What would people do if all the norms of society were broken? And how would you live with what you had done?
It’s these questions which make China’s Cultural Revolution so fascinating to outsiders, and also lie at the heart of a new book which is an early contender for book of the year on China.
A picture released by the Chinese official news agency shows a propaganda squad of Red Guards, high school and university students, brandishing the copies of Chairman Mao Zedong's "Little Red Book," staging a rally in September 1966 in Beijing's street to spread Mao's thought during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Photo: Xinhua / AFP
It was an era, roughly 1966 to 1975, when an erratic Mao ordered people to smash the “old China”, then stood back as Red Guards and the populace created egalitarian chaos beating and torturing people in his name. Families and friends denounced one another for being insufficiently Maoist and millions were killed.
Red Memory by Tania Branigan interviews both victims and perpetrators to ask why they did what they did and what they remember now. A correspondent for the Guardian from 2008 to 2015, she became aware of what she calls the silences around the Cultural Revolution. Her book of memory and forgetting unfolds as a series of people’s stories, each casting a different light on part of the Revolution.
There is Yu Xiangzhen, now in her late 50s, who precisely recounts her zeal in following Mao, her sudden freedom as a 13-year-old girl able to leave her family to take the free trains for Red Guards, of the righteous beatings she saw, the raids which led to executions and, finally, seeing a basketball court of the dying and dead. She was a good girl, concludes Branigan; a believer, a typical righteous teenager - but in the midst of revolution.
Mao Zedong (1893-1976) Photo: CHINE NOUVELLE / AFP
Harder to take are those with no remorse. Zhang Hongbing’s mother had become disillusioned with Mao. Worried someone else might denounce them, the family reports her to the Party knowing she will be shot. Zhang takes Branigan to her grave where he breaks into loud staged sobs while blaming his dead mother for failing to teach him independence of thought. Branigan is not impressed.
She is especially good at capturing evasions and silences. The Party has admitted the Revolution was a mistake, but nobody has been charged for what they did. Song Binbin was a Red Guard, the daughter of a Party leader and one half of a famous photo showing her pinning a Red armband on Mao in front of a packed Tiananmen Square. She also may have beaten her school’s deputy principal to death. Song has issued an apology, of sorts. It is of the “mistakes may have happened” type. When Branigan finally confronts Song and her friends about what precisely they did; they are evasive, skirting over the memory with generalities.
If it all sounds grim, it isn’t. Branigan has a surprising amount of whimsical encounters like the group of friends who had spent years exiled to rural villages to work among the peasants and now look back on it fondly. They get together in parks to sing, dance and reminisce.
The Cultural Revolution Today
Red Memory is not a history of the Cultural Revolution. There are good histories already like Yang Jisheng’s The World Turned Upside Down (2021). But Branigan does a fine job of outlining enough of the sprawling events to make it understandable, from Mao unleashing the Red Guards to Mao sending his young acolytes to labour in peasant villages.
Branigan lightly uses political philosophy to reveal what made the Revolution so unusual. It was not a movement of armies or political parties. Mao believed he was part tiger, part monkey - his authoritarian side struggled with the anarchist. His desire to destroy “old China” and install himself in people’s hearts as the Red Sun made it personal; it played out within families, schools, and workplaces. It unleashed paranoia; one year your views were correct, next you were the centre of suspicion.
Branigan brings this to life vividly; she has a journalist’s eye for detail, a psychologist’s interest in motivations.
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She ends with how the Revolution is still shaping Chinese politics, through Xi Jinping. His father, a leading light in the Party, was denounced and Xi was “sent down” to the countryside. His half-sister committed suicide.
What it has left him is a distaste for any upheaval, an instinct for political survival, a belief in the Party as the upholder of order, and a determination to be the one in charge.
Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution
Tania Branigan
Faber
