KinaNørderne
KinaNørderne - Casper Wichmann og Mads Vesterager Nielsen, stiftere af Sinolytica - dykker hver uge ned i nyt fra- og om Kina og nørderne dem igennem!Få analyser, tanker, indsigt, diskussioner om alt fra kinesisk politik - indenrigs som udenrigs - kinesisk samfund, kultur, sociale medier og meget mere!
KinaNørderne
Special - Red Memory: On China's Cultural Revolution - With Tania Branigan
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
22-08-2026:
Another special in English.
This year marks 60 years since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in China - a period of modern Chinese history that left an enormous mark on the country and its people.
We're delighted to talk with Tania Branigan former China correspondent (2008-2015) and current foreign editorial writer for the British newspaper The Guardian.
Tania is the author of the book Red memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution, and will help us understand why the Cultural Revolution is still important today, some of the people and cases she focuses on in her book, and also why the current Chinese leadership wants to control the narrative surrounding this period in China's history.
KinaNørderne af Sinolytica
Følg os her:
Substack | Webpage | FB | Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram
Intro
SPEAKER_01I'm gonna switch to English now because once again we are delighted to have an English-speaking guest with us today. We're gonna talk about the cultural revolution, and to do that with us, we're very delighted and honored to have with us Tanya Brennagan. You're a journalist, you're an author, and you're also a foreign editor with uh The Guardian, the British newspaper The Guardian. Thank you so much for being on the show, Tanya.
SPEAKER_03Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_01Before we get started, maybe you could tell our audience and listeners about your foray from journalism into China and focusing on China and China journalism as well. Because you were also the Guardian's China correspondent from 2008 to 15. So very interesting years in China as well.
SPEAKER_03Yes. I mean I feel incredibly lucky to have been there at a time when so much was changing, uh, when so much about China as it is now was formed, but also obviously a time when it was much, much easier to report from there. Certainly where the government was uh much more liberal, relatively speaking, in handing out visas, although perhaps it didn't feel like it at the time, and when it was easier to travel round and there was just less suspicion attached to foreigners, I think. So it really was a fantastic time to be there and to explore the country.
SPEAKER_01Did you know when you started in journalism that you wanted to cover China? How did that uh come about?
SPEAKER_03I didn't know from the very start, but I knew pretty soon, I think. Um, I mean, I just always found China fascinating. I didn't want to be a foreign correspondent per se. I just wanted to try and understand what was happening because it seemed to me that China was and is the story of our time uh in many ways. And I was I think the richness of the history uh of the place was just so extraordinary that I really felt that was the one story that I had to see for myself that I had to be there to cover. Uh, and so I did Badger, The Guardian a bit, and was sent out there initially as an extra pair of hands in Olympics year. And then as my colleague moved on to a new role, I I took over and became the China correspondent. And as I said, I mean, I think I was incredibly fortunate. It was a time when so much was changing, evolving, um, and there was a real sense of possibility and excitement in the air still, I think.
SPEAKER_01So, I mean, of course, this episode uh of the podcast is about your book, Red Memories. But before we get started on that, which are one of or two of your stories during your time in China that you're most proud of that you think back on with uh or most fondly back on?
SPEAKER_03I mean, the thing is, it's all as a journalist, you always sort of want to get the breaking news. And so, you know, the moment when China first puts Britain in the deep thaw, uh sorry, the deep freeze, uh, for what turns out to be rather a long time. Um, you know, there are moments like that when you get the scoop. But actually, the ones that you remember much more are about the people, I think. I think in terms of my coverage of the Saturday earthquake when that happened. Um, I'd only been there a few months at that point. And it really gave me an insight into so much uh about China in terms of the courage of people, um, the experiences of people, but also the way that authorities handle anything that goes wrong, that there was this sort of on the one hand, there was this kind of remarkable mobilization as a rescue effort, which is in stark contrast, obviously, to say, Venezuela that we see at the moment. But at the on the other hand, um, there was also this very rapid attempt to cover up all the things that had very obviously gone wrong in terms of shoddy schools collapsing and so forth. Um, and obviously the stories I remember are things like when I went to interview this uh military missile researcher who had sort of reinvented himself as a matchmaker in his 80s, and there was something about that that so sort of thoroughly encapsulated China and its history in so many ways. I mean, here was a guy who was told twice that he couldn't marry the women he sort of wanted to marry, and eventually the third time, you know, his pride to be was finally judged to be a sort of suitable political choice, and then to sort of go from that to this era in which, as he saw it, he was doing his sort of patriotic duty by defending young people from scammers because obviously matchmaking had been sort of so commercialized and so forth. I mean, in its very odd way, it was this little encapsulation of China's transformation. And I think the things that are always most interesting are when you see how these huge forces that were sweeping through China at such a vast rate, how they connect to people, to individuals at the other end.
