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Tania Branigan was the China correspondent for the British newspaper, The Guardian, from 2008 to 2015. She continues to work for the paper as its foreign editorial writer. In her new book, Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution, she writes about the legacy of the Cultural Revolution, often dated from 1966 to 1976, on Chinese society and politics today. Throughout the deeply reported book, Branigan introduces readers to a variety of ordinary Chinese people — both participants and victims — whose lives have been shaped by those years of profound upheaval. In a recent interview she talked to The Wire about the book’s key themes. The following is a lightly edited transcript of that conversation.

Q: You write in your book about having that nagging feeling as a foreign correspondent in China that there was an overarching story that you were not writing about. And how you came to the conclusion, particularly after you left China, that for you that story was the Cultural Revolution and how it’s remembered — and forgotten — in China. Can you explain how you alighted on this theme?

A: It was partly that sense that because everything in China was changing so fast, it was very difficult to take a step back from the immediate scramble of keeping up with the news, and to try and think about what the longer term issues were, and how they played out in China in people’s lives — and not just constantly be moving on to the next subject. 

The Cultural Revolution was something I was obviously aware of, and I knew how devastating it had been. But I had thought of it very much as being history, something that was in the past. And then I just happened to go for lunch with Bill Bishop [founder of newsletter Sinocism], and he mentioned a trip he had made with his wife a few years before, to try and find the body of her father, who had died in the Cultural Revolution: He’d been arrested by Red Guards and ended up running away and killing himself. The people in the village were sympathetic and remembered her father and so forth, but they were almost quite dismissive. When they were asked for help in finding his body they couldn’t understand it at all. They essentially said, ‘Well, how are we supposed to know which one of these is his?’ That was a moment that really made me realize that this was not just within living memory, but actually within pretty recent memory, and that it was something that people were still having to live with. 

Bill suggested I go to see a painter who had done a series of pictures about the Cultural Revolution. And so I interviewed some of the people that he had painted from the time, or their relatives. I really intended to leave it there, because I still thought, this is the past, and I’m a news writer. I’m supposed to be doing what’s contemporary. 

But from then on it seemed, with almost every story I did, there would be something that took me back to the Cultural Revolution. It was what made sense of all the other things that I was writing about. So if I was talking to a tycoon, and wanted to understand where they’d got their drive from, they would go back to their experiences of that era. Or if I was talking to an artist about their work, that ten year gap in the culture, followed by a sudden shock exposure to the outside world, was responsible so often for the way their work was the way it was. Or the way that family relationships had broken down… If you were trying to figure out what had gone on, it would turn out it all went back to the 1960s and what happened in the Cultural Revolution. 

And so it started to seem like it was this inescapable subject. And yet, in this odd way, it was not a subject that was being widely discussed, and certainly, of course, not in the official discourse.

Indeed, discussion of the Cultural Revolution inside China seems to be in an odd state of limbo: it’s not that you can’t talk about it, and it’s not that the Communist Party doesn’t refer to it. But discussion of the period is also not entirely free. 

Yes, it’s not completely taboo in the way that something like 1989 and the pro-democracy movement is taboo. But it is always something that’s been policed, and increasingly so over time. 

In the immediate aftermath, there was an outburst of scholarly literature. And you also had the memoirs and fiction about the time, mostly talking about how people had suffered and the very harrowing aspects of it. You also, of course, had the party’s official verdict that it was an error and a catastrophe. 

But even when that was being formulated, Deng Xiaoping said the point of it was to help people to unite and look ahead. It was never something that the Party wanted people to remember. It wasn’t a verdict given so that everybody could keep this memory alive and say, ‘Let’s never repeat this’. It was about saying, ‘Let’s draw a line, and then we can all move on.’ 

And so in the years that followed, the space gradually became more restricted. People did still find ways around it, and oddly, there’s still a kind of popular discussion. There’s a lot of people who won’t talk about it at all, but there are other people who will get to the subject fairly quickly and talk about it, often in quite fond or nostalgic ways. 

… how on earth do you sit down and talk about a time of such extremity, and violence and betrayal? 

But certainly from the official point of view, it’s something that’s only been allowed to exist very much in the shadows. The Party has quite liked to use it to send the message that we need tight political control, because it’s either that or turmoil. And I’m sure they probably believe that too: in that sense, it’s been quite a useful message. But they don’t want people to remember in great detail, and they certainly don’t want people to think or talk about the victims for a number of reasons. 

