ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores a type of labor protest distinctive from the politicized activism of either rebels or conservatives. The Red Guard movement accounted for only a part of the mass activism of the Cultural Revolution — a rather brief part, as it turned out. China's Cultural Revolution (CR) looms as one of the most important, yet least understood, milestones of the twentieth century. Having built one of the most powerful systems of state domination the world had ever seen, Mao Zedong in 1966 then called upon the revolutionary masses of China to "bombard the headquarters" — that is, to attack the party-state apparatus itself. In responding to Mao's clarion call, Chinese citizens evidenced a capacity for political activism that startled even the most seasoned observers of Communist systems, reliant as they had been upon a totalitarian model that downplayed the influence of social forces.
