Red Guards Movement and the Destroy the Four Olds Campaign

On May 25, 1966, Nie Yuanzi and six other Peking University staff members put up a big-character poster attacking the university's party leadership; Mao Zedong ordered it broadcast nationally on June 1 and praised it as the country's "first Marxist-Leninist big-character poster," turning campus criticism into a nationwide mobilizing signal. Four days later, on the night of May 29, a group of students at the Tsinghua University Middle School met at the ruins of the Old Summer Palace and adopted the name "Red Guards" — Mao Zedong's "red guards" — for a secret society dedicated to defending Mao Zedong Thought; within weeks similar groups had formed at schools across Beijing and then nationwide, drawing primarily on students from families classified as having "good" class backgrounds under the campaign's bloodline theory (血统论), which cast the children of landlords, rightists, and other stigmatized categories as suspect by birth.

On August 1, Mao wrote to the Tsinghua Middle School Red Guards endorsing their rebellious spirit as "just" (造反有理). A week later, on August 8, the Eleventh Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee adopted the "Decision Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" (the Sixteen Points), which explicitly called for destroying the "Four Olds" — old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits. Days before the plenum concluded, on July 28, Jiang Qing had already signaled the coming climate of impunity, telling a meeting: "We don't advocate hitting people, but it's no big deal if people get hit... if a good person beats a bad person, that serves them right; if a bad person beats a good person, the good person is honored."

On August 5, students at the Beijing Normal University Girls' Affiliated High School beat their vice principal, Bian Zhongyun, to death with nail-studded sticks and military belt buckles — the first educator known to have been killed by Red Guards in Beijing. She was fifty years old, a mother of four, and had worked at the school for seventeen years; the next day her husband spent his savings on a camera to photograph her injuries before the body was cremated.

Thirteen days later, on August 18, Mao appeared for the first time on the Tiananmen rostrum in a military uniform to review a rally of over a million Red Guards and students — the first of eight such receptions he would hold over the following three months, drawing more than eleven million young people to Beijing. Lin Biao told the crowd the party "firmly supported" their spirit of daring to rebel and called on them to "thoroughly smash the old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits of the exploiting classes." A Red Guard delegation led by Song Binbin, a student at the girls' school where Bian Zhongyun had just been killed, pinned a Red Guard armband on Mao; when he asked her name and she answered "Binbin" — meaning gentle and refined — he reportedly replied, "要武嘛" ("You should be martial").

In the weeks that followed — a period later remembered as "Red August" — Red Guards fanned out across Beijing and other cities, ransacking homes, destroying temples, monuments, and antiques, renaming streets and shops, and cutting the hair and clothing of anyone dressed in what they deemed a "bourgeois" style. Official statistics disclosed in a December 20, 1980 Beijing Daily (北京日报) report put the toll at 1,772 people beaten to death in the capital alone over roughly three weeks that August and September; a work report from a November 5, 1985 Beijing municipal verification conference gave a considerably higher figure of 10,275 deaths in the city — not counting suicides driven by persecution, such as Lao She's, described below — though it does not specify whether this count covers the same narrow window or a longer span of killings; nationwide, researchers such as Wang Youqin have since documented hundreds of named victims, while by October 1966 Red Guards were reported to have confiscated some 4.28 billion yuan in cash and bonds, 1.188 million taels of gold, and more than ten million antiques from private homes across the country.

Among the most prominent victims was the novelist Lao She, author of Rickshaw Boy and Teahouse. On August 23, Red Guards dragged him and roughly thirty other writers and cultural officials to the Confucius Temple in Beijing, forced them to kneel before a bonfire of opera costumes, and beat them for hours. The next evening, after saying goodbye to his granddaughter, Lao She walked to Taiping Lake and drowned himself; the Beijing Writers Association later issued a certificate stating that he had "cut himself off from the people." Mao continued receiving mass Red Guard rallies at Tiananmen through November 26, after which the movement increasingly turned from destruction toward organized cross-country "great networking" (大串联) travel and, within months, toward seizing power from local party committees.