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    s tudents were wounded with stones, blades and explosives.  The more

    the blood flowed, the angrier each group became.

    One Red Guard faction came across a lone member of the rival

    gang on campus, dragged him to an empty dorm room, tied him up, and

    interrogated him, searching for the secrets to their adversaries' weak

    points.  The captured student at first refused to talk.  The interrogators

    beat him with a chair leg.  They snared another student and hung him

    from the ceiling of the room for days.  Yet another, they bludgeoned

    with a poker.  This time, they made a mistake.  The poker had a sharp

    projection at the end which punctured the imprisoned student's skin

    every time it struck.  When the questioning session was over, the

    student's legs were bleeding profusely.  He died a few hours later.

    Why had the tormentors used so much force?  Their captive was a

    traitor to the precepts of Chairman Mao.  The Chairman himself had

    said that revolution is not a dinner party.  Sometimes it was hard to

    remember that the person hanging from the rafters had sat three chairs

    away from you in homeroom since the two of you were little kids.

    The commitment of students on both sides to the words of Mao

    was passionate.  They spat phrases from the Great Leader like machine

    gun bullets,  ferocious in their devotion to "dialectic truth."  But in

    reality, the Maoist ideology--with its noble goal of liberating

    humanity--was being used by one Red Guard faction to seize power

    from another.  Idealism transformed the rapacity of the students into a

    sense of selfless zeal.

    The Cultural Revolution threw China into chaos.  Finally, the

    military took control of the country and restored order.  The Red Guard

    members were drafted as they came of age.  The teenagers who had

    fought each other went their separate ways.  Gao Yuan entered military

    service, then studied in Peking.  He met an American girl, moved to the

    U.S., and wrote a book about his experience--Born Red.  Not long after,

    others who had suffered through the Cultural Revolution would pen

    memoirs revealing even greater horrors.

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