RED GUARD: The Political Biography of Dai Hsiao-ai

by Gordon & Ronald Montaperto Bennett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 5, 1970

If the Cultural Revolution seemed inchoate to Western observers with parochial biases, it apparently baffled some of the participants as well. On a University of Michigan grant the authors interviewed Dai, an ex-Red Guard of unspecified age now living in Hong Kong. In the spring of 1966 the Cultural Revolution's opening shots fractured the severe regimen of his Canton middle school: the principal denounced as rightists two teachers of bourgeois background. Dai joined the ensuing student offensive, which spread in successive waves to the school administration, the local Party group, Canton administrators and regional Party bureaucrats, and finally to clashes with the army and conservative forces opposing Dai's Red Flag faction. By the spring of 1967 Canton was in virtual civil war. Dai says he became disillusioned as Chou En-lai gave the Red Flag only qualified support, Mao's directives were too vague, and ch'uan-lien (""travel for experience"") turned out a sightseeing venture to Peking for loutish Guards who fought for railway seats while Dai suffered from Northern food and hard sleeping mats. Back in his own village an old peasant and Party member administers the coup de grace by asserting that he is just as poor and landless as he was in 1949; then a family friend urges Dai to flee. . . . It is too pat to be wholly credible; the interviewers ventilate their anti-Maoist sentiments while Dai compounds sell-justifications and grumblings. But the book warrants attention for its first-hand detail on factional groupings and new institutions still largely unmapped in the Cultural Revolution literature. Despite its jaundiced, often trivialized subjectivity, it provides the sort of supplement needed for, e.g., Neale Hunter's more sophisticated kaleidoscope of groupings and motor forces in Shanghai Journal (1969).

Pub Date: Feb. 5, 1970

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1970

Categories: NONFICTION