The Conclusive Scene: Mao and the Red Guards in July 1968

The paper is an analysis on the conclusive moment of the core sequence of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, through the commentary of a singular historical document that records the meeting between the Maoist group and the student leaders of the Beijing campuses, held on July 28th 1968. The hottest issue at stake was how to halt the grotesque and cruel “small civil war” in which student factions were wholeheartedly involved in the name of a “heroic” and in fact militaristic vision of politics. The meeting, held in a highly emotional atmosphere, marked the end of the key period of the Cultural Revolution, since it acknowledged that the degeneration of Red Guards into small paramilitary groups meant also the exhaustion of the political novelties that in mid 1966 had inaugurated the hopes of a political regeneration in China. Mao and the other participants vividly discussed both the causes of that decline and the problem of how not to annihilate the political tension created in the previous two years. An important part of the meeting was also devoted to debate the uncertain destinies of the universities and the educational policies. Given the importance of the meeting, an extremely accurate record was kept, and later diffused in the universities as a key political text. The unnamed author of the document, probably one of the Mao’s secretaries, shows a remarkable literary sensitivity and taste. He did not limit himself to record the content of the interventions, but also annotated the most personal intonations of the participants, sketching close portraits of each of the main actors of that subjective turbulence and of their mutual relationship, far more realistic than the current images prevailing in the sociological and historical research on those events.