Return of the Red Guards?

In the spring of 1966, a small group of students attending the Tsinghua University Middle School named themselves “Chairman Mao’s Red Guards” after signing two big-character posters criticizing the controversial play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office.  The students interpreted the play as an allegory for Peng Dehuai’s criticism of Mao’s Great Leap Forward during the 1959 Lushan Conference, which lead Mao to purge Peng.  In June that year, the People’s Daily newspaper published a banner written by Beijing University’s Nie Yuanzi (and seven others) criticizing the school’s educational methods for harboring “intellectual elitism” and “the bourgeois.”  Afterwards, backing for Maoist Thought surged through all the large universities in Beijing with students, working independently, going on strike and paralyzing the university leadership. While Mao Zedong was not initially responsible for the creation of the Red Guards, he came to find their patriotic enthusiasm particularly useful in advancing his agenda, and in August 1966, a million “Red Guards” were brought to a rally organized by Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, in Tiananmen Square.  As the movement grew in number, they quickly spiraled out of control, destroying antiques, ancient texts, and Buddhist temples, and publicly humiliating teachers, monks, former landowners or others suspected of being “counter-revolutionary” or “capitalist roaders.” As a result of their rampage, thousands of people were killed outright, and many more committed suicide.

Almost fifty years later, we are again witnessing some nascent signs of the reemergence of this patriotic fanaticism among Chinese citizens, the “New Red Guards,” which the Chinese Communist Party are now calling upon to assist in aggressively advancing China’s economic interests, especially over oil and gas reserves in the South China Sea.  The most prominent dispute is with Japan over what China calls the Diayou Islands and what Japan calls the Senkaku Islands. The New Red Guards are motivated by centuries of humiliation by the Western powers and enthused by China’s recent climb to economic prominence.  Indeed, China appears to have outgrown Deng Xiaoping’s advice “keep cool-headed to observe, be composed to make reactions, stand firmly, hide our capabilities and bide our time, never try to take the lead” and is ready to step on to the international stage, using whatever means practical to drive its interests forward.

The New Red Guards are drawn from all segments of an increasingly patriotic society, including students, intellectuals, social-media activists, merchants, the Peoples Liberation Army, and even fishermen.  Though admittedly the New Red Guards are in their nascent stage, there are worrying parallels with the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution. Like their predecessors, the New Red Guards represent a small, increasingly vocal minority of the population which turns to violence when carrying out their message.  As before, while not intentionally created by the Party, the movement is largely driven and used by political forces determined to undermine the old thinking.  The timing of the movement is also similar.  In the early ’60s, Mao Zedong was at odds with the leadership of the Party, particularly with revisionists such as Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi, who favored Soviet-style modifications to communist economic policy.  Today, political forces are at battle in a once-in-a-decade leadership change to be finalized next month at the ruling Communist Party’s 18th congress.  Once again, the push forward of the reformers is battling the pullback of the leftist backers, nostalgic for the revolutionary era of Mao Zedong.  The stakes are high, and the candidates for the top decision-making body, the Politburo Standing Committee, are constantly changing.  The Maoists have lost an important spokesperson, the prominent mayor of Chongqing, Bo Xilai, following his wife’s conviction and his upcoming trial over the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood.  However, the selection of Liu Yunshan, the party’s propaganda minister, who has kept domestic media on a tight leash and sought to control China’s increasingly unruly Internet, may act to somewhat counter the loss of Bo.  On the reformist side, current prime minister, Wen Jiabao, is said to be fighting to keep his legacy intact, although one of the Party’s most outspoken political reformers, Wang Yang, party boss of southern Guangdong province, is rumored to soon be maneuvered off the Standing Committee ticket.  Behind the scenes, Jiang Zemin, China’s paramount leader from 1989 until  2002, is believed to wield considerable influence on the selection of the Standing Committee.  All of this heightened political infighting also took place during the formation of the Red Guards.