Why is it so difficult to grasp what went on in the Cultural Revolution?
SPEAKER_02And as a part of the curriculum in China Studies, we also have a significant amount of time um delving into the culture revolution. And the culture revolution is such an evocative topic, you could say, also in the West. Um and I recently, or recently a couple of years ago, I stumbled upon your book. And after reading it, I really felt that it is really an extraordinary work where you get very close to the personal stories of the Cultural Revolution. Because a lot of the books I had read through my studies, it is great books, um, but always um but but often uh um focusing on document uh-based research and very kind of broad uh themes of what went on in the Cultural Revolution. And um uh that's why I think your book, it really um struck a chord with me and uh um and that it really stood out to me as well. That's also one of the reasons that uh that uh that I really wanted to get you on uh the podcast. And both Catherine and I, of course, we're so happy that you're here today. I would like to ask you a question, just starting off with the topic of the Cultural Revolution and also relating to your book, by reading a quote from your uh book, because in the introduction or the intro chapter of your book, you write that though I'd read accounts of the era, its horrific excesses, which extended in places to cannibalism and mass killings belong in another world, however documented, however graphic, they were too terrible to be quite real. And I think that it's often very difficult to explain the Cultural Revolution to um to outsiders in the the West. And so I want to ask, what makes it difficult for us, let alone outsiders with no knowledge of China, to grasp what went on in the Cultural Revolution?
SPEAKER_03Aaron Powell I think it's actually very difficult for Chinese people to grasp as well. And that was one of the things that became obvious to me. I remember one of the Red Guard veterans that I spoke to saying, we, you know, it's very hard for even um Chinese people to understand, you know, don't expect young people here to understand it, let alone a foreigner. And I think that's for a number of reasons. Um, one is obviously that China has changed and transformed so much the political climate is so different, it's it is a world away. Um but as I said, I think something about it is the sheer extremity of what happened in terms of I mean, two million people killed, which unfortunately, by the standards of Chinese history, as I say in the book, is sort of relatively modest, but you know, tens of millions more persecuted. And I think the nature of what happened not only in terms of the torture and murder of people, but also the very personal nature of a lot of these betrayals, the fact that families and friends turned upon each other, they make it so hard for us to imagine or to grasp, I think. I think there's a human instinct when something is really sort of terrible to try to distance ourselves from it. I mean, you see, for example, when you know, if a child goes missing um and is killed, that often there's this sort of instinct to talk about what the parents did wrong. You know, why did they let them out of their sight? And I think there is this sort of human instinct to try and set ourselves as far as possible from things that really justifiably frighten us. And the cultural revolution in so many ways is about the worst of human nature. So perhaps it's not only about its difference uh from our lives, but also, in a sense, the fact that we're afraid that we might see something we recognize in there.
SPEAKER_02You also um touch upon your reasons for writing the book, and also uh I believe that you mentioned that it wasn't at first your intention, or you weren't thinking, okay, I am gonna write a book about this topic when you arrived in China. But what what um sort of put you on the path then to then considering this uh to be compiled into a work and into the book that we have today?
SPEAKER_03Yes, I mean I always used to joke that I was probably the only journalist in Beijing who wasn't writing a book. Uh because there's always this, you know, when journalists are on postings, people always say, Oh, you're going to do a book. And I I always think that, you know, news journalism and reporting is uh when it's done really well, is extremely demanding and extremely valuable in its own right. And I've always slightly resented this idea that something has to be a book to sort of have real validity or or worth almost. You know, it seems as if books are sort of valorized in a way that uh perhaps reporting isn't. So I I definitely didn't set out to write a book. And I was also very aware that writing books is extremely uh time-consuming and draining, having seen friends do it. So it wasn't that I chose the book, but very much I think that the book chose me in a in a sense that I realized increasingly that I had questions, that the cultural revolution seemed to be there just below the surface somehow. And it was very obvious that it was critical to understanding modern China, uh, but at the same time it it really seemed as if nobody was sort of talking about it. And that this question for me was, well, what does the Cultural Revolution mean now? Why does it matter so much now? It exists in this strange kind of balance in which on the one hand it's hugely important, and on the other, it's almost forgotten in many ways, particularly sort of by younger people. Particularly, I I went um and had lunch with uh a contact of mine in Beijing one day. And then just over coffee, um, after we'd been chatting about sort of politics and economics and all the usual, he just mentioned about how a few years previously he'd been to look for the body of his wife's father, um, who'd died in captivity uh while held by red guards at the height of the Cultural Revolution. And so they'd driven up to this village, and actually the people in the village had remembered his father-in-law, even though it had been so long before. And they said, you know, yes, we remember him, they even remembered the day of his death, but they said, you know, well, how would you expect us to know where his body is? Because there are so many bodies from that time. And there was something so absolutely chilling about that, the fact that something so terrible that had left this woman, you know, fatherless as a baby, um, had had left her mother widowed so cruelly that this life of this young scholar had been sort of cut short. And yet, in fact, it was just one of so many that you wouldn't even really bother to look for the body, because it almost could be anybody that, you know, there were so many cases like that. And then at the same time, just the fact that it was so sort of immediate that it could come up over a cup of coffee in the middle of Beijing, it just really made me realise how very recent it was, because it's it's so terrible, and China has changed so much that it can feel a whole sort of world away, and yet it's absolutely within living memory. Um, and that's starting to change. Obviously, even since I wrote the book, you know, some of the people I write about in the book have passed away. But that it was it was something that was very immediate. And then after that, it really started to feel as if almost every conversation I had in the course of my reporting would in some way lead back to the Cultural Revolution because it's shaped so much about China from its economics to its psyche, really.
