Bron Sibree interviews Tania Branigan on her book Red Memory

Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution

Tania Branigan, Faber & Faber

***** (5 stars)

British journalist Tania Branigan fetched up in China as the Guardian’s correspondent in 2008. By then more than 40 years had passed since Mao Zedong had instigated the Cultural Revolution, the decade-long period of politico-social chaos that ended only with his death in 1976, and she had no desire to write about it.

“Although I’ve always loved history,” says Branigan, “I didn’t have any intention to go back and spend time dwelling on the past. My day job was keeping me busy and I didn’t have plans to write a book at all.” But now her recent non-fiction debut, Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution, is being hailed as a masterpiece. Early in its pages Branigan declares “it’s impossible to understand China today without understanding the Cultural Revolution” and goes on to reveal just how this decade, shrouded in silence and secrecy, continues to levy untold costs upon the present.

For Red Memory is as much about China’s relationship with history — which Branigan notes “sometimes feels like a war” — and the selective nature of human memory as it is an attempt to quantify the traumatic, trans-generational legacy of the Cultural Revolution. It was a decade of “horrific excesses” in which “intimate treacheries and abrupt reversals rent the very fabric of China”. Her haunting narrative is drawn from thousands of hours of interviews with victims and perpetrators as well as those who grew up in its shadow. It also plumbs the deep veins of scholarship on modern China and the nature of trauma. In integrating often heart-wrenching personal stories with her own astute observations, Branigan sheets home the ongoing toll of “the decade that cleaved modern China in two” with unique insight and compassion.

The book was triggered by a lunchtime conversation in Beijing with an old friend, explains Branigan. “He happened to mention this trip he’d made with his wife to try and find the body of his father-in-law and the fact they knew it was in this little village outside Beijing.” This man, an exemplary scholar, was a new father when Red Guards imprisoned him during the Cultural Revolution. He escaped his captors only to throw himself under a train, aged 27, and be buried by local farmers, recounts Branigan. “The farmers remembered his father-in-law on the morning of his death and how he’d been very quiet, and in that sense they’d been sympathetic. But when they said ‘we’d really like to find his body’, the farmers said, well, there were so many bodies from that time, how are we supposed to know which one of them was his?’”

Although she’d heard far worse about the Cultural Revolution, says Branigan, “it struck me and stuck with me. Then when I met his wife, Carol, who speaks about her father as being an absence that’s so profound it really came home that this was not something that ended.” She began to see the Cultural Revolution as a silent, haunting presence in every story she covered. “I started to see it everywhere and at the same time nowhere because it wasn’t being discussed. The thing is it’s so deeply inscribed in the culture and in Chinese society that you start to realise it underlies pretty much everything, whether that be economics or culture or personal relationships.”

The question that ultimately drove the book, says Branigan, “was not so much what was this thing but how do you go on when this awful thing has happened? Although I obviously wanted to understand it, it’s so complex, multifaceted and contradictory that it’s hard for anyone to understand the Cultural Revolution, even — or perhaps especially — when they lived through it. But I was interested in what it still meant for China today, how had it shaped China? How was China living with it? Beyond that I wanted to understand how people cope when something terrible happens, particularly when they are to some degree responsible. Although I wanted to understand specifically about China, for me it was trying to understand something about ourselves, about human nature.”

It’s impossible to read Red Memory and not ask how any society could repair itself in the wake of such a wholesale rupturing of trust. Unlike South Africa or post-World War 2 Germany, there has been no reckoning in China for that terrible decade. Indeed, some people she interviewed voiced “a dear but impossible aspiration” for a truth and reconciliation commission like South Africa’s. But Branigan argues that in China ”it’s not just about what the authorities have done. It’s also about what Chinese people have done to themselves in ways that are clearly shaped by officials but not solely determined by them. And that is obviously very different to somewhere like South Africa, where people have had that reckoning.”  

