ON THIS DAY · 18 AUGUST 1966

Red Guard rallies in Tiananmen Square

18 Aug 1966 — Mao, in army uniform, reviews about a million Red Guards at the first of eight rallies that bring some 12 million young people to Beijing by late November. A schoolgirl pins a Red Guard armband on his sleeve. The rallies told the young that the Chairman himself stood behind their rebellion.

The moment in context

Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, his movement to purge officials he called “revisionists” and to remake Chinese culture, by going around the Communist Party, the single ruling party, which he chaired. In November 1965 a Shanghai critic attacked a play by Beijing’s deputy mayor that Mao read as a veiled defence of his critics, and by May 1966 the capital’s leaders had been purged. A Central Cultural Revolution Group now directed the campaign: a small committee that answered to Mao, bypassed the Party’s normal leadership and included his wife Jiang Qing. On 25 May a lecturer’s poster at Peking University attacked its leaders, and Mao had it broadcast nationally. Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping sent work teams to contain the students, and Mao condemned them. His own poster of 5 August, “Bombard the Headquarters”, told the country that the enemy sat in the Party’s leadership. At the first great rally on 18 August he wore the armband of the Red Guards, student fighting groups much like a youth militia sworn to him. The highest authority in the land had licensed rebellion against every other authority.

From Cultural Revolution, chapter 9 of The People’s Republic under Mao, 1949–1976 (1967).

The place: Red Guard rallies in Tiananmen Square — map and full story →

The atlas that shows it

The People’s Republic under Mao, 1949–1976

12 CHAPTERS · AN INTERACTIVE SITUATION MAP