Red Guards

Red Guards were radical young activists mobilized during China's Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), primarily high school and university students who formed paramilitary groups to attack perceived enemies of Mao Zedong's revolutionary ideology.

They targeted intellectuals, teachers, and anyone associated with traditional culture or "bourgeois" values, destroying temples, books, and artifacts while publicly humiliating and sometimes killing victims.

The term now evokes fanatical political youth movements and ideological purges.