Mao's Cultural Revolution: Red Guards and a Model for the Khmer Rouge

Between 1966 and 1969, teenagers with armbands beat their teachers to death in Chinese schoolyards, and roughly a million people died at the hands of their own countrymen. Mao had asked for it. Less than a decade later, the Khmer Rouge would put children in charge of adults for reasons that were not unrelated.

Time Period Covered: 1964 to 1969

What led to Mao's launching of a 'cultural revolution' in the People's Republic? What were the aims of this movement? Why did perhaps a million people die at the hands of their countrymen in less than four years?

In what could be considered a belated part two to the episode introducing Maoism and the Great Leap Forward, Lachlan revisits China and attempts to explain the Cultural Revolution. Officially launched in 1966, this period of chaos, an example of a cult of personality being used to destroy a system and replace it with a kind of perpetual revolution, would lead China into a near state of anarchy.

Radical young Maoists, organised into groups of Red Guards, terrorised those they considered insufficiently loyal to the ideological mandate set by Mao.

 
Sources

Philip Short Mao
Frank Dikotter The Cultural Revolution: A People's History
Andrew Walder China Under Mao
Richard Baum Lecture Series