The Cultural Revolution …… examining the Red Guards & lots of slogans ……. on the wireless

Now I was just 16 when the Cultural Revolution was unleashed, and I have to confess it passed me by.  

I was aware of it from the news but took little interest.

Four years later and in the second year of a degree course I had embraced ideas of Revolution, bought countless copies of the books of Marx and Engels and adorned the walls with their pictures, along with those colourful Chinese posters of workers, peasants and soldiers striding to a better future.

Along the way I had my own “Little Red Book” full of the quotations of the Chinese leader.

None of them have survived the march into old age, although the Little Red Book was still around in the 1980s.

All of which means I shall be interested in the latest In Our Time programme on the Cultural Revolution which was first broadcast yesterday and is available.

"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Chairman Mao and the revolt he led within his own party from 1966, setting communists against each other, to renew the revolution that he feared had become too bourgeois and to remove his enemies and rivals. Universities closed and the students formed Red Guard factions to attack the 'four olds' - old ideas, culture, habits and customs - and they also turned on each other, with mass violence on the streets and hundreds of thousands of deaths. Over a billion copies of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book were printed to support his cult of personality, before Mao himself died in 1976 and the revolution came to an end.

With, Rana Mitter, Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China and Fellow of St Cross College, University of Oxford, Sun Peidong, Visiting Professor at the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po, Paris, and, Julia Lovell, Professor in Modern Chinese History and Literature at Birkbeck, University of London

Produced by Simon Tillotson and Julia Johnson".*

And what an excellent edition of In Our Time it was.

Picture; Book cover: "Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung," 1966 Edition, bilingual Chinese-English, published by the People's Republic of China Printing Office

*The Cultural Revolution In Our Time, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000q9b6