The Many Faces of Little Red Guards

Posted on September 20, 2012 by Minjie Chen

One strength of the Cotsen Library is Chinese-language children’s magazines published during the twentieth century. Prominent titles include early volumes of Er Tong Shi Jie (儿童世界, Children’s World) and Xiao Peng You (小朋友, Little Friend), both launched in Shanghai in 1922. Little Friend is arguably the longest-running children’s magazine in China, having remained active to this day despite two major suspensions–first during the Sino-Japanese War (1937-45) and later during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-76).

Another important group of magazines is Hong Xiao Bing (红小兵, Little Red Guard), which sheds light on Chinese children’s reading, learning, and socialization during a specific period of political chaos, as well as lends a nuanced view of Chinese history and culture that concern the youngest members of the society. These were reorganized through a recent cataloging project at Cotsen.

From “Young Pioneers” to “Little Red Guards”

The “Little Red Guards” was the name of a selective children’s organization sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party from December 1967 through October 1978. Prior to that, most school students from six to fourteen years old were members of the Young Pioneers, who wore trademark triangular, bright-red scarves around their neck. During the Cultural Revolution, children who allegedly failed to meet certain political criteria were denied membership, and eligible ones savored the great honor of being part of a new organization called the “Little Red Guards.” This organization should not be confused with the “Red Guards” (红卫兵), which consisted of older teens and college-age youth and played a far more aggressive role during the Cultural Revolution.

The Many Faces of Little Red Guards Magazines

Hong Xiao Bing Bao (红小兵报, Little Red Guard’s Paper) was first launched in Shanghai on July 20, 1967 as a children’s weekly. After the term “Little Red Guards” replaced “Young Pioneers” as a formal name by the end of 1967, a squadron of children’s magazines sprouted from all over China, all named after the revolutionary buzzword “little red guard.” When the Young Pioneers was restored in 1978, these “little red guard” magazines either ceased publication or adopted various new names.

Map of Little Red Guard magazines

Cotsen holds issues of Little Red Guard (hereafter LRG) magazines from eighteen provinces, in addition to one newspaper, pamphlets, and books with the popular term LRG in their titles, all dated from the late 1960s through the 1970s.

Each blue placemark represents one Chinese publisher that distributed a children’s magazine called LRG, or with a similar title, during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). The identical title shared by different publishers has caused confusion among researchers today, who have sometimes referred to it as a single children’s magazine.

Of the nineteen titles of LRG magazines held at Cotsen, the earliest two were released 1968-69 in Shanghai, including one issue of Shanghai LRG (上海红小兵, Jan. 1968) and more than 30 issues of LRG (Jun. 1, 1968-Dec. 25, 1969), but their relationship with each other is unclear. At least half of China’s provinces and municipalities–from Shanghai in the east to Gansu in the west, from Heilongjiang in the north to Guangdong in the south–produced their own LRG magazines, which varied in size, frequency, and content.

Cover images of LRG magazines, by place of publication (clockwise from upper left):
1. Shanghai, 1971, no. 21
2. Jiangsu, Feb. 1971, no. 4
3. Liaoning, 1974, no. 16
4. Ningxia, 1973, no. 2

A Publishing Miracle and Wealth of Information

The Cultural Revolution is widely known as a period of suffocating ideological control over print and media. Juvenile reading materials were no exception. Children growing up during the Cultural Revolution had few reading choices, when old popular titles were banned, and writers, illustrators, and editors were imprisoned or banished to labor camps in rural areas. Under the aegis of a politically correct title, these vibrant LRG magazines, issued as frequently as twice a month in some provinces, were short of a publishing miracle.

Written at the reading level of primary school students, LRG magazines typically include rhymes, songs, news and current affairs, short stories with illustrations, comic strips, and drawings by children. Many carry fine, off-set printed pictures of hand-colored woodblock prints, watercolor paintings, and oil paintings. Anecdotes suggest that some schools would subscribe to LRG and make it available in classrooms for supplementary reading. The magazine has been mentioned in people’s fond memories of their childhood reading.