The Red Guards in the 1960s could mobilize angry crowds quickly by word of mouth – today’s angry mobs can be thrown together more quickly, and coordinated in provinces and cities through the use of smartphones and computers using social networking sites such as Weibo and Youkou. The Red Guards destroyed property associated with the bourgeois, while the New Red Guards are focused on Japanese property — recent protests included the burning of a Panasonic factory in Qingdao, looting of a Toyota dealership and Japanese restaurants, fishermen in massive flotillas challenging fishing rights in disputed waters and the burning of Japanese-branded cars (being made in China by Chinese workers).  Fortunately for those car owners, a new Red Guard, celebrity philanthropist Chen Guangbiao, hosted an event on October 10,spending approximately five million renminbi of his own money to buy new domestic brand cars for 43 car owners who had their Japanese brand cars smashed and vandalized.

Some of the more nationalist newspapers in China are using editorials to influence public opinion and advance their patriotic cause, just as People’s Daily did in the days of the old Red Guard.  China Daily recently recycled its latest version of the “Diaoyu Islands are part of China” piece, while Hu Xijin, chief editor of the government-run Global Times, and one of the more vocal proponents of nationalism, recently chided Japan for its “diplomatic scurry” and urged Tokyo to “abandon the illusion that China would bend its position” on the Diaoyu/Senkaku issue.

The old Red Guards were successful in spreading their movement throughout the country, and Maoism soon thereafter spread beyond China’s borders.  The New Red Guards are also geographically dispersed, with protests in more than 50 cities over the Diayou/Senkaku dispute, and fisherman plying their trade and claiming the disputed waters of what the Philippine government call the Scarborough Shoal (known as Huangyan Island in China) – a little more than 100 miles from the Philippines and over 500 miles from China.  Chinese fishermen are also active in the Paracel and Spratley island chains off the shores of Vietnam, some of which is also claimed by Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei.  Half a million soldiers stand on the border with India, and in Myanmar, the public is increasingly worried about a more aggressive China, after seeing its ethnic insurgencies and narcotics trade supported by Chinese interests.  Backing up these border incursions, the Chinese navy last week joined the fishery administration and marine surveillance in running drills with 11 ships and eight aircrafts.  Chinese navy ships have continued to legally pass through Japanese waters and areas they have been warned not to by the Japanese government.

Despite these aggressive moves, there are encouraging signs of a more mature foreign policy emerging over the last week, as China and Japan have agreed to hold vice-ministerial talks to end the ongoing dispute over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands.  How far these talks will get is anyone’s guess, given recent visits to the Yasukuni Shrine by dozens of Japanese parliament members, the Japanese foreign ministry rushing out brochures asserting its sovereignty over the islands to its diplomats, and Japanese Foreign Minister Koichiro Gemba drawing a line in the sand with his comment “the important thing is that we cannot give over what we cannot give over.”

The willingness of the Party to incite and use patriotic feeling among the New Red Guards to advance their cause is a tactic borrowed from the Cultural Revolution.  The growth of nationalism and the encouragement of a New Red Guard in China is clearly doing more harm than good, restricting free trade among competing economies and potentially scaring off new foreign direct investment.  Japanese manufacturers are already rethinking China investment and production plans and other countries may follow.  While the New Red Guard cannot currently compare with the excesses of the Old Red Guard, China is not strengthening its cause by encouraging these forces to make headlines in the international media and is not garnishing worldwide sympathy for its nationalist cause.   Perhaps most importantly, though, China is heightening anxieties among neighboring nations and inadvertently stoking the nationalist fires of other countries.  In so doing, the Party is shooting itself in the foot as it weakens its ability to partner with these countries (and others not directly involved in border disputes) to secure the resources it needs for its continued and necessary growth.  This strategy of escalation will no doubt backfire as countries realize the extent the Party will go to in order to secure its own interest– to the detriment of its trade partners.  The new Party leadership should tread lightly, and reign in the forces of this recent upsurge in nationalism, for as Mao Zedong once said “it only takes a spark to start a prairie fire.”