She reveals in Red Memory, too, that the lives she was writing about often seemed “just a few steps away”. As the daughter of a Thai-Chinese mother and British father she is acutely aware “how easily you might be there or here”. She is also aware of the tilt toward zealotry in the West and says researching and writing Red Memory exemplified to her the need for any society to be careful. “To be careful and to be kind, as the poem says, because nobody foresaw the Cultural Revolution, even those who could see that things were shifting. People didn’t foresee the extremity, the intensity, how long it would last. I look at the political culture in which people are encouraged to demonise and scapegoat and I look the illegal migration bill that’s just been presented in the UK parliament; the way we are encouraged to fear others,” she says, “and I find that very disturbing.”

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TANIA BRANIGAN ON THE BOOKS THAT HAVE INFLUENCED HER

On the Use and Abuse of History for Life by Friedrich Nietzsche This is an essay that I read a long time ago at university but it was the seed in some ways of the book in that it’s all about why we remember and forget and how it helps us. Or the way in which history can help or damage us. Does it encourage us to live or do we get caught by it? It’s a fantastic essay. He talks about a man with the chain of the past on him and says however far or fast he runs, this chain runs with him. So I’d always thought about that and when I started seeing the Cultural Revolution in its presence and absence that was one of the things that stuck with me.

Collective Killings in Rural China During the Cultural Revolution by Yang Su This is quite academic and technical but what is fascinating is his systematic study of the mass killings that happened in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution — not by Red Guards but local militias that formed. Entire families were wiped out, even children, because they were landlord families and so forth. What is powerful is that he looks at it  calmly and systematically and one can see how these quite banal impulses led to these deaths. You see how multifaceted the Cultural Revolution was and the way in which things like ambition, for example, fed in to it — the way people who wanted to move up in this system saw an opportunity and took it. It gave me a sense of how complex the revolution was, how many forces fed into it beyond the political fervour that we all know about.

From the Soil by Fei Xiaotong This is a famous book by a Chinese sociologist who was purged during the Cultural Revolution, although he survived and came back. He wrote this book in the 1930s. It’s about Chinese society and webs of relationships — how it’s all about connections. It gave me a sense of Chinese society pre-Cultural Revolution but also made me think about what had managed to persist and survive in China. He also writes about memory in a couple of places and about how, with memory, we are not just pulling things out of the past but constructing memory in the present from what we need. This seems such a modern way of looking at it and  scientifically it’s quite accurate in the sense we don’t retrieve whole memories; we’re kind of rebuilding them each time we remember them.

Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma by Gabriele Schwab This German writer looks at transgenerational trauma in many places and via a variety of lenses, social and psycho therapeutic and so forth. She’s interested in the interrelationship between personal experience and social experience and historical memory. Some of the most striking passages are personal. She writes about her own relationship with Germany’s past, which is complex. Her parents had been through traumatic experiences in the war but at the same time she, as a teenager, became fascinated by why in Germany — where we’re told everybody came to terms with the past — there wasn’t, she felt, a real reckoning about what happened to the Jewish population. And she realises that even though she’d become personally and professionally fascinated by the way that Jewish people had been erased from Germany, she was unaware of the ways they’d been erased from her own home town. So it’s very personal, very honest, very raw and helped me think about how societies look at their past, understand their past, and how we often erase by omission — even in places that like to think they’re honest about the past.

Red-Colour News Soldier by Li Zhensheng People know that history matters. Li Zhensheng knew it would be important to have images of the period that were not created and controlled from the top, and he kept all the photos he secretly took, around 20,000 hidden for years. Together with his written account, his images offer a vivid and complex insight into the era with all its contradictions and complications. But what struck me about Red-Colour News Soldier was Li's urge to keep a record — even when doing so could have cost him his life. Incidentally, it’s striking how much of China’s unofficial history comes from people who were within the system — Li worked for an official newspaper at the time; Yang Jisheng was a Xinhua journalist for decades before he turned to documenting Maoism’s disasters after his retirement.