Anyone who has ever done serious research on the early stages of the Cultural Revolution has probably tried to gain insights into the movement by reading the so-called Red Guard tabloids, newspapers edited by the manifold student organizations that came to appear all over China after mid-1966. And probably most researchers have experienced a certain amount of frustration over the inability to penetrate beneath the surface of the highly charged and aggressive discourse, with its intricate use of metaphors and local events, when trying to understand the evolving coalitions and factions. The most common explicatory model, propounded since the late 1970s, emphasized status inequalities and class interests as main reasons for splits within the Red Guard movement. Andrew Walder has started to question these social explanations nearly a decade ago with a series of path-breaking case studies. He now has combined them into a larger framework to explain why the Red Guards developed into irreconcilable factions that did not follow clear lines of social background. The book masterfully combines historical case studies with sociological methodology and fundamentally changes our understanding of Red Guard factionalism.

The study is exclusively focused on Beijing's universities and high schools and provides a social and political history of the Red Guard movement between June 1966 and July 1968. It is a great strength of the book that the author always describes his working hypotheses and the reasons which made him reformulate his own presumptions, shaped by classic theories of networks and social constituencies, in the first place. Walder proceeds by analysing the role played by work teams in different units and their influence in instigating factional conflict. He relies on a sample of 27 universities representing 76 per cent of Beijing's students and demonstrates the necessity of in-depth historical research to explain the highly different outcomes that depended on the strategies of the work teams and the interventions of high-level political leaders. As the lucid analysis demonstrates, political conditions were too contingent to advance predetermined interests throughout. Instead students from the same social background found themselves on different sides of the divide. An unresolved question remains the growing militancy of the work teams which only in a few cases tried to protect the pre-existing party structures. But this phenomenon is ultimately tied to the larger question of why so many veteran CCP politicians took active part in destroying the foundations of the party-state, which they had fought for in endless battles, instead of mounting collective resistance to Mao's “hare-brained” schemes.

Walder describes the various turns of the movement, the establishment of city-wide associations such as the three Red Guard headquarters, and summarizes his findings wherever possible in charts. This is very convenient to understand the situation in a particular school or to compare the constituencies of the cross-city Heaven and Earth factions, the formation of which is explained here for the first time in satisfactory detail. The book offers glimpses into the behaviour of important actors, and especially the characterizations of Nie Yuanzi and Kuai Dafu are of great interest to understand why the creation of a unified Red Guard organization in the capital ultimately failed (a classic is Kuai's first meeting with party economist Bo Yibo while reading big-character posters, whom he failed to recognize and referred to as “this old fat guy,” p. 71). But of equal interest is the portrayal of Red Guards such as Zhu Chengzhao, leader of the radical “East is Red” faction at Beijing Geology Institute, who dared to mount resistance against the interventions of the Central Cultural Revolution Committee around Mao's wife Jiang Qing and offered highly perceptive assessments of the situation. Zhu in January 1967 already characterized the Cultural Revolution as “not a mass movement, but mass manipulation” (p. 201). For Walder the Red Guard phase is best described as “extensive mass participation in a tumultuous episode of bureaucratic politics” (p. 259).

The general lessons to be drawn from this book can aptly be summarized by the author's argument that a “social interpretation of politics does not end with an accurate description of social structure” (p. 251). Political contexts are of enormous importance since repeated interactions changed the status and identities of Red Guard groups irrespective of their social background and kept them wary not to come out at the losing end once political power was re-established. It remains to be seen how far Walder's assumptions can be transferred to other parts of the country where political intervention by the central leadership was less frequent, and the recently published 60-volume set of Red Guard tabloids in the provinces might provide a viable starting point. The book is without doubt one of the greatest breakthroughs in research on the Cultural Revolution published during the past three decades and should be read by anyone interested in the history of mass movements and modern Chinese history in general.