The Hóng Wèibīng Movement and May 68 Student Protests
- EPOCH
- 10 hours ago
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Evgeniia Gromova | University of Padua
Choosing to watch B. Bertolucci's The Dreamers (2003), one expects to see a clip row of stereotypes about the French from the Italian director rather than to be immersed in the context of the Parisian interest in Chinese Cultural Revolution. The film shows youngsters of the new born Fifth Republic and postmodernity fighting with the old men of the Fourth Republic and modernity. Students depicted follow Maoist doctrine, quite popular among radicals in France in late 1960s. In the more timely motion picture, La Chinoise (1967) by J.L. Godard, the gap between Chinese revolutionary ideas and bourgeois reality of the echo chamber of young and educated French is shown even more clearly: characters hold lectures about China's role in geopolitics, collect Mao's books in their flat, and argue with other leftists. Both films illustrate the collision of European 'stormy sixties' actuality and French abstract reception of Maoism. While many idealistic young people fought, killed, and died in China, the echo of the Cultural Revolution affected Parisian youngsters. Hence, the situation was marked by an unexpected cosmopolitan circulation of revolutionary ideas, which made the connection of Red Guards in China and Red Students in France possible.
Let us begin with the French: in 1968, Paris witnessed huge student protests. Postwar France was experiencing steady economic growth, and a welfare society was flourishing within the industrial system. And yet, capitalism at that stage of social and economic development no longer met the expectations of the younger generation. As the rebels demanded the removal of the twilight veil of 'the society of the spectacle', Marxism reappeared on the historical stage, undergoing a qualitative renaissance in 1968.
French students were dissatisfied with many things: they were not attracted by factory jobs or meaningless labour (in this sense, they can be seen as the driving force of the post-industrial society of information and services). They were frustrated by the rising cost of education, yet delighted by reading Chinese and Soviet leftist literature, by the collapse of colonial systems (many were themselves immigrants from, for example, Algeria), and by the possibility of occupying the Sorbonne or disrupting classes — which they enthusiastically did.
The wave of student protests rose from within trade unions and socialist student organisations. On May 2, young men and women occupied university buildings in Paris, then moved toward the city centre. Soon, teachers and workers joined them. On May 6, the first barricades went up and the first clashes with the police began. Students hurled paving stones, and the carnival of protest was underway.
At the same time, radical youth mobilisation had already been unfolding in China for two years since 1966. Unlike French protests against governmental structures, the Chinese schoolchildren and student movement were deeply connected with the persona of Mao Zedong and those political structures which were under his control. Since Mao was known and read in Paris, and his ideas were circulating primarily in Paris universities' circles, the information about a nationwide campaign of so-called Red Guards' riots became part of Parisian intellectual discourse.
In the Sorbonne, one of the political action centres of May 68, cafeterias, sleeping quarters, and even nurseries worked around the clock, and political debates never ceased. By May 13, the strike had spread all over France, making it as nationwide as in China. Ironically, that very success of collaboration between proletariat and students (which followed the structure of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, using workers as the driving force) doomed the movement: the government managed to negotiate with the workers, promising higher wages and a shorter workweek. By that evening, most students had been detained.
Despite the failure, tuition fees were reduced, classes resumed in September, and the social shift was irreversible. Having uncovered the institutional correlation between University, Power, and Capital, the youth began to formulate ideas of Post-University, Post-Power, and Post-Capitalism. Criticising the existing order, they proposed new forms of socio-economic life — post-Fordism, the intellectual exploitation of the 'cognitive proletariat', and flexible economics.
Now, it is time to move to China, where from 1966 to 1976 the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of Mao Zedong was raging. In May 1966, within the Communist Party of China, a 'Cultural Revolution Group' was established. Its goal was to reclaim power from those who were leading the country down a capitalist or moderately socialist path. The dominant ideology was to become Maoism.
Mao understood well that he was supported by a minority within the Party, so he sought a force capable of forming an active opposition to the majority. He found it in youngsters: university and high school students. It is worth noting that while the French protest was spontaneous, the Chinese one was far more organised. Beginning in the summer of 1966, schools and universities in Beijing saw the emergence of the Hóng Wèibīng, or 'Red Guards'. Their active actions lasted for about two years. Mao called them little generals of the revolution.
In schools and universities, public trials were staged to denounce unwanted Party officials and professors. The Red Guards forced them to confess to imaginary crimes, humiliated, beat, and even killed them. They made them wear clown hats and paraded them through the streets. Students stormed Party offices and threw administrators out of their buildings. During this rampage, many temples and monasteries were burned, sections of the Great Wall were demolished, and countless artifacts and relics were destroyed or stolen.
