Description:

“Red August” is the name given to the weeks in late summer 1966 when hundreds of thousands of private homes across China were raided, their contents seized, and their residents subjected to humiliation and violence. Red Guards hauled away private belongings by the truckload, refashioned occupied apartments into makeshift headquarters, and routinely harassed homeowners. The wave of violence was justified by scandalizing the private lives of the old elites and, by extension, calling into question the institutional structures that had sustained their privileged status under socialism. Although the raids subsided after only a few weeks, they left behind complex logistical and political challenges. This talk offers a long-term perspective on the mechanisms established to reunite former owners with their possessions. The focus is on the group that was both a primary victim of the house raids and among the first beneficiaries of restitution: the capitalists. For the Red Guards, the old bourgeoisie symbolized a failure of an incomplete revolution—a radical line that was never fully embraced by the party or state. The indeterminacy surrounding the issue of capitalists presents a rare case where the rectification of Cultural Revolution excesses can be traced, both institutionally and biographically, to the economic reforms of the post-Mao era.

Puck Engman is Assistant Professor at the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently working on a book that examines how the Chinese state defined and attempted to solve the problem of capitalists following the takeover of private enterprises and the integration of shareholders and managers in the socialist system. He is the co-editor of Victims, Perpetrators and the Role of Law in Maoist China: A Case-Study Approach (De Gruyter 2018, with Daniel Leese) and author of “What Right to Property when Rebellion is Justified? Revolution and Restitution in Shanghai” (in Justice after Mao: The Politics of Historical Truth in the People’s Republic of China, edited by Daniel Leese and Amanda Shuman, Cambridge University Press 2023).

This event is co-sponsored by the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and the Council on East Asian Studies. Open to the Yale community.