FOR weeks, Peking-bound trains, buses and trucks have been crammed with groups of excited students and teachers. They are crowding into the city's university halls and football stadiums, into railroad-station waiting rooms and public squares "to exchange revolutionary experiences" and listen to lectures on the means of spreading Mao Tse-tung's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution across the land. Peking, in fact, has become a giant revolving revival meeting as tens of thousands have come to town, then, rearmed with Mao's think, have gone home, often accompanied by cadres of Peking students to ensure their continued doctrinal purity.
Thus in Peking was born the strangest phenomenon of China's current convulsions: the Red Guards. For the name, Mao reached back to another time of troubles—the civil strife of the '20s and '30s. Mao first used the Red Guard label in 1927 to designate the peasant irregulars who fought alongside his troops in such battles as the victorious assault on the walled city of Tingchow. Later, Red Guards accompanied Mao and his men on the Long March in the mid-1930s to the safety of the caves of Yenan.
Ghostly Organizer. The reincarnation of the Guards in their present form came in mid-June. A pilot group was organized at Tsinghua University's middle school in Peking. The organizer and initial commander of the Guards was Mao's longtime ghostwriter, Chen Pota, 62, and he loosed his youthful minions in public for the first time at an August 18 pep rally for the cultural revolution in Peking's Gate of Heavenly Peace. Standing on both sides of the reviewing platform, the Guards, mostly in their late teens and early 20s, wore belted military-type uniforms and red arm bands. At a prearranged signal, several hundred Guards rushed in front of the stand to greet Mao. Mao accepted an arm band and pinned it on, as did his newly designated No. 2 man, Defense Minister Lin Piao. Chanted the Guards: "Chair man Mao, we shall crush the old world and build a new one."
The accent has indeed been on crushing. Within a week of their introduction, the Guards were on the rampage in Peking, roughing up Chinese in Western dress, changing street signs to "revolutionary" names, and humiliating Franciscan nuns. The Guards aimed not only at rooting out all foreign influence in Mao's China but also at obliterating China's own preCommunist past. Nor was that all. "We are not only stirring up a revolutionary storm in China," they cried, "we shall spread it over the whole world." As for anyone who dared to oppose the new trend, the Guards pledged to "reform him, impose dictatorship on him, and fight him until our bayonets are stained with blood."
The blood often belonged to the Red Guards themselves. As the movement spread, so did the violence. Red Guard units from Peking fought with reluctant local party leaders and on several occasions sacked party headquarters. Fights broke out over which units should go to Peking.
Soviet Horror. Further fights erupted as units returned from Peking and started telling their unanointed comrades in the local Red Guard schools how things should be run. Squabbles also broke out between Red Guards and workers and peasants. For the first time in years, troops were brought into major cities to keep order.