Partly this is because if you think about the early Red Guards, many of them came from elite families. There is a sense that it would be too awkward for some powerful figures. Also, there was just a feeling that it was so raw and painful that it could be very damaging to allow the subject to be discussed too freely, that it really had the potential to cause so much division and rancor — how on earth do you sit down and talk about a time of such extremity, and violence and betrayal? 

Of course under Xi, we’ve seen history take a much more prominent role. His glossing of history requires a much smoother path, so that it really becomes a story of how history over thousands of years leads inexorably to the triumph of the Communist Party, restoring China to the forefront of the international story. The twists and turns along that path are not something that the party wants to dwell upon. Document No. 9 talks about historical nihilism as being, for example, to suggest that there’s a break between the early years of party rule, ie, up to the end of the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s death and the later years. And so, I think if you want that smoothing out of the story, then you really have to smooth the Cultural Revolution out of the picture as much as possible.

Of all the terrible atrocities of the twentieth century, the Cultural Revolution is one of the hardest to grasp — the reasons for it and how it became so ferocious, the way in which it pitted Chinese people against each other. After all your research and reporting, did you come to a closer understanding of what was behind it?

It is incredibly hard to understand, because it’s so complex, it’s so many movements in one. And it’s so all encompassing, we’re looking at something that affects everybody from Mao’s heirs apparent, right down to farmers in the middle of nowhere. 

I think, essentially, you have to see it as being about Mao’s reassertion of power, after the failure of the Great Leap Forward: Mao seeing himself reined in, wanting to remove political opposition and looking as well to his legacy, both in terms of [Soviet leader Nikita] Khrushchev’s posthumous denunciation of [Joseph] Stalin, and also then seeing Khrushchev removed. This was his way of reclaiming power. 

But he also genuinely believed that communists had lost their way and been seduced by power; and that to achieve the true revolution that he’d envisaged, there had to be a reckoning. Because he then went out to the people to do that, which was partly a tactical necessity given his loss of authority within the party, it was bound to be hugely chaotic, messy, overwhelming, and hard to understand. 

There’s no doubt that people were motivated by extraordinary political zeal. People revered Mao, and were taught to regard him as being as close or closer than family members. He was the ultimate source of authority. Also, you’ve got people who were brought up in an era of struggle, where they are constantly being told that their country is under threat — as it was, in many ways. They were also brought up in an era of revolutionary zeal more generally, listening to parents who had stories about how they built the revolution. These children were raised with ideals of struggle and martyrdom, but had never really had any outlet — so when they’re told to go out and make the revolution happen, they really believe it, and they really are passionate about it. They believe it’s not just an admirable thing to do, but a necessity. 

In terms of why it becomes so punitive and awful: As I said, once you draw that many people in, you’ve got personal grudges, you’ve got even quite banal things like ambition — you remove the cadres just above you by turning on them and that’s potentially an opportunity to advance. And beyond that, modern China is a series of traumas piled upon each other. One of the interesting things psychotherapists have found when talking to people, is that a lot of them were traumatized before the Cultural Revolution came along. These were already people who had often been through horrendous experiences in terms of foreign aggression, with first the British and other foreign powers trying to carve China up, and then the Japanese occupation, then the Civil War. Interestingly, [prominent Chinese historian] Yang Jisheng suggests the Great Famine [a result of Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward policy in the late 1950s] was the original sin, because that’s where everybody learned that you had to be selfish to survive. He saw that as being the birthing point of the Cultural Revolution in terms of why it got so vicious and individualistic, and why people turned upon each other. 

So it’s the combination of all of those things: you’ve got Mao’s power grab, you’ve got the political, ideological environment of the time, and then you’ve got a really traumatized nation. You sew all those things together, and it’s not entirely surprising that it becomes as devastating as it does.

How did you go about reporting the stories that you tell in the book and, and finding people that were willing to share their experiences?

One other reason that I started writing about the Cultural Revolution was that more and more people suddenly started coming forward to talk about it in the time I was there. Around 2011, through to about 2013, I suddenly noticed a lot more people seemed to be emerging. One thing that unites everybody in the book is that they were choosing, at that point, to keep the memory of what had happened alive. Some of those were people who had always been determined to do that, and then other people had come to it more recently through a combination of hearing other people talk about it and through the internet, which, while obviously heavily censored, was less censored at that point. 

That was one of the things that I found was fascinating — that it felt as if it was surfacing. What interested me was less what had happened, and more why people were choosing to remember it now and how they remembered it. 

At one point, though, you talk about how there seemed to be a broad desire amongst the population not to talk about the Cultural Revolution, almost to protect the nation: it’s not just coming from the top. Could you expand on that? 

