Great leap forward at the traffic lights in China – archive

Peking, August 24
It will be red for go and green for stop on Peking streets if one group of the Red Guards – vanguard of China’s new “cultural revolution” ­– gets its way.

The Guards plastered posters on the city’s walls today which said that red was the colour of revolution and should be used as a signal for traffic to go forward. Observers said the posters did not appear to be authorised by the Government but to be a suggestion of an individual group of guards.

“Red Guards” today raided Peking homes, accusing their inhabitants of opposing the ideology of Mao Zedong, and the cultural revolution. Crowds cheered as the students smashed windows, overturned furniture, and tossed possessions which they considered luxurious or bourgeois into the street.

In some houses, the students merely shouted slogans and quotations from Mao’s writings, argued with the householders, and put up red flags and posters denouncing bourgeois customs. In others, they held up items like strings of pearls and Western-style clothes and shoes for the crowd to ridicule, before hurling the articles out of the houses.

Offenders paraded
Some offenders have been paraded along the streets by the “Red Guards” and foreign diplomatists reported having watched one man being marched along wearing a placard proclaiming : “I am against the revolution.”

The students put up a poster at the entrance to a park criticising young couples who sat in lonely places giggling and “doing things which burn the eyes.” The poster said that these activities and others such as sitting up late at night writing love letters must stop.

Other posters today declared that books which did not conform with Mao’s ideology should be burned. People still drawing interest from the State on their former property should repay to the State all but 1,000 yuan (about £150) of what they had in the bank.