Displacing red childhood : representation of childhood during Mao's era in Little Red Flowers

In 1966, with the support of Chinese youths, Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a revolution unprecedented in Chinese history. By mobilizing large population of youths throughout the country, Mao Zedong turned students from universities and secondary schools, as well as primary school pupils, into irrational revolutionary rebels. Labeled "Red Guards," these young rebels envisioned themselves as "revolutionary successors" and "revolutionary rebels" dedicated to "smash the old world," to eliminate old ideas, culture, customs and habits, with Mao's thought as their weapon. Tens of thousands of Red Guards were mobilized to expunge anything that represented the ideology of the exploiting bourgeois classes. They displayed propaganda wall posters, ransacked private properties, rampaged cities, renamed streets, attacked people in fashionable attire and haircuts, and humiliated foreign diplomats.