SPEAKER_01Planning a book like this, how do you go about that? Getting people to interview lined up and just selecting your informants and your sources also on such a delicate topic, especially in China. I know there was probably a little more leeway back then than there would be if you were to undertake a project uh today, but how did you go about this process?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I mean, I don't think I could have written this book now. Absolutely. And I think I was sort of fortunate. I mean, the other thing that sort of shaped this book was that it really felt at around the point that I became interested, there started to be this sort of opening up of popular memory, that people, partly because of the internet, I think, um, opening up a space for these kinds of discussions, partly perhaps because of age, uh, people thinking about things they'd done in their youth and trying to sort of take some accountability for that, or to understand what they had done, or sort of expunge perhaps some of their guilt. So there was this moment where it felt like this space was being clawed out to talk about some of these issues. And I started to come across these stories sometimes on the internet, sometimes through friends. Um, and as I said, what interested me very much was not the history of what had happened, although obviously I write about that in Red Memory, not so much what happened in the 1960s as how people now understand that and are shaped by it and how they feel about it. And so when I was writing the book, I wasn't really trying to write an oral history because there are fantastic accounts of that time. There was obviously a lot of scar literature that was published. Um, that there was this point just after the Cultural Revolution where people were allowed, almost encouraged to write about uh what had happened, partly, of course, to justify the fact that China had taken the turn away from the Cultural Revolution. So that was partly a political project, but also I think a sort of uh recognition from the leadership, many, you know, a lot of which had suffered itself, that there was a need for some kind of catharsis. And so there'd been these fantastic sort of oral histories as well by Chinese uh historians, and I didn't want to re-tread that. But what I wanted to do was talk to the people who were keeping the memory alive in some way, because what became very clear is that while almost everybody was trying to forget the Cultural Revolution, there were all these people who, in one way or another, were keeping it alive, whether it was the painter I spoke to who was painting portraits of a hundred people involved in the Cultural Revolution, uh, in some way or another, uh, or the musician I spoke to, whose music was very much shaped by his terrible suffering in the movement, uh, or people who had lost parents and wanted them to be remembered. Um, so people who had been involved at the time, red guards who were coming forward to talk about what they had done and how they felt they sort of hadn't been accountable for it before. And that, in a sense, did make it easier because these were people who had chosen to address this issue. One of the first people I speak to in the book is a woman who became a red guard at the age of sort of 12 or 13. And she had begun to blog about what happened to her, but she also said to me, you know, I'm the only one who talks about this in real life. There are people like me on the internet, but she would be the awkward person who turned up at the school reunions and said, Well, what about these things we did? And of course, nobody else wanted to engage with that as far as they were concerned. You know, she was just difficult, um, you know, raising unwelcome problems. Um, all of that said, I mean, it did take time to persuade people to talk to me, and not everybody wanted to talk. And, you know, as a journalist, you always feel obviously that if somebody hasn't spoken, you s you sort of think, well, this is a failure, can't write this story. Um, it became obvious to me as I was writing that actually the reluctance of people to speak was part of the story. And so I did go down to the Cultural Revolution Museum that was set up in a very remote bit of Shanto in southern China by an official who had been persecuted in himself from the Cultural Revolution. He managed to set up this sort of tiny museum by setting it up in the middle of nowhere. Uh, and basically by agreeing it would have no publicity, so very few people knew it was there. But I went to see him, and although he'd done interviews before, he just wouldn't talk. Um and possibly, you know, quite rightly so, because by that August, um, you know, there was sort of much more security. Um, when I did go to the Cultural Revolution Museum on my own, it was obvious I was being followed by plainclothes, police, and things. And it had just become too sensitive to speak about. So even this very small space that was granted to him as somebody with amazing connections, um, who'd managed to kind of create this thing by being extremely careful, even then, it was sort of too sensitive to talk to me. And so I realized that the reluctance to speak was just as important a part of the story, and that I needed to incorporate that actually.
