Chinese Students Perform ‘Red Loyalty Dance’ Dressed as Mao’s Murderous Red Guards

Chinese high school students from the eastern province of Jiangxi dressed as the mass-murdering Red Guards of Communist Party founder Mao Zedong to perform a “Red Loyalty Dance” during a parade on Sunday.

In a display described by some as a "red loyalty dance" in honor of the opening of the National People's Congress' in Beijing, hundreds of students dressed in full military uniform marched through the streets of Shangrao on Sundayhttps://t.co/Su5t4DBgeG

— Radio Free Asia (@RadioFreeAsia) March 8, 2023

The appalling display of reverence for one of history’s worst death squads was part of a parade held in the city of Shangrao to commemorate the annual “Two Sessions” legislative meeting in Beijing, as reported by Radio Free Asia (RFA) on Tuesday. 

The dance of loyalty was accompanied by songs of praise for Comrade Lei Feng, a cobwebbed hero of the Communist takeover praised by Mao as the “model worker” and perfect soldier. The Chinese Communist Party has generated mountains of propaganda over the past half-century to valorize Lei, who supposedly died when a telephone pole fell on him in 1962, but might not have actually existed.

The Red Guards were a militant Communist student movement that dressed in paramilitary garb. They spent the late 1960s terrorizing and murdering Party members who did not display enough revolutionary fervor. 

The Red Guards claimed hundreds of thousands of victims, displaying particular venom towards teachers disliked by the student revolutionaries, before splitting into factions and turning against each other. Mao sent in the actual military to break the student militia up when it became an obstacle to his plans for industrialization. To put them in a modern context, the Red Guards were like a cross between Woke cultists and the Children of the Corn.

The Red Loyalty Dance also has a sordid history stretching back to Mao’s bloody Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. The dance is literally an act of religious worship for the spirit of Mao and all Chinese citizens were required to learn and perform it, including very young children.

The nadir of authoritarian mind control was reached when a reporter for a Party newspaper spotted a kindergartner with unusually fair hair performing the loyalty dance and singing about how she loved Mao more than her own parents. The girl, who became known as “Little Yellow Hair,” was pushed on the Chinese people as a paramount example of Communist loyalty. In later years, the photo became an embarrassment to the more “open” and globalist regime in Beijing.

According to RFA, some Shangrao city officials were uncomfortable with celebrating this particular chapter of Chinese Communist Party history. None of the participants or organizers of the parade were willing to answer RFA’s questions about the spectacle, Shangrao schools denied being involved with it, and a string of municipal employees mumbled that they had no idea who granted permission for the Red Loyalty Dance.

RFA was given an especially amusing response by a school official who tried to foist the call off on another bureaucrat before offering a half-baked theory for why a phalanx of modern high school students was marching around in death squad costumes:

An official who answered the phone at the Xinzhou district education and sports bureau said they didn’t know which schools had taken part in the event, adding that some of the schools in the district are administered by the city education bureau.

“This wasn’t organized by us … there are district-run schools and city-run schools, and I don’t know which schools you are referring to,” the official said.

“Learning from Lei Feng is normal … it’s quite normal for schools to organize activities that promote it,” the official said. “Maybe copying the clothes worn by Lei Feng is part of red education, but it’s not formalistic.”

Modern China has a restless relationship with the horror of the Cultural Revolution, and the Chinese Communist Party spends a good deal of effort on trimming and pruning its official history. The Party continues to venerate Mao, and current dictator Xi Jinping strives to be seen as a leader second only to the founder in Chinese Communist mythology, but frank discussion of Mao’s gruesome excesses is heavily discouraged. The adults of Shangrao might well have been confused to see students marching around in the garb of the Red Guards, who they are usually instructed not to remember.