The Chairman asked: “You say that the universities in Beijing have formed a grand united front and established the Red Guard Committee. That’s excellent! Then what about those three headquarters?”

The reply was: “They no longer exist; they have all been abolished.”

The Chairman said: “Oh? Why were they abolished? I simply don’t believe it—have they really been abolished already?”

(Excerpted from Comrade Zhou Enlai’s speech at the Guangzhou Symposium with Mass Organizations on April 18, 1967)