By virtue of their quick publication cycles, LRG magazines capture the vicissitudes of political turmoil and provide a wealth of information about Chinese history, literacy education, propaganda and censorship, gender role, and political socialization of youth during the 1970s.

China’s daughters…and the evil queen

In 1961, MAO Zedong saw a photo of a rifle-carrying female militia member and was inspired to write a poem, “Militia Women,” in which he commended “China’s daughters” for “having high-aspiring minds / They love their battle uniforms, not feminine dresses.” Visual depictions of revolutionary, progressive females during the Cultural Revolution strived to meet Chairman Mao’s aesthetic standards for women and girls, wiping out as much difference between male and female body features as possible. A typical image of masculine-looking, strong Chinese women can be seen on the cover of a 1965 Little Friend issue.

Left: Cover image of Little Friend (1965, no.24). Shanghai, Dec. 25, 1965.

Right: A satirical illustration of JIANG Qing in “大寨人勇斗白骨精” (Dazhai people bravely fight the White-Bone Demon). LRG (1977, no. 4), unpaged. Hunan, Apr. 1, 1977.

After the death of MAO Zedong on September 9, 1976, his fourth and last wife, JIANG Qing, was made to shoulder much of the blame for the damage and devastation caused by the Cultural Revolution. LRG issues published after her downfall ridiculed Jiang in stories and cartoons. In one illustration (shown above) that accompanies spoken rhyming lyrics, the then sixty-three-year-old former First Lady is satirically portrayed with a slim waistline and a long dress, making her the most “fashion-conscious” female in all LRG publications.

Sugar-coating learning with political messages

Pinyin exercise in LRG (1975, no. 5). Shanghai, Mar. 10, 1975.
A rhyme that celebrates China’s new 1975 Constitution.
The last two lines mean “Chairman Mao made the new Constitution / The red regime is as stalwart as steel.”

The Cultural Revolution has been remembered as a period when intellectuals were censured, schooling was disrupted, and students were encouraged to challenge teachers and even physically assault them. LRG magazines, however, carry a surprising amount of writing that encourages literacy and learning, using revolutionary rhetoric and quotations from MAO Zedong to legitimize the call. Pinyin exercises, which drill the crucial Chinese literacy skill of pronouncing phonetics, spell out political slogans. A math problem is couched in the practical scenario of children dividing up liquid pesticides while working on a farm, as Mao had instructed students to learn through manual labor. A science essay explaining the physics of audio amplifiers begins with the importance of listening to news and political messages through radio broadcasts first thing in the morning.

A Mirror of Chaos

It must have been especially confusing for a child to grow up during the Cultural Revolution. Traditional values were turned upside down. Countless old authority and power figures were demoted to “untouchables” in the new political caste system. “Red Guard” factions attacked one another, each claiming to be Mao’s truest followers. LRG magazines reflect that chaos, sometimes with immediate responsiveness to contemporary events, and other times with a curious length of delay. As one of the few accessible and appealing children’s reading materials of the time, their content could further add to the sources of confusion for young readers.

On one hand, LRG magazines are full of folkloric stories befitting young readers’ level of cognitive and moral sophistication. Stories about Communist heroes and class struggles painted a binary world of black and white, good and evil. On the other hand, exactly who the “good guy” and the “bad guy” was could change drastically as a result of power struggles. Two of the political leaders that received about-face treatment in LRG were Marshal LIN Biao and China’s future No. 1 leader DENG Xiaoping, as shown by the following illustrations.

Cover image of LRG (1971, no. 18). Shanghai.

This LRG issue was published September 25, 1971, nearly two weeks after the death of Marshall Lin (in green military uniform on the right, standing close to Chairman Mao). According to the dominant account–among competing versions of the event–Lin had allegedly attempted to assassinate Mao but failed, before being killed in a plane crash on September 13, 1971. For some complicated reasons, the cover image did not reveal the colossal political crisis, but continued to portray the late Lin as Mao’s “closest comrade-in-arms,” as was officially stated in the Constitution of the Chinese Communist Party. Could the magazine editors be as ill-informed as the general public of Lin’s secret coup? Or were they “insiders” conniving to cover up the Party’s biggest embarrassment?