For a lot of people, it’s simply too painful, they cannot bring themselves to think about it at all. It’s very common that people won’t speak about it, even with family members who actually were there and witnessed what went on. There are other people who almost feel like it’s some sort of jinx or curse, that if you start to talk about it, it’s so dark that you just can’t go there. And then there are people who feel that there is so much pent up emotion, rage, anger, hatred, recrimination, and that if you unleash that, where does it end up? 

I suspect that that’s something that the leadership feels as well — that it’s dangerous for the nation. It’s not just about maintaining their power, it is also a concern about what happens if people start to say, ‘You murdered my father, you killed my husband.’ It’s amazing that people did manage to carry on in the same workplace with people who tormented them, or who persecuted their siblings to their deaths and so on. And that is a kind of achievement, even if it’s come at a great cost. 

Even when you speak to people who are broadly in agreement that the Cultural Revolution was a terrible thing, and that it is important that we talk about this terrible thing so that it doesn’t happen again — even between them, it turned out that there were these incredibly bitter arguments, and they struggled to address these issues in a calm way. These are people who should, in a sense, be having an intellectual discussion, and they seemed to still find that incredibly hard to do. And that really made me realize how extraordinarily difficult it would be to reopen the subject. 

One of the other themes of the book is questions about the nature of identity that the Cultural Revolution exposed. So many people found themselves doing things that, when they look back on it now, must make them feel like it was almost like an out of body experience.

Yes, it was really important to me that I didn’t want people to judge those I write about, because sometimes people are very swift to judge what others have done. I don’t know what I would have done had I been in that situation, or raised in that culture. Quite often, the people I spoke to didn’t know if they had done the right thing or not at the time; even when they drew back from violence, they were worried that they hadn’t been brave enough, or didn’t believe enough. It’s so hard to think ourselves into the atmosphere of the time, and into the way that people had been raised. A friend of mine once said to me, ‘Everybody thinks they would have been in the resistance in the Second World War’ — the reality, of course, is that most people weren’t. 

When people look at terrible times, it can be very easy to have a position of superiority, where you’re saying, ‘How could people do these horrendous things’; I wanted people to recognize how difficult and how confusing it was to live through that. When you speak to psychotherapists about the impact of that time, they talk about the constant uncertainty of never knowing what was supposed to be the right thing to do — Which way was up? Which way was down? What was going to be good for your survival? What might put your family in danger? It’s just impossible to imagine ourselves into that world, and therefore we need to approach it with humility.

One of the extraordinary stories in your book is that of a man called Zhang Hongbing, and the way that he turned against his mother. Could you talk about that passage?

Zhang denounced his mother when he was 17: He and his father went to the authorities to turn her in for criticizing Chairman Mao. And he knew full well that she would be executed as a result, as she was. His explanation now is that because of the ideology that he had been raised in, when she attacked Mao, he simply didn’t see her as his mother, but as a monster — and he knew he had to tackle her. 

What struck me speaking to him was how much his family had been through, due to the Cultural Revolution. His grandmother had been sent away, his 16-year old sister had died of meningitis just after going to see Mao at one of the rallies in Beijing, then his father was denounced. And then his mother was denounced and was held away from the home for a couple of years. 

… where people have come forward to talk about what they did, how much blame should we attach to them? And how much should we be condemning them rather than trying to understand them?

So you have a 17-year old child who must, I imagine, have been immensely traumatized, and confused. It’s hard enough for us to think about how you could do that — turn on your own parent. People did, but it was usually under pressure, it was pretty rare to do it independently. And then to imagine having to spend the rest of your life living with that guilt and attempting to atone for it. 

That really summarized a lot of what I was what I was trying to understand in this book, which is how much can you hold a 17-year old responsible for what they have done, particularly when they have done it because all the figures of authority around them had brought them up to believe that this is the correct path of action. And when they have also been through immense challenges and turbulence and pain in their life. This is one of the things that really divides people looking back at the Cultural Revolution: how much do we hold people accountable for what they did at that age? Clearly, it is terrible and unfair that many murderers, or people who hounded people to their deaths, have never been held accountable. But equally, especially where people have come forward to talk about what they did, how much blame should we attach to them? And how much should we be condemning them rather than trying to understand them?

Anyone outside China who knows about the Cultural Revolution probably thinks mostly of the first couple of years: the violence, the Red Guards rampaging through the country and so on. But of course, it went on until 1976. That latter period is characterized mainly by a lot of the urban youth being sent down to the countryside, with the young Xi Jinping among them. That period contains its own horrors, but it does seem that some also look back on it almost nostalgically. What do you think explains that?

