Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution

"Yes, it’s not totally uncovered territory, and you could also point to important works by historians like Frank Dikötter. Tania Branigan was a journalist for The Guardian in China and what she realised is that there was this spectre she kept encountering, which was the unspoken legacy of the Cultural Revolution. It was obvious everyone knew, but no one wanted to dwell on it, or talk too much about it. It was a mass, collective experience, so most people she was encountering had either been through it themselves or their parents had been through it. Essentially, it has deformed Chinese society. The book goes right through to President Xi, whose father had been a big wheel in the Communist Party. He then fell from favour and was persecuted in the Cultural Revolution, as was Xi himself. Now he’s behaving with ever-increasing authoritarian tendencies, which is quite strange. What Tania Branigan does very elegantly and assuredly is tell the story in a very human way. We meet people, and then she goes back and tells the whole story. The violence is appalling—it’s just unbelievable. Schoolchildren were kicking their teachers to death. It’s about how everyone has buried that or reconfigured the story to tell it differently. We all felt that the book was very well written, very vivid, and pertinent to China which is, obviously, one of the big stories of our time. There are many ways to understand China, and this is one way to understand Chinese society today, if you’re looking at it from the outside with not a lot of knowledge. You come away learning a lot about it. At a broader level, again this book is about memory, trauma, and history. Look at what’s going on right now. How do you deal with evil behaviour that has happened in your midst? You may even be responsible for it. It might be within your family, or it’s your next-door neighbour."

"China, as a country, remains a mystery to many people around the globe. But there is a moment in Chinese modern history that is intriguing—this is the Cultural Revolution . Those of us who follow what’s going on in the world, and specifically in Asia, were astonished by this twentieth-century experiment in social political engineering, as the Chinese leadership tried to erase the consciousness of people and replace it with another set of ideas. It was unprecedented, perhaps, in its magnitude and the people it affected. Red Memory tackles this moment through the words and voices of the survivors of this era. We had no idea how it impacted normal people doing their jobs, going to the market, and educating their children. It is about the horrific moment of engineering society and changing its consciousness. What really intrigued me is that this is supposed to be a Cultural Revolution, but the author shows how deeply horrific it was at every level of society: at the level of the Communist political party, the schools, the farms, the markets, the youth clubs. The author captures the voices of those survivors. What is most interesting—and this relates to your quotation—is that the book allows us to understand contemporary China. This is a China that has moved from communitarian life to individualistic capitalism and consumerism in the 21st century. Branigan explains to us what had happened and how this Cultural Revolution, in its focus on community, the nation and the political party, came to a disaster, precipitated a famine, and was built on excessive violence and torture. Basically, the book explains to us how China moved from Mao to market, from community to individualism, and from famine—triggered by the Cultural Revolution—to excessive consumerism. The book is accessible, and sheds light on that dark moment in Chinese history that continues to influence the way China and Chinese society perceive themselves in the 21st century."

"It’s another beautifully written book and it also deals with issues of contested memories. It has a much tighter focus, temporally. It goes up to the present, but it is continually going back to what is remembered and forgotten about the period from 1966 to 1976, which is now talked about as the Cultural Revolution decade. In that sense, it’s a micro study – it zeroes in on this one moment. It makes sense to read these two books together. Not surprisingly, they’re being reviewed together occasionally (a good example is Yangyang Cheng’s excellent essay in a new venue called China Books Review that is edited by someone you’ve worked with a lot, FiveBooks.com alum Alec Ash), or a review of one will bring up the other. There are overlaps and intersections between them. Branigan’s book came out first in the UK and got a lot of review attention. It’s gotten less review attention in the United States, where it came out later. Not only has it been getting prize nominations in the UK, but in North America it won the prestigious Cundill History Prize. (The prize has been around for about a dozen years and is administered by McGill University in Montreal. Two books about China have won the prize before: Julia Lovell’s book on Maoism and Stephen Platt’s book on the Taipings). Meanwhile, Ian Johnson’s book got a lot of review attention in the United States. It is partly a function of his being based in the United States and the book coming out at the same time in both countries. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . But I’m struck that there’s a particular value of Branigan’s book within the UK for a very specific reason, which relates to Wild Swans . That’s a book that came out in 1991 and is about the suffering of the author’s family during the Cultural Revolution. It was a global bestseller, but it looms especially large in shaping the understanding of China within the UK where its author Jung Chang is based. People whose view of China was shaped by reading that family memoir have an idea that it’s possible to think of the Cultural Revolution as an event with a fairly simple dividing between people who were victims and people who were victimizers. Other memoirs about the Cultural Revolution have had that impact as well. Life and Death in Shanghai is another one that reinforces the idea that you can think about it as a time when there were people who committed violence and those who suffered violence. What Red Memory does very powerfully, as many specialist works on the Cultural Revolution have done before it, is to show that one of the deeply disturbing things about that decade was that people could begin on one side of the perpetrator-victim divide and end up on the other or flip back and forth between them. It’s a real mistake to try to divide up the people who suffered and the people who caused suffering because it was often members of the same family who were affected in different ways, and there were individuals who were victims and victimizers during different parts of their lives. Efforts to simplify this complicated event creates real problems for understanding China. We’re seeing official uses of a simplified version of the memory of the Cultural Revolution in officially promoted Xi Jinping biographies. They talk about his time in the countryside as a time that gave him a particular connection to ordinary Chinese. It’s another way of turning it into a simpler story than it is. I think it’s true. People who are reaching their seventies or eighties have lived through an incredible set of events, of extraordinary periods and changes in China during the course of their lifetimes. Younger people have also lived through incredible changes. They haven’t had a way to put it into a full perspective by the truncated version of any discussion of what happened during this decade. It really is a crucial decade to come to terms with. With the Cultural Revolution, there are a small number of narratives that you are allowed to talk about briefly and then move on. It’s not this thing that you can’t even mention, but rather, there’s a desire not to dwell on it. The one time I lived in China for an extended period was in 1986 through 1987. There would be foreign travelers I would meet, who would say in a hushed way, ‘My tour guide mentioned how his family had suffered during the Cultural Revolution.’ I’d say, ‘It’s not surprising that they mentioned it but didn’t go into the details. Tell me when somebody says their family did well during even part of the Cultural Revolution.’ The taboo is about talking about being swept up in it. It became okay to say, ‘That was a dark period. That was bad.’ However, to probe into the details and to get at the fact of how many people had something to feel ashamed about, something to be disturbed about – that’s where a richer perspective is needed, to give a sense of how the event affected people in many different ways, in many different places."