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Anyone who has ever done serious research on the early stages of the Cultural Revolution has probably tried to gain insights into the movement by reading the so-called Red Guard tabloids, newspapers edited by the manifold student organizations that came to appear all over China after mid-1966. And probably most researchers have experienced a certain amount of frustration over the inability to penetrate beneath the surface of the highly charged and aggressive discourse, with its intricate use of metaphors and local events, when trying to understand the evolving coalitions and factions. The most common explicatory model, propounded since the late 1970s, emphasized status inequalities and class interests as main reasons for splits within the Red Guard movement. Andrew Walder has started to question these social explanations nearly a decade ago with a series of path-breaking case studies. He now has combined them into a larger framework to explain why the Red Guards developed into irreconcilable factions that did not follow clear lines of social background. The book masterfully combines historical case studies with sociological methodology and fundamentally changes our understanding of Red Guard factionalism.
The study is exclusively focused on Beijing's universities and high schools and provides...