The case of teacher Bian and Song Binbin
SPEAKER_02And yeah, in your book, you also cover the case of uh teacher Bien and uh Tung Pin Pin and people uh from young students at that time from Beijing Normal University. And um, I think this really shows the breadth of your uh work because you have these individual stories, but with the case of Tsung Pin Pin, we are really as a the it is really elevating the narrative all the way to the top, basically, of Chinese politics. Because Tsun Pingpin, who was she? Well, she was the red guard that put the armband on Mao Zedong himself. Could you tell us about um the the incident of T Japien and the the red guards that were involved and how they deal with this incident today?
SPEAKER_03So Songbin Bin is, in many ways, after Mao, perhaps one of the most famous or even notorious people associated with the Cultural Revolution. Uh, she's actually died since I wrote the book. She died a couple of years ago now. She was very young when the Cultural Revolution broke out, and she was one of the uh children of a she was the child of a very powerful political figure. Um, she was one of many people studying at an elite girls' school in Beijing. And the reason she is famous is twofold. The first is that she's known as the young Red Guard who put an armband on Mao, really signalling his approval of the Red Guard movement and its extremes, I suppose. The second is because she was the first to denounce her teacher, Bien Jong Yun, and Bien is now known as the first victim of the Cultural Revolution in Beijing. She uh turned on Bien Jong Yun along with her friends. In a poster denouncing the vice principal. And that led uh to attacks upon teachers in the school, initially verbal at sort of struggle sessions, these denunciation rallies, but then also physical. Song Binbin later said that she'd tried to stop the attacks on the teacher when she learned about them. And she also took Bien Jong Yun to hospital. After lurch, she learned that Bien Jong yun would been found unconscious on the grounds. But of course, Bien Jong Yun died. And while her name is not so well known, um, Songbin Bin became famous because she then went, she put this armband on Mao. Famously, he asked her her name and said, um, oh, as in meaning refined or gentle. And she said yes. And he said, Well, be Marshall. And in the days that followed, uh, the newspapers were plastered with these images of her giving in the armband, um, and of her declaring, apparently, she subsequently denied this, that she had said her name would now be Marshall. Um, and this was a moment that really represented Mao's embrace of the radicalism, the extremity, and even the violence of red guards. And in the years that followed, all sorts of rumours spread. It became assumed that she had personally killed Songbin Bin. Um, although, in fact, there were no witnesses to suggest that. Um, and she became this thy word, I suppose, for extremity and for violence. And she moved to the US, tried to distance herself, but this reputation was still there. And then in around 2012, she actually came forward and along with some of her classmates, made an apology for what had happened to the teacher. The idea was um that this would, I think, open up a space for people to talk about what they'd done, to acknowledge what they'd done, share their guilt. But in fact, it provoked a firestorm because people felt that she had been insufficiently or insincerely repentant. Um, so they argued that the way she talked about it really distanced herself. Lian Jungyun's husband had been incredibly brave. I mean, many people distance themselves from family members who were killed at the time because they were afraid of being tainted with this idea that they were sort of counter-revolutionary. Um, he could not at that time speak openly in defence of his wife. He was worried about, you know, this the children. He still had four young children to look after. But he did, by a camera, he took pictures of her body, he kept even her bloodstained clothes, and he kept all of these things, believing that one day the world should know the truth about what happened to his wife. And so after the Cultural Revolution, he did come out and he did speak about her. And he was furious that having spent all these years remembering his wife when everybody involved in her murder had wanted to forget it, he was then furious that people should come forward and felt basically that they weren't taking enough responsibility. And so this row raged about whether Songbin Bin in fact had come forward because she wanted to atone for her part in starting the process of denunciation, or whether, in fact, she was really just trying to escape from this shadow that had dogged her all these years of being this figure associated with extremity. And what could have been a moment of healing actually became incredibly toxic, incredibly rancorous, incredibly bitter, and I think really, in many ways, probably put anybody else off coming forward to address their responsibility. And I think that really speaks for so much of the cultural revolution today in its aftermath, which is that even when people try to address what's happened in a way that is not encouraged, even then, people who might seem to be broadly on the same side of saying, Well, let's talk about the cultural revolution, let's talk about some of the things that we did wrong, very quickly it becomes very bitter, very personal. Um, that it's still so raw, I think, because people have never had that chance to deal with it. And so over the years, it's actually become almost more toxic rather than less.
