Red Guard

One of the militant school and college students, wearing red armbands, who were the shock-troops of the Cultural Revolution in China from 1966 to 1969. After killing many party officials and plunging the country into chaos, the Red Guards were outlawed and suppressed by the Chinese leader Mao Zedong.

The term has often been applied generally to militias in communist states; the first units to be known as Red Guards were the armed workers who took part in the Russian Revolution of 1917. The Chinese Red Guards were formed by Mao to combat supposedly ‘revisionist’ elements within the Community Party who opposed him. Massive demonstrations were held in Beijing in 1966, and the numbers of Red Guards swelled to around 11million. Their activities became ever more zealous and violent, involving widespread persecution and murder of any person suspected of being ‘bourgeois’. In-fighting and growing economic disruption led Mao and the People's Liberation Army to suppress the Red Guards by the end of the 1960s.