The Red Guard worked to eliminate and destroy the Four Elders, foreign influence, enemies of the Party and the current societal structure, by persecuting those who were believed to perpetuate them. All vestiges of outdated customs, habits, culture and ideas had to be destroyed, because the movement represented "a triumph of youth over age, of the 'new' over the 'old.' To do this, the Red Guard destroyed thousands of art collections and library contents, and changed "reactionary" street signs. They persecuted members of the public who tried to stop them or refused to give up the Four Olds. Those with foreign connections, such as businessmen, missionaries, or those with Western education, were also persecuted to prevent backward or right-wing ideologies from spreading in the new Chinese society. Chinese intellectuals have also been hunted down for the same reason: preventing free thought. The movement's messages were "negative: against established authority, against the Party, against the army" and against the outdated structures of the older generation. To destroy the established order, the Red Guards attacked educational and political institutions hostile to Mao and the party, and caused general chaos in China. The Red Guard targeted teachers, education policies, and universities to change the core of education and the qualities it extolled. Members of the general public and even party officials themselves have been attacked for excluding bourgeois-leaning “capitalist truckers” from society. Mao hoped that in this chaos, a new communist China would emerge. The main cause of the tensions that led to their dissolution was that many members were attracted to the Red Guard by the possibility of a better life and more opportunities...... middle of paper ..... .014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3097988.Chiu-sam, Tsang. “The Red Guards and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” Comparative Education 3, no. 3 (June 1967): 195-205. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3097988.Fairbank, John King. The Great Chinese Revolution 1800-1985. New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1986. Heaslet, Juliana Pennington. “The Red Guards: instruments of destruction in the cultural revolution”. Asian Survey 12, no. 12 (December 1972): 1032-47. Accessed April 2, 2014. doi:10.2307/2643022. Lifton, Robert Jay. Revolutionary immortality. New York, NY: Norton and Company, 1976. Spence, Jonathan. The door to heavenly peace. New York, New York: Penguin Books, 1982.———. The search for a modern China. New York, NY: Norton & Company, 1990. Walder, Andrew G. The Beijing Red Guard Movement: Fractured Rebellion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.