SPEAKER_01Also, on the topic of reconciliation, guilt and blame and responsibility, you have an interesting case in the book as well about um Jiang Hong Bing, who is visiting his mother's grave, and you're describing how he's almost bragging that he's bringing flowers to his mother's grave, and then the reveal is how she died, that she got disillusioned with Mao, took down Mao's picture, and her own family turned her in, knowing the consequences of turning her in, and thus were indirectly or directly, if you want, responsible for the mother's death. Um, and Jiang Hung Ping also, in a sense, wants his mother to bear some of that responsibility for her own death, even though they were the ones who signed her her death warrant. So, do you think people are looking for personal atonement in some way, or because it's a very hard cross to bear, I would imagine, basically having killed your own mother indirectly in that chaos? Were there any other cases that surprised you in that sense? And how did you sense that people were dealing with this guilt responsibility? Or is it just such a big scar that for most people it's easier also following the government in a sense of to just not talk about it? Let's just move on and just forget that it even happened, even though it is, as you say, still a relatively big scar in Chinese modern history.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I mean, it it's it's huge, and people have to live with the things that were done to them and the things they did. And, you know, both of those in many cases are horrific. I think you had a population that was already hugely traumatized in many ways by the experiences they've been through of imperial aggression from the British, among others, over the years, obviously from this terrible uh uh invasion and occupation by Japan, which was incredibly brutal, um, then the Great Famine, you know, the Civil War, then the Great Famine. I mean, it was just year after year of suffering in many ways for so many Chinese people. And so, by the point of the Cultural Revolution, you have people who have already been through great family trauma, as in the case of Zhang Han Bin, and they then are thrown into this constant political struggle in which first his father is attacked and then his mother is attacked, and people are living in this state of fear, uh obsoletry, of chaos, of not knowing what's come next. And and it's that's the context, I think, in which you have to understand his case, to understand how a 17-year-old boy could denounce his mother, knowing, as he says, that it was going to lead to her execution. And yet at the same time as you say, um he then sort of blames her in a sense, and he sort of says, Well, she, you know, she brought me up to sort of believe in this system. And it was an to me, his case is so extraordinary. First, the sheer horror of it, but secondly, the fact that he's just had to go on living with that through his life. How how do you bear a burden like that? And how do you try to make sense of that? I don't think it's surprising that many of the people who've spoken most about what they've done have often been people who haven't done particularly terrible things because it's obviously easier. You know, if you denounced a teacher but they survived, that's much easier to live with than if you denounced your own mother and she was shot as a result, obviously. And so people are trying to, you know, a lot of people have just buried it, and then other people try to come to terms with it in whatever way they can. And I sort of think of this um psychoanalyst I spoke to who said, Well, in many ways, you know, anybody who can survive almost just he he just admires people for surviving almost, not just surviving those years, um, but surviving the aftermath, surviving having to live with everything that happened. And that's one of the things that I think is so hard for us outside that situation to understand, not just foreigners, but also, you know, younger Chinese people, anyone who didn't have that experience. And that's I think one of the things that's sort of so striking, just going back to Song Bin Bin for a moment, you know, one of her sort of defenders said, Well, you know, there are so many people in Beijing who did worse, far worse than she ever did. However, however bad her actions, there are many more people who murdered people in those years and have never admitted it, have never taken any responsibility of any kind, and yet she's the one who gets turned upon because she comes out and and talks about it, and also because she had been such a high-profile figure for so long. So it is incredibly raw and brutal, and in you can see why the authorities, for so many reasons, don't want to open up that box. I mean, one, obviously, many of the perpetrators of violence in the early years were red guards who were themselves the children of very elite, powerful families who subsequently came back into power. Um, and although they later suffered themselves, um, in the early stages, they were often at the forefront of the violence. So that was a very kind of practical reason uh why people didn't address the violence. Um, but then I think I I suspect also there is a genuine fear on the part of authorities that you know this these things are so toxic. If you open them up, where is it going to lead?
Will we see a change in how the period is treated and dicsussed?
