266 { China’s Quest
The assaults began in January 1967 with huge, sustained, and angry demon-
strations outside the Soviet embassy in northeast Beijing.^8 The minor incident
that triggered the siege was a scuffle involving Chinese students returning to
China from study in Eastern Europe who attempted to spread Mao Zedong
Thought during a brief stopover in Moscow. The Chinese students went to
Moscow’s Red Square, where they unfurled radical posters at the tombs of
Lenin and Stalin. When Soviet police demanded they stop their activity, which
the police said was illegal, a confrontation resulted, and several Chinese stu-
dents were injured. Soon after, demonstrations involving millions of Chinese
assembled outside the Soviet embassy compound in Beijing.
Over a period of three weeks, millions of angry Chinese surrounded the
Soviet compound. Truckloads of soldiers with bayonets fixed sometimes
joined the crowds. Demonstrators were urged to frenzy by angry exportations
by group leaders. Posters with vehement condemnations of Soviet leaders cov-
ered the walls of the compound. Effigies of Soviet leaders were burned. Entry
and egress to the compound was virtually impossible. Inside the compound,
Soviet personnel lived in fear. The street outside the Soviet compound was
renamed “Anti-revisionist Street” (fan xiu lu) and nearby restaurants previ-
ously popular with Russians posted signs “no dogs or Russians allowed”—a
reprise of a notorious sign “No dogs or Chinese allowed” believed (incor-
rectly) to have been posted at the entrance to the foreign park on Shanghai’s
waterfront in the nineteenth century. At one point, a large group of frenzied
demonstrators broke into the Soviet compound and set fire to a portion of
it. When Moscow ordered the withdrawal from China of spouses and chil-
dren of Soviet diplomats, those people were tormented and humiliated by
Red Guard crowds at the Beijing airport, forced to crawl on hands and knees
under posters of Chairman Mao and between ranks of angry and abusive
Red Guards. The Red Guard siege of the Soviet embassy was encouraged by
an editorial in Renmin ribao condemning Soviet leaders as “filthy revisionist
swine” whose “atrocities” against Chinese students in Moscow were akin to
the actions of Hitler, the tsar, and the Ku Klux Klan.
The assault on the Soviet mission paralleled the “January storm” in which
Red Guards in Beijing, Shanghai, and other key cities “seized power” from
the regular CCP power-holders in offices and factories. This was a critical mo-
ment in Mao’s effort to oust those perceived as disloyal to him. From Mao’s
perspective, the assaults on the Soviet and other foreign diplomatic missions
served the critical purpose of demonstrating to the Red Guard that even
those traditionally immune could now be toppled from power, that the revo-
lutionary forces loyal to Mao Zedong, especially the PLA, would support re-
bellion. The world was aflame with an irresistible tide of revolution of which
the Red Guard uprising was a part. That was the message.
Similar assaults followed against missions of other countries. Between
January and August 1967, eleven foreign missions were besieged and often