China's Red Guards: what do they think now about what went on in the sixties?

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China's Red Guards: what do they think now about what went on in the sixties?

1JonathanLerner
Feb 21, 2022, 4:30 pm

I was a member of the radical leftist group the Weather Underground, in the U.S., in the sixties and seventies. I still have what people call progressive politics, but I have thought and written quite critically about the mayhem we caused, and tried to cause, back then. Which mayhem paled in comparison to the Red Guards' actions during the Cultural Revolution in China, when books and temples were destroyed, people with advanced professional training were sent to "re-education" hard labor in the countryside, and so on.

I'm just finishing Vikram Seth's From Heaven Lake, which describes a trip across China in the eighties. Seth laments the vestiges of the Red Guards' destruction he encounters, but he was there only two decades after it happened. So it set me wondering what the individuals who were active in that movement might now, 50 years after the fact, think of their youthful activities. And to what extent any of them have become openly critical of their pasts...and even if they are self-critical, whether it is possible for them to openly express their regrets given China's controlled culture.

All of this is to ask whether anyone knows of books that address this question?

Thanks in advance.

Jonathan

2lilithcat
Feb 21, 2022, 6:51 pm

I found this article in The Guardian, from a few years ago, about a blog written by a former Red Guard: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/07/mao-little-general-horror-cultural... Unfortunately, the blog itself is in Chinese.

3Shrike58
Feb 22, 2022, 7:48 am

China's New Red Guards might be a good start.