rapidly grew. The movement in Beijing culminated during the "Red August" of 1966, which later spread to other areas in mainland China.^[5][6] Mao made use of the group as propaganda and to accomplish goals such as seizing power and destroying symbols of China's pre-communist past ("Four Olds"), including ancient artifacts and gravesites of notable Chinese figures. Moreover, the government was very permissive of the Red Guards, and even allowed the Red Guards to inflict bodily harm on people viewed as dissidents. The movement quickly grew out of control, frequently coming into conflict with authority and threatening public security until the government made efforts to rein the youths in, with even Mao himself finding the leftist students to have become too radical.^[7] The Red Guard groups also suffered from in-fighting as factions developed among them. By the end of 1968, the group as a formal movement had dissolved with many of the red guards sent to rural areas and country side due to the Down to the Countryside Movement.