Red Guards (China) - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

• Allen Ginsberg refers to "Red Guards battling country workers in Nanking" in the first line of his poem "Returning North of Vortex," included in the collection The Fall of America: Poems of These States.
• In The Last Emperor, the Red Guard appeared near the end of the film humiliating the prison warden who treated the Emperor of China Puyi kindly.
• The film To Live has the Red Guards appearing in a few scenes, showing their various types of activity.
• Farewell My Concubine, the Red Guards humiliate Cheng Dieyi and Duan Xiaolou as they try to overthrow the old society.
• In the film The Blue Kite, Tei Tou's classmates are shown wearing the red scarves of the red guards, and the film ends with the red guards denouncing his stepfather.
• Jung Chang's autobiography Wild Swans describes the atrocities committed by the Red Guards.
• In Hong Kong, TVB and ATV often depicted the brutality of the Red Guards in films and television dramas. They are rarely portrayed in film and television programs produced in mainland China.
• The video game Command & Conquer: Generals misleadingly named the Chinese standard infantry unit the "Red Guard", that ensured the game's ban in China.
• The novel about the Cultural Revolution, Red Scarf Girl by Ji-Li Jiang, prominently features the Red Guards. The main character often wishes she could become one.
• In the book Son of the Revolution, the main character, Liang Heng, becomes a red guard at age 12, despite the years of persecution he and his family received from them.
• In the autobiography Gang of One, Fan Shen provides first hand accounts of his youth as a Red Guard.
• Li Cunxin makes repeated reference to the Red Guards in his autobiography, Mao's Last Dancer.
• In the book Red Flower of China, Zhai Zhenhua recounts her time as a Red Guard.
• Yang Rae recounts her time in the Red Guards and in the countryside in Spider Eaters.