Guobin Yang is a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania best known for his research on the internet in China. But in his latest book, “The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China,’’ he turns back to examine the upheavals of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution and the imprint they left on a generation of Chinese who became radicals and Red Guards in the name of Mao Zedong. The book explores the cultural background to the violence of the Cultural Revolution, and how those experiences nurtured dissenting ideas and the cultural experimentation that burst into flower after Mao’s death in 1976. In an interview, Mr. Yang explained how that happened.



The Cultural Revolution is often considered a time of fanaticism and blind obedience, but you write that undercurrents of dissent arose quite early in the Red Guard movement. How did that happen?

Ironically, the Cultural Revolution itself provided the conditions. It endorsed the use of so-called big character posters for mass criticism. And a Red Guard press flourished. Several thousand titles of Red Guard papers appeared around the country. These publications gave them channels for expression they couldn’t have dreamed of before.

Dissent was also a direct result of factional conflicts. Red Guard factionalism didn’t start with physical violence, but with debates — verbally or in their “small papers.” For example, Yu Luoke’s famous essay “On Family Origin” was written in 1966 in response to the notorious couplet that stated that if you came from a revolutionary family, then you must be a revolutionary, and if you came from a bourgeois family, then you were a counterrevolutionary.