In LRG (1973, no. 11). Jilin, Nov. 1, 1973.

In this photo and rhyme published two years later, school children were condemning Lin as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing ” and head of the “anti-Party clique.”

A panel of comic strips in LRG (1976, no. 8). Guangdong, Aug. 1976.

Children perform and watch a play, the theme of which is to condemn the “stinky” DENG Xiaoping.

A news photo in LRG (1977, no. 9). Fujian, Aug. 1977.

Published one year later, this LRG issue shows Chinese Vice President DENG Xiaoping giving the closing speech at the eleventh National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 1977.

LRG magazines offer rich raw materials to help us imagine the intellectual life of a generation of Chinese children–now having approached middle age–growing up in a world of conflict and confusion. Cotsen holdings of these magazines can be most easily located by searching for titles in Chinese characters (“红小兵”) or pinyin Romanization (“hong xiao bing”).

Relevant Studies

Naftali, Orna. “Chinese childhood in conflict: children, gender, and violence in China of the “Cultural Revolution” period (1966–1976). Oriens Extremus 53 (2014): 86-110.

Cotsen Research Projects: Vienna Secessionist Book Illustration for Children

Posted on August 16, 2012 by Jeff Barton

Note: The Friends of the Princeton University Library offer short-term Library Research Grants to promote scholarly use of the research collections, which are awarded via a competitive application process. Researchers usually offer a short informal talk or presentation to library staff and others in the Princeton academic community near the end of their work on campus about the results of their research and how it fits into their broader research project or interests.

The text below was kindly provided by Megan Brandow-Faller, recipient of a 2012 Library Research Grant, following her July 2012 research project at Princeton in both the Cotsen Children’s Library and Marquand Art Library, following her July, 13, 2012 talk entitled: “An Artist in Every Child–A Child in Every Artist: Avant-Garde Frauenkunst and Kinderkunst in Vienna, 1897-1930.” (The images accompanying the text are adapted from select slides in her PowerPoint presentation.) Dr. Brandow-Faller is currently Assistant Professor of History at the City University of New York/Kingsborough. Her research focuses on women’s art institutions in early twentieth century Habsburg Central Europe.

Vienna Secessionist Book Illustration for Children

by Megan Brandow-Faller

The art of the child found fertile ground in Vienna 1900, cultivated by Franz Čižek’s renowned Jugendkunstkursen (Youth Art Classes), at important exhibitions of children’s art, and in the pages of Ver Sacrum and other periodicals. Rejecting the elaborate technological miniatures popular in the nineteenth century–toys intended to ‘dazzle’ but which would ultimately leave a child cold–artists associated with the Vienna Secession and Wiener Werkstätte (the applied arts commercial workshops co-founded by Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser in 1903) designed objects conceived ‘with the eyes of a child.’ Secessionist toys, illustrated books and graphics using simple shapes and bright colors were designed to awaken children’s creative impulses in a design language that children could understand.

Figure 4b: Kolomann Moser & Therese Trethahn, turned wooden toys, in Jan. 1906 issue of Kind and Kunst. (Cotsen Children's Library)

Figure 4b: Kolomann Moser & Therese Trethahn, turned wooden toys, in Jan. 1906 issue of Kind and Kunst. Leipzig: A. Koch, 1904-1909. (Cotsen 87516)

In designing these so-called ‘reform toys,’ Secessionists tapped two main sources for inspiration: the untutored drawing of children and traditional turned wooden peasant toys. The January 1906 issue of Alexander Koch’s progressive journal Kind and Kunst, for instance, devoted a richly-illustrated twenty-three page article to Wiener Werkstätte items (including finely-illustrated children’s books, games, silver rattles, and furniture suites) for children, including toy designs by Hoffmann, Moser, and Carl Otto Czeschka.

Kolo Moser’s crudely-shaped wooden figurines (illustrated in Figure 4b) reveal how Secessionists interpreted traditional toys in a highly-stylized manner verging on the grotesque.

