On a warm day in the early fall of 1966, a 17-year-old former high school student led a group of local Red Guards in a struggle session to publicly shame members of the "Five Black Categories (landlords, rich farmers, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, and right-wingers)" in a small town near Shanghai. The teenager, who came from an affluent landlord family, herded over a dozen "Five Blacks," who were ordered to stand in a row on a makeshift stage in the town center and wear signs showing their names and alleged crimes.
The Red Guard leader read out each person's crime against the revolutionary regime, demanded confessions, and encouraged the crowd to join the struggle. He chanted: "The revolution is just and the rebellion is justified!"This event was part of a student-led paramilitary movement that debuted the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
Many, including the generation born after the Cultural Revolution, view the chaos and destruction caused by Mao's Red Guards as a mere historical hiccup, rather than a formative series of events that would set a pattern for the future. Few draw parallels between what happened in China half a century ago and what could happen in an open society engulfed by an orthodoxy of group think, racial identity politics, and dichotomous social relations.
To start, this radical orthodoxy preys on impressionable and unsuspicious young minds, filling them with romanticized "revolutionary" ideas, such that many are willing to forego formal education for political ambitions.
Chinese Red Guards, mostly high school and middle school students, helped effectively shut down their schools by subjugating school principals and teachers in endless struggle sessions and substituting field trips with free train rides to Beijing to meet with Chairman Mao.
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