During the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong called upon the country's young people to "make revolution." Called Mao's Red Guards, these youngsters' ages varied, but for the most part they were teenagers.
Within each class and school, various youths would band together in a Red Guard group that would take on a revolutionary-sounding name and would then carry out the objective of challenging people in authority. But the people in authority-especially schoolteachers, school principals, bureaucrats, and local leaders of the Communist Party- initially ignored the demands of the Red Guards that they reform their "reactionary thoughts" or eliminate their "feudal" habits.
The Red Guards initially had no real weapons and could only threaten. Since they were considered just misdirected children by those under attack, their initial assaults had little effect. But soon the frustrated Red Guards took to physically beating and publicly humiliating those who stubbornly refused to obey them. Since Mao had not clearly defined precisely what should be their objectives or methods, the Red Guards were free to believe that the ends justified extreme and often violent means. Moreover, many Red Guards took the opportunity to take revenge against authorities, such as teachers who had given them bad grades. Others (like those pictured above wearing masks to guard against the influenza virus while simultaneously concealing their identities) would harangue crowds on the benefits of Maoism and the evils of foreign influence.
Mao eventually called on the army to support the Red Guards in their effort to challenge "those in authority taking the capitalist road." This created even more confusion, as many of the Red Guard groups actually supported the people they were supposed to be attacking. But their revolutionary-sounding names and their pretenses at being "Red" (Communist) confused the army. Moreover, the army was divided within itself and did not particularly wish to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party authorities, the main supporters of the military in their respective areas of jurisdiction.
The Red Guards began to go on rampages throughout the country, breaking into people's houses and stealing or destroying their property, harassing people in their homes in the middle of the night, stopping girls with long hair and cutting it off on the spot, destroying the files of ministries and industrial enterprises, and clogging up the transportation system by their travels throughout the country to "make revolution:' Different Red Guard factions began to fight with one another, each claiming to be the most revolutionary.
Since the schools had been closed, the youth of China were not receiving any formal education during this period. Finally, in 1969, Mao called a halt to the excesses of the Red Guards. They were disbanded and sent home or out to the countryside to labor in the fields with the peasants. But the chaos set in motion during the Cultural Revolution did not come to a halt until the arrest of the Gang of Four, some 10 years after the Cultural Revolution had begun.
Children of school age during the "10 bad years," when schools were either closed or operating with a minimal program, received virtually no formal education beyond an elementary-school level. Although this meant that China's development of an educated elite in most fields came to a halt, nevertheless it resulted in well over a 90 percent basic literacy rate among the Chinese raised in that generation.