Figure 1a: Minka Podhajska, cover illustration for Sept. 1902 issue of Ver Sacrum. (Marquand Library)

Figure 1a: Minka Podhajska, cover illustration for Sept. 1902 issue of Ver Sacrum. Wien: Verlag Gerlach & Schenk, 1898-1903. (Marquand N6494.W5 V47q)

Yet, it was actually the female students of Hoffmann, Moser, and Czeschka who produced some of the most important work in artistic toys and children’s book illustration. Contemporary critics found toy design and book illustration particularly appropriate fields for female craftswomen, given women’s ‘natural’ stake in childrearing (i.e. that women were believed to better understood children’s thought processes than men). Female craftswomen training at Austria’s progressive School of Applied Arts and Vienna’s Women’s Academy exploited such discursive linkages to the fullest.

Figure 1b: Fanny Harlfinger-Zakucka, stenciled image in Sept. 1902 Issue of Ver Sacrum. (Marquand Library)

Figure 1b: Fanny Harlfinger-Zakucka, stenciled image in Sept. 1902 Issue of Ver Sacrum.
(Marquand N6494.W5 V47q)

One popular method of graphic art and book illustration for children involved the use of painted stencils to produce clear, simple images. Stenciling had experienced a recent revival during the English and Scottish arts-and-crafts movement. In conjunction with the so-called Schablonieren Kurs (Stenciling Course) taught by Secessionist Adolf Böhm at the Women’s Academy, Böhm’s students published illustrated fairy tale and picture books and gained recognition through replication of such illustrations in the pages of Ver Sacrum, die Fläche and other periodicals. A special September 1902 issue of the Secessionist periodical Ver Sacrum featured the work of Böhm’s students. (Figures 1a & 1b) His students’ toy designs were regularly featured in the pages of The Studio.

Figures 2a & 2b: Fanny Harlfinger Zakucka, stenciled images from Schablanon Drücke, ca. 1903. (Cotsen Children's Library)

Figures 2a & 2b: Fanny Harlfinger Zakucka, stenciled images from Schablanon Drücke, ca. 1903.
(Cotsen 103414)

One such book of children’s stencils (housed in the Cotsen Collection) created by Women’s Academy classmates artist/designers Minka Podhajska and Fanny Harlfinger-Zakucka around 1903 employs a fresh and original graphic language using negative white space in lieu of the black borders that Čižek encouraged his students to bound their drawings.

Packing a strong expressive punch into a minimal number of marks expressed as abstract geometrical shapes, Harlfinger-Zakucka’s stenciled image of a reform-clothing-clad mother, sporting what looks to be Wiener-Werkstätte style textiles, guiding her toddler plays on negative and positive space to reveal the interconnected forms and hence psychological closeness of mother and child (Figure 2b). Her stencil of a children’s Jause (snacktime) employs similar techniques (Figure 2a). These stenciled images reveal a striking encounter with Japanese printmaking techniques in their unusual manipulation of spatial perspective and boldly ‘cropped’ nature.

Figures 3a & 3b: Minka Podhaska, stenciled images from Schablanon Drücke, ca. 1903. (Cotsen Children's Library)

Figures 3a & 3b: Minka Podhaska, stenciled images from Schablanon Drücke, ca. 1903.
(Cotsen 103414)

Likewise carving her images out of negative white space, Podhajska’s depiction of a dancing couple (Figure 3a) reveals her fascination with folk art, an important source of influence for the turned-wooden toys she and Harlfinger-Zakucka produced. Her stencil of a witch conjuring her brew employs a wonderfully expressive sinuous curve associated with the new art movement (Figure 3b), which also relates well to the idiosyncratic use of turning-lathe methods in her turned-wooden figurines. The tangible figure of the witch and cauldron is expressed in a curvilinear fashion. Yet it is the intangible aspects of the image–the suggestion of smoke, fire and more abstractly the witches’ incantations–lending it its fiery expressiveness. While both artists tapped into folk imagery and design idioms, their work freely reinvented and modernized traditional folk design into images that were designed to awaken children’s creativity through subtle narrative elements. Images stood alone to leave the rest of the story to children’s imagination.