Then, the image of a Chinese diplomat who was injured in an embassy attack in Jakarta became a media sensation across the country. Six hundred thousand Red Guards protested in front of Indonesia’s embassy in Beijing. As ethnic Chinese refugees fleeing the violence in Indonesia arrived in China, they joined the Indonesian students and leftists already stranded there.27 Their stories of the horrors in their homeland became iconic during the Cultural Revolution, used as potent symbols of the dangers of right-wing violence and the need to heroically resist imperialism.
