Beijing Buzz Article

Beijing Buzz

Rising of the Red Guards

10/12/66

BEIJING-Today at Tiananmen Square millions of Chinese students gathered around to answer Chairman Mao’s call for Red Guards. The square is so tightly packed that there is no room for anybody much to move around. A lot of the students are waving their Little Red Book, singing Mao’s song, or crying. These students have waited for a few days now to see Chairman Mao. Mao had ordered the schools to be closed so that he can bring these kids together. Mao also said that the “Red Guards” can travel free and make revolutionary ties with the other comrades.

Mao told the Red Guards to capture and torture anybody who is a bourgeois, rightist, in the black class, or even being a capitalist. He believed that in order to have a good Communist country, that country has to have nobody against it. SO that’s why Mao wanted to get rid of those people.  “I love this moment. Standing with the other Red Guards waiting for Chairman Mao to come and greet us,” said Yuan-Shing, one of the Red Guards told me. He also told me that he participated in every movement that the Communist Party held. Yuan thinks it is improtant for every body to equal, that every can’t be rich or poor.

On the contrast my friend, Lee Long, who was accepted as a Red Guard, but instead he refuses. “The whole idea of ‘Red Guards’ is pathetic, what a waste of time for us; school should be first,” he explains. He is also an counter-revolutionist in which he believes a democracy is better. He loves democracy so much that he wants to join the Kuomintang group and help them.- Marvin Tao