SPEAKER_02I think um yeah, that this year itself is uh quite interesting just to that end because this year marks the 60th uh anniversary, uh, we can call it of the um the beginning of the cultural uh revolution. And um just like you you mentioned earlier, some of the people you cover and that you talk to in your book, they have passed away. And um and how difficult it is really to treat the cultural revolution, also in in an environment really where there is both victim and perpetrator living in some cases side by side. I have experienced this myself whilst living in the the Hutongs in downtown Beijing, that you could meet people who were, of course, very ambivalent with talking about this this era, but also some who were actually openly for or like cheering red gods and being very romantic about that era. I wanted to ask also, uh, since you you mentioned earlier that that you think your book would not be able to make today, well this reconciliation as a probably it's too late now. Um or or what do you what do you think? Like most likely we'll not see any public um uh or change in public stance, but um but but will we see any or is it likely that we'll see any change in how um uh the period is is treated or discussed?
SPEAKER_03Yes, I mean it's very strange. There is a sort of nostalgia, as you say, um in many parts of society for the Cultural Revolution. Um some of that I think is simply that if you weren't one of the people that suffered, if your family didn't suffer, and if you were young at the time, then that's when you were young and you probably have sort of happy memories of being your friends in the same way that you know people uh romanticize things uh about their past here. I think also there is um certainly when I was in China, there was a sense for many people that they were seeing the Cultural Revolution through the lens of the present day. And for them, because the Cultural Revolution was sort of the peak of Maoism, it was a time that was more egalitarian, where there was more respect for workers, um, where there was an opportunity to challenge authorities when you could speak out against authority. Uh now, obviously there were limits on that. You weren't going to question Mao, and it it could be incredibly dangerous because the political tides would turn again. But but it really was a moment where people saw it uh as a moment of democracy, in a sense. You know, this is our chance to speak up, um, to challenge the corruption that had sort of come into the system. And so people had a certain idealism, and above all, I think many people saw it as a contrast to the present day, because it was a time that was less about corruption, less about money. It was it there was a meaning and a purpose in life. And so I think looking back from 21st century China with all the corruption and the rampant commercialization, um, there was that sense of longing for a time of values and meaning. A little bit, I guess, you know, like people talk about the Blitz, they romanticize the sort of the Blitz in London as a time of Blitz spirit and everybody getting together. Uh, or if you think about a show like The Waltons, which sort of romanticizes Depression-era America, you know, that there is this sense that it was a bad time, but we got either it was a bad time we got through, or that there was somehow, you know, it was tough, but it had more purity somehow, that uh people were coming together in some sense. Now, obviously, for a huge number of people, that's not their experience at all. Um, but I think that nostalgia, as I said, is both sort of politically driven and also, in a sense, socially driven, that that hunger for meaning. And so the cultural revolution, as people see it, is as much about China today as it is about what actually happened in that era.
SPEAKER_01So talking about China today as well, we can't talk about it without talking about Xi Jinping as well. And he, of course, also felt the Cultural Revolution on his own body and also probably remembers it quite fondly, going through the countryside and Shanxi living in this little hut that's also now become a tourist destination, but also is very keen to not have anyone talk about the cultural revolution anymore. I mean, it's done and done. The party corrected itself and and moved on and bettered itself. How do you see how Xi is using the Cultural Revolution in for his own political project ideologically and personally? And how do you think it affected him? Was there any talk about that? Or how do you see this space changing under the rule of Xi Jinping since you started uh writing the book?
SPEAKER_03I mean, this is so fascinating because Xi's family obviously suffered greatly throughout the Cultural Revolution. Uh his father, Xi Jongsun, who is a very senior party figure, um, was already in disgrace actually when the Cultural Revolution broke out, uh, but very quickly uh fell into much greater trouble. Shi himself was denounced. Um, we have reports that his mother himself, his mother was made to denounce him at a rally at one stage. His half-sister ended up killing herself uh under the political pressure that the family was under. And then, of course, he was sent down to the countryside for uh seven years. I mean, labouring in absolute sort of grim poverty. And I think it's kind of hard for us to imagine what it must have been like for these city kids, but they weren't just going hundreds of miles from their family, they were going really back a century in in terms of living standards, um, suddenly expected to kind of scrape a subsistence living without any of the skills. I mean, it was hard enough to survive in the countryside anyway. And if you didn't have any of those sort of basic farming skills that you would have grown up with. So, I mean, isolated, tough, not knowing if you're ever going to