September 13, 1966

Cultural Revolution

Reports circulate of clashes between Red Guards and party-backed groups

Foreign correspondents reconstructed the violence from Beijing wall posters — and noted that Red Guards reacted badly when foreigners stared long enough to translate them.

What was published on 13 September

On 13 September 1966 Le Monde published an AFP dispatch from Beijing, dated the 12th, reporting that newly posted wall notices described violent clashes between Red Guards and workers or peasants in numerous Chinese cities over the preceding two or three weeks.

The posters reportedly named Beijing, Jinan, Tianjin, Xi'an, Luoyang, Lanzhou, Shanghai and Wuhan. This was a bundle of reports from scattered places rather than one battle on one day.

The incidents described

The report described a Tianjin funeral for a former Communist committee secretary of the city's taxi drivers who, according to a placard in the procession, had been shot by young Red Guards; a banner called him a martyr of the revolution.

Travellers reported that a dispute at a Guangzhou glassworks escalated after Red Guards detained the director for defending a worker accused of a “reactionary” haircut; roughly 600 workers then attacked the students, and about 50 people were said to be injured.

The details and casualty figures were claims drawn from posters, travellers and partisan publications, not independently verified facts.

The TASS attribution remains unverified

The event as listed credits TASS, but no 13 September TASS dispatch has been located, and the strongest contemporaneous source found for that date is the AFP report in Le Monde. An archived Soviet newspaper carries a clearly labelled TASS Beijing dispatch dated 17 September about incidents between revolutionary students and party leaders. That is a failure to corroborate the attribution, not proof that no such dispatch was filed.

The two sides were also not simply the party against the Red Guards: Mao and the central Cultural Revolution leadership encouraged the Red Guards, while many of their targets were provincial or municipal officials.

Within a day of the report, the Chinese Communist Party issued directives seeking to restrict Red Guard activity in rural areas and keep students out of industrial, research and design workplaces.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 6 sources 2 audit passes, 1 issue open Date disputed

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

Date disputed. Sources disagree about when this happened.

What the sources leave uncertain

The exact title/date pairing is not independently verified. The strongest contemporaneous source found for September 13 is an AFP report published by Le Monde, not TASS.
An archived Soviet newspaper carries a clearly labeled TASS Beijing dispatch dated September 17 describing incidents between revolutionary students and party leaders. Le Monde documented continuing TASS reports on September 23–24, but neither establishes a September 13 TASS dispatch.
A September 16 Straits Times report says TASS had reported on September 15 that Red Guards demanded a speech from Mao; that was a different story, further suggesting that later chronologies may have conflated separate dispatches.
The alleged clashes were reported from posters, travelers and partisan publications. Details and casualty claims should be attributed rather than presented as independently established facts.