Hello and thank you for downloading Witness the History Program from the BBC World Service.

And today we're going back to China in 1966, when Chairman Mao declared it was time for

a cultural revolution, supported by millions of young people who joined what they called the Red Guards.

I'm Lucy Burns, and I've been speaking to one of them. Since our birth we received all the teaching that he was a great leader. We thought he was a god.

Saul Young was 20 when the Cultural Revolution started and devoted to Chairman Mao.

He liberated the whole country, all people.

He rescued the poor person.

I was totally poor my energy, even my life, into it to support whatever Mao asked me to do.

Mao had decided to mobilize the young people

as the driving force of a vast campaign to purify the

Communist Party. Mao called them his red guards. There was to be a new revolution, a cultural revolution, a revolution in people's

thinking. Its purpose was to root out all the old-fashioned ideas and habits which Mao believed could be used to block

progress towards communism.

Of course I join it, it's glorious to join.

Only the good class background can join this regard.

Good class of worker, passion, revolutionary people.

Back class means bourgeois or landlord, anti-revolution background.

The Red Guards weren't officially set up by Mao,

but by students in Beijing keen to prove their devotion to the Communist

Revolution.

But the movement soon spread across the whole country.

Students and school pupils started wearing red armbands to show their allegiance.

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