Interview with Guobin Yang

Guobin Yang is a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania best known for his research on the internet in China. But in his latest book, “The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China,’’ he turns back to examine the upheavals of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution and the imprint they left on a generation of Chinese who became radicals and Red Guards in the name of Mao Zedong. The book explores the cultural background to the violence of the Cultural Revolution, and how those experiences nurtured dissenting ideas and the cultural experimentation that burst into flower after Mao’s death in 1976. In an interview, Mr. Yang explained how that happened.

Ironically, the Cultural Revolution itself provided the conditions. It endorsed the use of so-called big character posters for mass criticism. And a Red Guard press flourished. Several thousand titles of Red Guard papers appeared around the country. These publications gave them channels for expression they couldn’t have dreamed of before.

Dissent was also a direct result of factional conflicts. Red Guard factionalism didn’t start with physical violence, but with debates — verbally or in their “small papers.” For example, Yu Luoke’s famous essay “On Family Origin” was written in 1966 in response to the notorious couplet that stated that if you came from a revolutionary family, then you must be a revolutionary, and if you came from a bourgeois family, then you were a counterrevolutionary.

Yu’s ideas were revolutionary and utterly subversive in that context. In essence, he was calling on people to rise up and fight for equality. These ideas struck a chord among people who had suffered discrimination or persecution because of their family background. Later, in the Democracy Wall movement in the late 1970s, these ideas began to be expressed in the language of human rights. I should add, though, that the ideas Yu challenged and the people who embodied those ideas are well and alive in China today.

Chinese of Yu Luoke’s age who were in Beijing then have said that reading his essays was an electrifying experience. What was it that he and other young dissenters were challenging?

They were challenging unequal political treatment on the basis of family background. They were also challenging the privileged new class of party elites and cadres.

Yu argued that this was a reactionary position that violated Mao’s teachings and Marxist theory. Others, especially Yang Xiguang in Hunan, challenged the political status quo. They believed that China’s Communist power elites had formed a new “red capitalist class” and called for its overthrow by means of revolutionary violence.

Were they were disillusioned with Mao, even if they dared not say so?

Not yet. In fact, they were emulating Mao. They wanted to become young revolutionary theorists like Mao. Yang Xiguang’s most influential essays copied Mao’s rhetorical style and language.

Disillusionment came later, with the beginning of the sent-down movement and then the Lin Biao incident in 1971. Lin Biao was minister of defense and Mao’s designated successor. When Lin suddenly died in a plane crash on Sept. 13, 1971, and was declared a counterrevolutionary, it struck doubt into millions of young people.

I’m fascinated by the role previously restricted books played in sowing the seeds of new thinking among the Red Guard generation. These were the translated ‘‘yellow cover’’ and ‘‘gray cover’’ books, originally meant to be read only by select officials so they could understand the thinking of ideological foes.

The “yellow cover” books were mainly works of post-Stalinist Russian literature such as Ilya Ehrenburg’s “The Thaw.” There were also some works of the American Beat Generation” and the British “angry young men” variety, such as Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” and Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye.” The “gray cover” books were works of social science, philosophy and political analysis such as “The Revolution Betrayed” by Leon Trotsky and “The New Class’’ by the Yugoslav dissident intellectual Milovan Djilas. These were translated and printed in the first few years of the 1960s as “internal publications.” They allowed officials to study ideas considered too dangerous for the public. Only top-ranking party cadres and intellectuals had access to them. The purpose was to prepare party cadres for the polemical war with the Soviet Union, which intensified in 1963 and ’64.

How did they spread? The internet of the ’60s and ’70s was the social networks among sent-down youth. The sent-down movement had scattered them around the country, but they were connected because they had been classmates, schoolmates or friends. They wrote letters to friends in different places.

A great opportunity for exchanging information was when they visited homes during holidays, especially during the Lunar New Year. They would bring information back home to share with one another. Then when they went to the villages, they would bring new information, and books and food, back to their villages or farms. They borrowed books from one another, copied books onto their notebooks and sometimes stole books from libraries that had been sealed during the Cultural Revolution.

You trace how the schools of artistic experimentation and intellectual dissent that emerged in China in the 1970s and flowered for a while after Mao’s death emerged from this undercurrent in the Cultural Revolution. The generation that started out as fervently loyal to Mao ended up 10 years later producing this outpouring of dissent.

It is the biggest irony in modern Chinese history. It was a gradual process of the profanation of what was once held as sacred. Red Guard factionalism resulted in nothing but violence. Many people felt betrayed, like puppets being used by the power elites. After they were sent down to villages from late 1967, disillusionment deepened. They also saw a China unknown to them before, very poor and harsh.

Many people used family connections or feigned illness to try to move back to cities. The more intellectually oriented ones thought and wrote about their experiences in poems, stories, letters and diaries. Throughout the ’70s, people like the now famous painter Xu Bing practiced their art after a day’s labor tilling the fields. Some entertained themselves by circulating hand-copied manuscripts of spy stories or erotic literature. Others took to singing romantic songs, especially Russian folk songs. The most apolitical kind of activity, like singing a love song, was an expression of political dissent, because it was a rejection of politics when politics was supposed to be “in command” of everything.

These were small things, small but happening more and more often, in more and more places. Together, they made up the undercurrent that eroded the ideology of the Cultural Revolution and primed Chinese society for radical economic and political change when opportunities arose.