Many schools and universities were shut down, and entrance exams to colleges were abolished. According to the Ministry of Security, in a single month in 1966, nearly two thousand people were killed in Beijing alone; property was confiscated from 33,000 families, and over 85,000 people were expelled from the city. This movement came to be known as the 'Red August'.
The Red Guards 'brought' the protest from the streets into the educational sphere. At first, they treated it almost as entertainment: renaming streets with revolutionary and anti-imperialist slogans, confiscating bourgeois perfumes and cosmetics, smashing aquariums and flowerpots. They even proposed to change the traffic light colours' meaning: to cross it on red, the revolutionary colour, instead of green. They hunted down girls with long hair and cut it short by force, demanded that portraits of Mao Zedong be hung in every home, and that everyone carry a red booklet of his quotations.
This fury was partly due to the fact that the Red Guard movement was created under the careful supervision of the army and followed its example. Military headquarters served as Guards' recruiting points and communication centres; they were supplied with free transportation, printing facilities, and other funds. Only those from peasant or proletarian backgrounds, as well as children of Party officials loyal to Mao, could become Red Guards. Each group of twenty people was supervised by a military officer. The number of students involved in the Cultural Revolution was colossal — reaching into the tens of millions.
The actions of the Red Guards were anarchic and criminal in nature yet met with no resistance from the organisers of the Cultural Revolution for a long time. By 1967, however, the situation turned against the young people. Perhaps Mao feared the consequences of their revolutionary zeal. Perhaps the reason lay in the lack of tangible results. In any case, chaos spread throughout China: too many still supported the old political course, and the Red Guards only intensified the tension. The student movement exhausted its political potential. With the usage of military forces, the ‘politically immature’ Red Guards were forced to disband. Some were arrested and sent to labour camps.
Opinions on the Red Guards remain divided. On the one hand, it was a democratic uprising against the old order in the name of progress. But a more critical view sees the Cultural Revolution as violence against law and politics. It is difficult to discern where the execution of Party directives ended, and the initiative of the Red Guards began. In any case, such a tool of the proletarian revolution can be considered both violent and ineffective. The students were deceived by the promises of change, that eternal catalyst of youthful enthusiasm.
The Red Guard movement paralysed the country politically and economically, allowing Mao to strike at the entire Party system and his opposition while remaining outwardly uninvolved in the chaos. Violent reforms led to the collapse of the old political order. Mao had dreamed of creating a new China without bureaucrats, strong officials, or authorities, but with a voice for all. Whether he succeeded is a question that deserves another article. But it is doubtless that the Hóng Wèibīng movement was not the production of the Revolution, but its very essence, and the driving force.
And what, then, makes Chinese and French students alike? Both groups of rebels sought to create a new economic order, acting, however, in a somewhat irrational and naïve way. The utopia, the carnivals of Red May and Red August, shared the same spirit of trying to blow the society of the spectacle up from the very inside.
Despite the failure of both movements, neither Paris nor Beijing ever returned to what they were before the 1960s. The new world, one that listens to its youth, and in which students define their own future, became a reality. Yet it must be admitted: the French, heirs to their own revolutionary tradition, could not afford the same cruelty as the Red Guards. The guillotine could not fall again in a world that had just outlived Hitler. Destroying co-citizens seemed to be impossible. Chinese students, though, became killers, radical anarchists, and the driving mechanism of a repressive machine. Probably, this case creates a good question about how a repressive and aggressive state turns radicals into its tools.
The romanticisation of Mao Zedong and the Red Guards in France sadly fit into the general atmosphere of idealism, but it had nothing in common with the bloody street violence unleashed by unpunished students upon ordinary people. French students smoked in university classrooms and made Nouvelle Vague films as revolutionary actions. Chinese students made Marx’s darkest prediction real by showing what might happen to an exploited society when the voices of the 'lower classes' and young people are ignored for too long.
Further Reading:
Guobin Yang, The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China (Columbia University Press, 2016).
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Bureau of Public Secrets, 2014).
Kristin Ross, May '68 and Its Afterlives (The University of Chicago Press, 2002).
Evgeniia Gromova is a Masters Student in the University of Padua, Italy, who is studying Economics, Cultural History, and Cinema. Her research interests lay within interdisciplinary fields of the history and philosophy of economic thought, semiotics of money in media, and socio-economical issues in cultural processes such as education.