go home again, if you're ever going to see your parents again, um, a lot of those kids died uh in accidents or illness. An incredibly bleak time. Uh and yet actually, um, when he talks, has talked about it in the past, in terms of he's talked about the cultural revolution itself in very scathing terms, saying, you know, well, wasn't that supposed to be a time of big democracy? See where that got us. Um, but in terms of his own experience, there's a a remarkable bit in um that's quoted in Joseph Terigian's fantastic biography of his father, called The Party Always Comes First. And she says, Well, everyone else was crying on the train to the countryside, but I was laughing because, you know, who knew I basically who knew if I was going to survive in Beijing? And however bad the countryside was going to be, it was probably going to be safer than my experiences of living in Beijing. So he then, having said all that, you know, he then did try to come back at one point. His mother made it clear that he couldn't. He was sent back to the countryside. I think it's really hard for us to imagine how brutal those years must have been. And yes, he would have been slightly cushioned by the fact that he was sent somewhere that his father had been very well liked, but it was still clearly a formative experience. You know, I can't see inside Xi Jinping's head, but you would have thought in terms of teaching him how vulnerable you are to political power if you're not the one in charge. Um, and also how dangerous turmoil is. I mean, I it seems to me that those are the big, sort of the two big lessons that he very obviously takes away from it. Now, what's interesting, as you say, is that the party has spent years really burying the memory of the Cultural Revolution. So after the end of the Cultural Revolution, there was this very brief attempt to uh come to terms with what had happened. And Deng Xiaoping, when he takes over, orders an official verdict to be written. But the point of that, as you say, it talks about what went wrong and it really justifies the party's turn away from Mao towards the market in this very new era under Dung. But it also is intended to draw a line. And so it says, you know, this is about looking forward, uniting and looking forward. It's not about sort of raking over the coals. And so, even at that point, the message is very clearly let's basically forget what happened, let's all move on. And little by little over the years, um that space to talk about the past has shrunk and shrunk and shrunk, particularly under she, who has made controlling history really central to who he is. Um, that he within months of coming to power, uh, he gives this famous speech about to the party, about the threats facing the party. And in that, he puts historical nihilism on a par with things like Western democracy and the free press and so forth. So he sees control of the past and of the narrative as absolutely essential. And the party has mostly tried to forget the Cultural Revolution. It has also found it useful, I have to say, that it's wanted people to have this sort of vague sense of the Cultural Revolution as being a time of chaos and the masses getting carried away. So you basically subtract the fact that Mao set all this in chain, that this was Mao's reassertion of power, and you turn it into this story about how you shouldn't hand power to the masses. Now, I think the senior leaders, like Xi's father, having been through that era, probably genuinely believed that to some extent, and I imagine she probably does. Um, but it's also been very convenient, obviously, as a way of saying that the party's writ must not be challenged. What the party does is right. And that even if you don't like it, that the danger you would all face, that the danger China would face from allowing a more open society is just too great to contemplate. So that's the other key part of the party's story. And that's very much part of Xi Jinping's hour. Clearly, that you have to maintain this discipline. But the odd thing is, as you say, that there is this one bit of the Cultural Revolution that they actually do talk about, and that is his years in the countryside. And I think that's because they feel that they've managed to almost detach it from the politics. So nobody ever talks about why he went to the countryside. They just talk basically about the fact he was there, look how he struggled. And it is an extraordinary, you know, in what you what we'd call a backstory in terms of politics here. You know, how many leaders anywhere would really have the understanding of what it is to be one of the poorest people, you know, in the country to sort of scrabble to make your living, to be so isolated, so vulnerable. Um, so it's a story about how he knows what it's like to be an ordinary person in the way that the party tells it. And it's also a sort of a foundation myth. It's the story of how he came to manhood. You know, he talks about how everything sort of in his life that he knows really was learned in those years. Um, and it's this very potent story of him being able to endure, of him working alongside ordinary people, and then of him offering leadership to people in the village and making life better for them. So you can see why it's so potent.
SPEAKER_02Tanya, I have also uh noticed when going out to uh some of the Qing Chus and uh reconstructed villages around uh uh China recent years, you actually begin to see these um uh uh uh kind of romanticizations in in uh uh reconstructed villages of like the Len Ningungsa, for example, um and as of so really trying to aestheticize the Maoist years actually for future generations, which I also think is an an interesting way of just uh processing and like well for the party to show and I guess like rectify an image as they want it to be going forward.
