Red Guards (simplified Chinese: 红卫兵; traditional Chinese: 紅衛兵; pinyin: Hóng Wèibīng) were a mass, student-led paramilitary social movement mobilized by Chairman Mao Zedong in 1966 until their abolishment in 1968, during the first phase of the Cultural Revolution, which he had instituted. According to a Red Guard leader, the movement's aims were as follows:

Chairman Mao has defined our future as an armed revolutionary youth organization.... So if Chairman Mao is our Red-Commander-in-Chief and we are his Red Guards, who can stop us? First we will make China Maoist from inside out and then we will help the working people of other countries make the world red...and then the whole universe.

Despite being met with resistance early on, the Red Guards received personal support from Mao, and the movement rapidly grew. The movement in Beijing culminated during the "Red August" of 1966, which later spread to other areas in mainland China. Mao made use of the group as propaganda and to accomplish goals such as seizing power and destroying symbols of China's pre-communist past ("Four Olds"), including ancient artifacts and gravesites of notable Chinese figures. Moreover, the government was very permissive of the Red Guards, and even allowed the Red Guards to inflict bodily harm on people viewed as dissidents. The movement quickly grew out of control, frequently coming into conflict with authority and threatening public security until the government made efforts to rein the youths in, with even Mao himself finding the leftist students to have become too radical. The Red Guard groups also suffered from in-fighting as factions developed among them. By the end of 1968, the group as a formal movement had dissolved.