Wearing a Red Guard armband himself, Mao used the rally to bless the youth movement he had unleashed to purge rivals and 'bourgeois' elements from Chinese society. The gatherings emboldened Red Guards nationwide to attack teachers, intellectuals, and officials, launching a decade of chaos, purges, and violence that convulsed China until Mao's death in 1976.
By August 1966, Mao Zedong had lost some control over the Communist Party apparatus and moved to reassert his authority by mobilizing China's youth directly. Beginning on August 18, he held the first of eight massive rallies in Tiananmen Square, though the movement's fervor was already building on the 16th as Red Guard groups converged on Beijing from across the country, many arriving on free train passes the state had authorized for the pilgrimage.
Estimates suggest roughly a million young people packed the square and surrounding avenues, waving copies of the 'Little Red Book' of Mao's quotations and chanting slogans. Mao's decision to don a Red Guard armband himself signaled unmistakable approval, a green light for students and teenagers to attack anyone deemed insufficiently revolutionary—teachers, professors, former landlords, and Communist Party officials themselves.
Within weeks, the movement spiraled into violence: public humiliation sessions, beatings, ransacked homes, and destroyed cultural artifacts. Schools shut down as students left classrooms to 'make revolution.' The Cultural Revolution that these rallies helped ignite would not fully subside until Mao's death a decade later, leaving an estimated death toll in the hundreds of thousands to millions and scarring an entire generation.
Key people: Mao Zedong