On 8 August, the Central Committee of the CCP issued the decision of starting the Great Cultural Revolution. Many young students under eighteen years of age who were educated in the thought of Chairman Mao were considered to be counter revolutionaries and were severely criticized. “At the very beginning of the Great Cultural Revolution, students struggled against one another for more than two months because the Regional Party Committee followed the policy of “discharging lots of arrows at the same time”. I remember I used to lead students to “destroy the four olds.” Therefore, the Party Branch at the Lhasa Middle School decided to select a few young teachers to join the Red Guards, working as leaders. It was a concern that the Tibetan students might get into trouble, for they didn’t know the right direction. Most of the students in my school were Tibetans. Therefore we formed our own Red Guard organizations. The Han teacher who later became a top revolutionary leader in Gyenlo told Melvyn Goldstein: In “August 1966 the Red Guards were everywhere in the whole country, and Lhasa didn’t want to be left behind. See Separate Articles: CULTURAL REVOLUTION IN TIBET įACTIONAL DIVISIONS IN TIBET DURING THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION ĪTTACK ON JOKHANG TEMPLE AND END OF THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION IN LHASA Forming of the Red Guards in Tibet One former Tibetan member of the Red Guards told the Washington Post, "At the time, I didn't really think about it because we were young. In this way the monasteries were made into barns and barracks.” The frugal, strong-saving, clothes-patching, shoe-mending Chinese saved each reusable brick. Brick by brick, timber by timber, the monasteries were taken down. "When the order went out, Smash the feudalistic nests of monks!," the writer Paul Theroux wrote, "the soldiers, Red Guards and assorted vandals made chalk marks all over the monasteries save these timbers, stack these beams, pike the bricks, and so forth. The first part of the book documents in considerable detail the escalation of inter-factional conflict in Lhasa, with violent battles being fought between the two factions by early 1967, and government offices and neighbourhoods in Lhasa controlled by one or the other faction. With the arrival of new Red Guards from inland China the campaign against established leaders within the Regional Party Committee intensified, with the radical revolutionary groups eventually combining to form the Gyenlo faction (the Revolutionary Rebels), while organisations supportive of the Regional Party Committee became Nyamdre (the Alliance). Ronald Schwartz wrote in China Perspectives, “As the Cultural Revolution began to unfold throughout China in 1966, the Party leadership in Tibet was uneasy about the prospect of unleashing Red Guards in Tibet. Mao sought to mobilize the masses to discover and attack what he called bourgeois and capitalist elements who had insinuated themselves into the party and, in his view, were trying to subvert the revolution.The first activists were young students called Red Guards, who began attacking their teachers and administrators, searching to uncover those who were following the capitalist road and had sneaked into the party. Unlike the standard Chinese Communist Party purges that took place entirely within the rarified air of the party itself, in the Cultural Revolution, the driving forces of the cleanup- Red Guards and revolutionary workers-were outside the party. In his book “On the Cultural Revolution in Tibet,”Melvyn Goldstein wrote: “In 1966, Mao unleashed the Cultural Revolution to eliminate his enemies and reshape relations within the party.
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