Bian Zhongyun joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1941 and worked as an editor for People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the CCP’s Central Committee. Her service to the CCP continued for a quarter-century, until her final posting as deputy principal of a school in Beijing. Her tenure ended on August 5, 1966, when students—members of the “Red Guard”—dragged Bian onto a stage in shackles and beat her to death. 

Bian was only the first to die. Seven others at Bian’s school were also killed, and sources reported that the Red Guard murdered over 300 others in that same school district, in that same month. Thousands of other educators in Beijing’s universities and secondary schools were hunted down, subjected to “struggle sessions,” and beaten mercilessly.

At the Tiananmen Square rally on August 18, 1966, Song Binbin was praised by Mao Zedong
for her role in Bian Zhongyun’s murder as well as the Red Guard’s other atrocities.

What inspired China’s “Red Terror”?

The direct cause is often attributed to an editorial published in People’s Daily on June 1, 1966, that marked the beginning of the decade-long “Cultural Revolution.” The campaign not only targeted the “Five Black Categories”—the more traditionally Marxist class enemies such as landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, and the “right-wing”—but also “reactionary academics.” 

An editorial allowing for mass violence may have been the spark that ignited the pogroms, but the students’ underlying motivations were surprisingly simple: a mix of political zeal, peer pressure, youthful rebellion, idealism, and a disgust of the elitist attitudes found in China’s education system, headed by “bourgeois” intellectuals. The Red Guards themselves were of late grade-school age, effectively belonging to the very first generation to be born and raised in Communist China. Their education under the CCP predisposed them to the social acceptability of political violence, as well as ingrained within them a cult of personality around Mao Zedong. 

It should be noted that the students’ motivations for mass violence against their own educators, even fellow Communists like Bian Zhongyun, were effectively provided to them by circumstance and political leadership, not borne from personal grievances with the professoriate. The same can not be said for the revolutionary socialists and communists of our day, however. The revolutionaries of our day have grievances that are both personal and legitimate. 

Many have already commented on the phenomenon of the “over-credentialed, under-employed” emerging as the leaders of revolutions, but few have examined the unusual situation universities created for themselves today: the academy instilled in its students a revolutionary zeal only to later abandon it; courted minorities via “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) initiatives only to capitulate to anti-discrimination law; and saddled students with debt while persuading them that their credentials were worth the cost.

By the start of the 2020 academic year, the political scene on college and university campuses was awash in neo-Marxist identity politics. For incoming freshmen in high school or college still trying to find their place in a new community, the message was clear: join the new “culture war” or become a campus pariah. Not only was the message clear, but it was also reinforced through the selective enforcement of policies meant to curtail the COVID-19 pandemic. Gathering in large numbers was prohibited unless it was for “anti-racist” events, and this paradigm held for roughly two and a half years.

Students wearing masks attend a talk given by radical scholar Cornel West at George Mason University. April 28, 2022.

As the pandemic subsided, the discourse changed again in October 2023 as the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war opened up new dimensions of leftist activism from “racial liberation” to “Palestinian liberation,” and like the “anti-racist” movement in 2020, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement had new winds in its sails. This time, however, campus authorities resisted the revolutionary zeal instead of embracing it. For months, protesting students set up encampments, occupied and defaced buildings, and clashed with police and campus administrators.

A student protester stands before the defaced statue of President Washington amid the encampment at George Washington University, Washington DC. Photo taken by author, May 3, 2024.

I was at George Washington University’s encampment in May 2024 and made a public note of how many of the protesters seemed to feel betrayed by the professoriate. Their sentiment is perfectly understandable when one considers that all of their efforts were in concurrence with the values and in advancement of the left-wing causes impressed upon them as underclassmen. Those values were now exposed as hypocrisy, and those causes, too, as I argued in a February 2024 report, had been subtly abandoned by the professoriate because they were no longer seen as particularly advantageous for career advancement.

Nearing the end of 2024, not only had the university administrators and professors clearly turned their backs on Palestine, but also on their own activist-students, either recent graduates or those preparing to graduate. For years, those students were lauded, only to find themselves cast aside and burdened with mountains of debt many could never hope to repay. Nearing the end of its tenure, the Biden administration attempted to placate the financial dimension of this growing resentment by cancelling student debt, ultimately succeeding for some five million borrowers. The administration, however, failed to mitigate the broader sense of betrayal felt by many of its most ardent activists.

After Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, DEI and anti-racist initiatives were likewise abandoned as colleges and universities agreed to adhere to anti-discrimination law—at least on the surface—and a quiet reckoning and revision among those activists ensued. Already steeped in neo-Marxism, the activists returned to the earlier iterations of Marxism-Leninism and Maoist thought. They came to the conclusion that the “culture war” was a distraction from the real “class war” and that liberal professoriate, now clearly reigned in and insufficiently revolutionary, was effectively nothing more than mouthpieces of the billionaire elite.

To worsen perceptions of their former professors, the activists in classes ‘24 and ‘25 quickly learned, post-graduation, that their college credentials were not as useful in the workforce as they had been led to believe. Here, we arrive at the oft-cited problem of “over-credentialed, under-employed” revolutionary leaders, though today’s workforce outlook makes the issue even more severe.

Initially, very few took notice when, on November 30, 2022, a chat application was released to the public for free. In the beginning, and for roughly two years after the app’s launch, ChatGPT and other AI models were largely seen as harmless tools to get help with homework. Post-graduation and upon entry to the workforce, AI is viewed instead as an existential threat to the working class—specifically to those in the service industry, as many of these activists now are—and existential threats are most often met with extreme violence. Recall, for instance, the self-driving Waymo cars being set ablaze by protesters in Los Angeles in June 2025.

By February of 2026, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) hit 100,000 members, setting a record for the DSA, and is it really any wonder why? Karl Marx’s warning that “the production of too many useful things results in too many useless people” has never resonated quite as deeply with the left as it does today. When those leftists look back on their former academic institutions, and see how students known to be cheating are credentialed all the same by the professoriate, and how that professoriate has not been held to account for its hypocrisy, the left is right to be indignant. 

Many conservatives will, undoubtedly, protest and point to ongoing radicalism discovered in many schools, such as Pennsylvania’s flagship law school, continuing to promote “anti-racism.” Yet, I contend that the presence of radicalism alone does not mitigate the left’s resentment toward the liberal professoriate’s past or present wrongdoing. The distinction between “leftist” and “liberal” is of paramount importance here, as genuinely leftist professors remain a relative minority within the broader professoriate.

Conservatives might find this hard to believe, but the left does not necessarily view the typical conservative as an enemy. Leftists often extend to run-of-the-mill conservatives the benefit of the doubt, assuming that said conservatives are merely misinformed and/or possibly propagandized. Michael Parenti, whose work is practically required reading among the left, articulated much of the same throughout his writings, believing it ironic “that people of modest means sometimes become conservative out of a scarcity fear bred by the very capitalist system they support.”

Liberals, on the other hand—who, again, constitute the majority of the professoriate—are viewed by the left as wolves in sheep’s clothing, possessing the prerequisite “class consciousness” and yet selling out to the billionaire elites. Liberals serve the billionaire elites by absorbing and defusing revolutionary sentiment, acting as a sort of containment system. To quote Parenti again, from his book Black Shirts and Reds, “The function of left anti-communism” (i.e., liberals, not leftist) “is not to fight for revolution but to prevent one.”

Thus, the question obtains: is the ongoing radicalism that conservatives point to a genuine embrace of leftism or, instead, a frantic effort by the liberal professoriate to absolve themselves of a resentment they’ve unleashed? I lean toward the latter: the professoriate finds itself facing a momentum it can no longer control—one that now threatens them.

Compared to conservatives generally, who again are not necessarily viewed as the left’s enemy, the liberal professoriate has not only legitimate reasons to be hated by the left, as enumerated above, but the added problem of proximity to the left as well. Liberals and leftists very often live and work in the same blue bubbles, but only the latter seek the social conditions that would make raising a new “Red Guard” and beginning a new “Red Terror” acceptable. With political violence instigated and celebrated by the left with increased frequency—from the assassination of Brian Thompson and Charlie Kirk to the Palisades and Ontario warehouse fires—the liberal professoriate has every reason to fear. 

The Marxist-Leninists’ class enemies will be dealt with violently, no doubt, but true sadism will be reserved for the class traitors, among whom the liberal professoriate is certainly numbered. After all, Bian Zhongyun served the left faithfully for a quarter-century and was persecuted by young revolutionaries with illegitimate reasons and no personal grievances to speak of. The young revolutionaries of today have entirely legitimate reasons and numerous personal grievances that they speak of incessantly, and should social conditions ever allow for massive violence, the lengths they will go to will surely surpass those of Mao’s Red Guard. 

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