Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution, by Tania Branigan

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'Red Memory' by Tania Branigan

China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-67) deliberately uprooted all ethical and social values in a berserk war against the past waged at the whim of the country’s ruler, Mao Zedong. It was not only a campaign of mass public humiliation, the smashing of Buddhas and vandalization of buildings. At its peak, the Cultural Revolution eluded Mao’s control like a bad novel that began to write itself. The revolution he provoked began to eat itself. 

Mao’s war against his own people cost two million deaths, upended the lives of most Mainland Chinese and left psychological scars that have been passed down to generations unborn during the upheaval. 

Tania Branigan has composed a masterful, empathetic and vividly drawn account of the Cultural Revolution’s psychic damage. The Guardian’s China correspondent for seven years, Branigan derived her narrative by speaking with survivors and examining the public record when available. China’s current ruler, President Xi Jinping, himself a teenage victim of the events Branigan describes, has marginalized the Cultural Revolution and other Maoist outrages, realizing that to call-out the history of China’s Communist Party is to undermine its hold on the country.

The violent madness of the Cultural Revolution was not without method and its lodestone was Mao’s interpretation of Marxist-Leninist ideology. Deciding to create utopia in a hurry by levelling anything contrary to his teachings, Mao took the radical step of destroying the governing apparatus he had established by harnessing the reckless idealism of youth. He was their Big Brother, the benign red Sun glowing overhead, hovering over the anarchic chaos of hatred he unleashed. Most everyone denounced someone to save themselves and many of the denouncers were swept away by other denunciations. Perhaps the entire population was complicit? However, Branigan is refreshingly wary of armchair moralizing about “a time when you could not do the right thing because there was no right thing to do.”