Less Is Mao

By Charles Elliott

RED GUARD: THE POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY OF DAI HSIAO-AI by Gordon A. Bennett and Ronald N. Montaperto. 267 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.

As an old revolutionary, Mao Tse-tung is obsessed with the knowledge that revolutionary sacrifice swiftly settles into slothful bureaucracy and the status quo, unless the people are regularly--and forcefully--stirred up. "Revolutions and children," he confided to Andre Malraux in 1965, "have to be trained if they are to be properly brought up ... Youth must be put to the test." Less than a year afterwards, a curious convulsion known as "the Cultural Revolution" was under way.

Viewed from the outside, that vast ideological spasm made little sense. Millions of students were sent mysteriously on the rampage, tormenting innocent people, destroying works of art, defying local Communist authorities. Dai Hsiao-ai was one of those students. His story is neither pleasant nor easy reading. Yet it succeeds far better than anything yet published in transforming that frightening mass of unhinged automatons into boys and girls with human faces. Even before the first ammoniac whiffs of disorder drifted down from Peking in February 1966, the students at Canton's elite Kaochung Middle School, Dai writes, had been taught to believe in dramatic solutions. Drenched in Maoist doctrine since birth, they had no use for original thought. "All we cared about was implementation and results." Getting results could just as easily mean dealing with counter-revolutionaries as with raising the pig-fat production quota. In fact, the "struggle" technique was the same for both--a sort of continuing pep rally, or ideological mass rape, during which all opposition is drowned in slogans, charges and insults.

At first, Dai and his fellow students "struggled"--with posters and speeches--against a few political malfeasants in the distant government. Then the Party Central Committee announced it was necessary to repudiate the bourgeois elements that had "sneaked into the party, the government, the army and all spheres of culture." All at once there were plenty of targets right there in school. The principal singled out two teachers for attack, and the students humiliated the victims to the point of suicide.

Then a flurry of editorials stressed that the party must be rid of "monsters and ghosts." More teachers were hauled up to account--and the principal himself. In August, the Cantonese city and provincial party apparatus came under attack--and collapsed. Looking higher and higher for leadership as each layer of authority was discredited, the students continued to ferret out monsters and argue over the meaning of directives emanating from Peking. Advice to "destroy the Four Olds" (old ideas, old culture, old customs, old habits) sent Dai and his friends roaming through Canton, smashing anything that looked faintly bourgeois and changing street names (one group got in a fist fight with another team over whether one street should be East Is Red Road or Pioneer Road). There were minor disappointments ("Old objects became difficult to find, since people began to destroy them themselves"). But on the whole, Dai admits, "we felt like adults, really for the first time."

Not for Long. Furnished with free train tickets, 9,000,000 students from all over China--Dai among them--were encouraged to pass through Peking in 1966. The city was a political shambles. Earlier directive charges had obliquely reflected phases of the power war between Mao and his Peking colleagues. Now came a nightmare of factionalism, Red Guards against Red Guards, with everyone still swearing passionate allegiance to Mao. The schisms had their funny side: Dai mentions one exclusive faction at Kaochung that consisted only of three boys "with a common interest in radio repair." Much ingenuity went into naming the groups, although the Swear to Die Defending Chairman Mao Rebellion Corps, Canton Workers United General Headquarters was criticized by Chou En-lai as "troublesome to pronounce."

Massive violence came next. In Canton, rival groups raided army bases for weapons and fought pitched battles. Dai took part in one where his Red Flag faction lost 33 dead to Doctrine Guards armed with "long-handled spears and throwing knives." Even in the middle of this bloody chaos, the students never ceased debating whether or not Mao's "latest instructions" were being obeyed. When the authorities finally moved to end the fighting in the fall of 1967, most of the Red Guards, significantly, were still willing to listen, trust and obey.

Dai Hsiao-ai was an exception. Convinced that he had been used, he disgustedly seized an opportunity to cross over to Hong Kong. "There was no way to interpret [Mao's] vague directives," he complains, "and implementing them proved impossible." It seems probable, though, that Mao did not care how the Dais of China interpreted his directives, so long as they broke their hearts trying. After all, as he had told Malraux. "The young are not Red by birth. They have not known revolution."

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