China: The Virtues of the Awful Convulsion

“In his new book, The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China,
Guobin Yang describes this movie as part of a propaganda barrage that
laid the foundation for the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966 and
lasted until 1976. A professor of communication and sociology at the
University of Pennsylvania, Yang writes how the Party’s control of
information and images created

a world of enchantment,
mesmerization, and danger, one that combined a sense of infinite
possibilities and hopes with a sense of danger and threat. It was this
world that gave reality, urgency, and potency to the political culture
of that historical era.

Yang is aware that
generations are difficult to define and he is careful with his words.
Roughly speaking, these people were born around the time of the
Communist takeover in 1949, and for them, joining the student units
known as Red Guards was central to their lives.”