In general, people are often nostalgic for their youth. And if that’s the only youth you had, then you probably try and take from it what you can. It’s clear that for a lot of people, it’s quite a bittersweet thing. Even the people I encountered who meet up purely to remember those times, are at the same time really frank about them, the fact that it was horrific and that their initial idealism was totally misplaced. So it’s a very odd thing where although they’re nostalgic about it, it’s a nostalgia which embraces the grimness. 

As I say in the book, it’s not unknown for people to pine for tougher times. I mean, if you think about people talking about the Blitz spirit, or if you think about something like the Waltons capturing the Depression era, there is a sense in which people find the lightness, in the dark times, and for the most part they remember the camaraderie and the kindness they sometimes found from villages, rather than remembering the horrors of desperately trying to scratch a living, when they had no experience of farming, or being attacked by local cadres, or something. 

Nostalgia is always very much to do with how you see the present. And so in an era where there was a huge gulf between rich and poor, and between the city and the countryside, and this sense of corruption, and so forth, the idea of a simpler life suddenly seemed quite appealing. 

So there has been this grassroots nostalgia, which then, of course, the Party has built upon, because that’s become such an important part of Xi Jinping’s story. It now promotes that as sending a message about how he is a man of the people, has worked hard, knows what it is to be poor. All of that is true: He probably does have an understanding of what life is like at the very bottom of the heap in a way that leaders in the U.S. or the U.K. don’t. There’s a truth in that, that makes it appealing. But also it’s about selling a story of purity, comradeship, all of those things.

Staying with Xi: a lot of comparisons are often drawn between him and Mao. What do you think he learned from the Cultural Revolution and that whole period? 

One of his big lessons, of course, is very un-Maoist, which is that he clearly sees turmoil and disorder as being dangerous and to be avoided at all costs. 

Beyond that, what’s extraordinary is that Xi’s father [Xi Zhongxun, a prominent revolutionary] and the other party elders set out after the Cultural Revolution to semi-institutionalize or at least collectivise the system to try and ensure that you could never have another strongman again. But the lesson that Xi seems to have taken from it is that you need to have the right person in power. And if you’re the person in power, you need to have absolute power, and not be hobbled by others around you messing things up. It seems a very odd lesson to take away: but I guess you can understand why someone who went through the experiences that he and his family went through would think that you want to be in charge and not be subject to other people’s whims. 

What do you feel are the broader lessons of the Cultural Revolution? Is this something that has a relevance and value to societies beyond China?

Yes, absolutely. And I’m really glad you asked about that. People in the West, especially, think of the Cultural Revolution as being young, left-wing people being zealous and vicious, as opposed to it being a political campaign orchestrated by Mao, which is a fundamental difference. The parallel that seemed very immediate and obvious to me was that of politicians very deliberately and calculatingly whipping up mass emotion and encouraging divisions. Adam Serwer has this very powerful phrase about [Donald] Trump — the cruelty is the point. Mao would say, ‘Who are our enemies, who are our friends?’ — then you look at Trump and the way that he whips up the crowd and uses hatred for political purposes and it’s quite hard not to see the parallel. 

In China, the censorship, the erasure, and the propaganda are so obvious, it’s kind of easy to miss the fact that we do quite a lot of that ourselves, in our own societies.

I was quite shocked, as I wrote, by that sense of a parallel, but also I always hoped that people didn’t see it as just being a story about how China is a strange place where this terrible thing happened. Obviously, the Cultural Revolution could only happen in that specific form, at that time and in that place. But I think the broader lesson for all of us is about how easy it is for us to be seduced by the worst aspects of human nature, how hard it is sometimes to keep our moral compass and not be swept along.

The way you describe how some of the people that you met have adjusted their memories, to cloud out either things that happened to them or that they did, seems to have another lesson about how we remember our pasts, even if nothing as dramatic as the Cultural Revolution has happened in our lives.

Exactly. When these things happen, it’s about what we do and the choices we make. But it’s also about how we then go on and live with those things, and how honest we are able to be with ourselves and others. No country is totally honest about its past, and probably no individual, either. In China, the censorship, the erasure, and the propaganda are so obvious, it’s kind of easy to miss the fact that we do quite a lot of that ourselves, in our own societies. I grew up not really learning anything about the slave trade, other than the fact that Britain ended it — and certainly not learning about the immense profits we made along the way. In a free society where people can go off and research and publish as they will, that seems fairly remarkable to me.

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