Gao Yuan

Gao Yuan’s 1987 autobiography Born Red: A Chronicle of the Cultural Revolution, published during his time as a postgraduate at Stanford, describes his time as a middle school student during the most violent period of Mao Zedong’s movement to purge capitalist traditions from Chinese society. The son of a rural administrator and an accountant, Gao attended boarding school in a small town in northern China, where he and his fellow classmates became Red Guards, violently and crudely enforcing Mao’s aims, before splitting into factions. “Comrades, we cannot be naive about class struggle,” one teenager cries to rally the others in Gao’s recollection. “We must defend ourselves by force!”