The Red Guards carried out the Cultural Revolution by

The Red Guards was a Chinese mass movement formed by young students mobilized by Mao Zedong to overthrow what he called the elitist and old elements of the society. In the framework of the Cultural Revolution, during 1966 and 1967 they carried out terrible excesses and the systematic destruction of Chinese heritage, public humiliation, and persecution of government officials and Confucian and Taoist intellectuals, since they were viewed as part of an old decaying elite.