If only judging from the title, one might assume that this is yet another book on the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution. What makes The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China stand out is that it moves beyond the factionalism of the Red Guards and focuses on the continued transformation of the Red Guard generation and the changing political culture from the Maoist era to the present. Guobin Yang defines the Red Guard generation as “members of the age cohort born around 1949 who experienced the Red Guard movement,” including many who also experienced the sent-down movement (pp. 5–6). Yang delineates the long-term trajectory of this generation—from Red Guards and then sent-down youth in the 1960s and early 1970s to veterans of political activism in the 1980s and contributors to the Mao fever and zhiqing (sent-down youth) nostalgia in the 1990s.
Because of its broad scope, the book engages a few sets of theories and literatures. In terms of the Red Guards, unlike scholarship that pursues what divided factions, Yang uses performance theory to explain what drove factions to collective violence.Footnote 1 As for the sent-down youth, instead of tracing the origins or detailing the ordeals, Yang borrows Victor Turner's notion of the ritual process, and believes such experience was “a process of routinization” and desacralization (p. 16).Footnote 2 In the last chapter, Yang integrates two competing theories of collective memory to study the memories of the Red Guard generation in contemporary China.
Chapter 1 examines factional violence in Chongqing, and Yang uses the case study to argue more broadly that “rebel violence happened as a result of the conscious enactment of an imagined revolution,” in which violence was the ultimate manifestation of revolutionary performance, and death and martyrdom became attractive options in revolutionary competition (p. 47). Yang is interested in the causes of factional violence, something that all factions shared in common. This is the only chapter that has a regional focus, while the rest of the book looks at the Red Guard generation more broadly.
Chapter 2 steps back to examine the political culture of the 1950s and early 1960s that contributed to the generational imaginary of revolution. In particular, Yang analyzes this through memories of canonic Chinese Communist Party texts, films, music, songs, images, and literary works. The social world constructed through these cultural forms combined a sense of enchantment with a sense of danger.
Chapter 3 considers revolutionary theorizing as a parallel to revolutionary practice that led to violence. Though ironic, Yang argues that dissent was also “the result of factional competition to perform the revolution” (p. 70). Yang selects four groups of heterodox essays, highlighting the privileges of family origin, as well as a divide that surfaced in the Red Guard movement and still exists in the present.
Chapters 4 and 5 discuss the Red Guard generation's experience of the sent-down period from 1968 to 1979, as well as its impact on that generation. Yang makes a convincing argument that transformation through the sent-down movement “provided the social foundation for China's great reversal from the ideology of class struggle to the ideology of economic development … as well as for new forms of political activism” (p. 95). Chapter 4 emphasizes that the affirmation of the values of ordinary life and personal interest among sent-down youth negated prior ideological rhetoric of class struggle and people, and enabled grassroots demands for socioeconomic change. Chapter 5 shifts to the underground cultural movement during the sent-down period. Considering both the production and the reception sides, Yang argues that the movement was transgressive and self-cultivating, in the sense that it desacralized the revolutionary culture while producing a new self. The movement included letter writing, reading, note taking, singing, storytelling, radio listening, and “salon” gathering, and all of these underground activities would emerge aboveground in the 1980s.
Chapter 6 reviews four major episodes of political activism from 1976 to 1980, including the April Fifth Movement, the Democracy Wall Movement, protests by sent-down youth, and democratic elections on university campuses. Yang situates this wave of protests as “a radical reversal of the Red Guard movement and a precursor to the student protests in 1989,” and the Red Guard generation as the biographical linkage between 1966 and 1989 (pp. 142–43).
Chapter 7 traces shifts of memory narratives of the Cultural Revolution from de-Maoification in the 1980s to Mao fever and zhiqing nostalgia in the 1990s and the second red culture revival of the 2000s. Yang argues that the factional divisions of the Red Guard movement have continued to divide contemporary memories of the Cultural Revolution.
While historians of modern China have been successfully challenging the 1949 divide, more recent scholarship like The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China has moved further to challenge the 1976 divide by providing links between the Cultural Revolution and the post-Mao era. Yang's book strengthens this growing literature by showing that the sent-down experience of the Red Guard generation provided the foundation for socioeconomic changes and political activism in the reform period up to 1989.
As the book covers from Mao to now, it also sheds light on contemporary Chinese politics with crucial foresights. Two years before journalists and scholars compared Xi Jinping with Mao after the abolition of the two-term presidency in China, Yang had already explained Xi's Maoist practice and populist approach because of his experience as a member of the Red Guard generation. Such foresights confirm that the politics and experiences of the Cultural Revolution have a continued impact today.