The Cultural Revolution outside of Beijing
SPEAKER_02Another thing that uh that I would uh would would would like to just um uh briefly uh ask you about is the culture revolution outside of Beijing, basically. Because I think that the scale of the cultural revolution um it's it's very difficult to uh to fathom. And once you start to look into the different incidents that happened, especially in the late 60s, um well, then you you find uh um these incidents around China, like the Wuhan incident in uh in uh 1967 where there were armed struggles. You also mentioned the case of the secret Inner Mongolian People's Party, which is it it looks like uh at that time like a wild uh goose chase for officials to try and root out a conspiracy that ends up killing around 22,000 uh uh uh people in Inner Mongolia. You have a chapter that covers Chongqing and what happened in Chongqing and the Sha Pingba uh um cemetery, which is one of the very few and probably one of the only Red Guard cemeteries that survived to this day. Can you uh explain about the cemetery and some of the people that you talked to in uh in Chongqing?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I mean, Chongqing was an absolutely extraordinary case. We we do tend to focus often when we think of the Cultural Revolution on the Red Guards in Beijing, you know, chanting at Mao and so forth. But as you say, it swept right across the country, and there is nobody that it didn't touch, you know, no part of society. That's the extraordinary thing about its universality, from the top leaders down to very poor farming families falling victim to it in some cases. And so Chongqing is a particularly uh odd uh example in a sense, but really sort of shows how extreme the the movement became. So after the initial uh wave of red guards emerged from the sort of elite, as I started to say very much, then you saw them splintering, um turning upon each other, and there was this wave of factional fighting, um often on what seems to us extraordinarily sort of bizarre or esoteric grounds, some very minor ideological difference, and in reality, of course, underneath that all the sort of personal factors. In Chongqing, because it was uh it had been the wartime capital at one stage, so there's lots of munitions factories, and so you quickly see it getting out of hand. It it descends into essentially civil war on the streets, and people told me that people were fighting with uh ships on the river, and not just with sort of hand grenades, but with machine guns and with tanks. I mean, it it's just sort of beyond imagination in many ways. Um, many of those people were still alive, the red guards of that era, and still uh meet up actually to talk about what has happened, um, including across the sort of the ideological divide, which is what I found so interesting in a way, that there were people who not only had been literally battling against each other in those years, um, but also ideologically remained very, very much divided. Um, some hoping for reforms, uh, some very much attached to the status quo, was thinking that was the only sort of safe route for China. And then other people, um clearly, one of the people I spoke to in Chongqing, who was most memorable, was this completely sort of unrepentant uh Maoist who basically felt that the Cultural Revolution's biggest problem was the fact that it hadn't succeeded. Um and so to him, you know, well, you you get violence at any movement, yes, it's you know, terribly bad, but um actually, you know, that was the pure time. That was the time when people got things right. And that's the very sort of potent left critique, as I said very much about looking at 21st century China and saying, you know, we didn't have these problems with corruption siphoning off hundreds of millions of dollars. Um, you know, we we had respect for sort of ordinary figures. Now, but part of that was obviously sort of nostalgia on his part for the kind of prestige he had enjoyed as this sort of student leader at the forefront. Um, but I think part of it was this sense that for people like his family, it had been a much a time of the the Communist Party had saved them in it had been a time when poor people were respected and given some sort of agency, um, and yet clearly at this incredibly uh painful cost. And so, you know, going to Chongqing, meeting um people who were literally handling the corpses of their friends and classmates, you know, 15, 16-year-old kids who had died in these struggles. I mean, just the the sheer futility and horror of it was just unimaginable. Um and as you say, many of them are buried in this graveyard. Um, it used to be possible for people to visit uh once a year on Tomb Sweeping Day. I tried to go, and by that point they already had officials sitting outside taking everybody's passports, and you know, they'd only let in families of the uh uh victims and so forth. And then, in fact, um somebody showed me a picture subsequently, and an entire you couldn't even look in anymore, basically. It's not just that the gates were locked, but you couldn't even look in anymore because they'd put up this big steel gate and there was a CCTV camera, surveillance camera watching, and I just thought that really kind of epitomized the story. And you know, let's not remember those those kids in there could be walking the streets of China today had they lived. You know, it was not that long ago.
SPEAKER_02I went there in 2020, actually, uh in Chongqing and to Xiaoping Ba. And I also saw the uh the gate there. It's and I did not go on tomb sweeping uh uh festival, but it is completely closed, uh closed off. I I uh I saw the evidence of that as well. I would like to ask you just um following up on that, um, and I will start with a quote again uh from your book where you say that when you talk to some of the red guards and some of the people who lived during the Cultural Revolution, they would tell me it's not about hatred or how evil the Red Guards were, but how to prevent it happening again, perhaps not precisely the same way, but in some new form. Miles death, the fall of the Gang of Four, they were just a timeout. To tell you the truth, I feel it hasn't ended. So my question I would like to ask is do you think that it can happen again? And also the the quote here says, well, maybe it's a timeout. And there is some sentiment from people that something like this could happen in other forms. And we do often see that um that some media they will use COVID or other um uh historic um events to say, ah, draw comparisons to the Cultural Revolution. Um but how do you feel about this uh uh these sentiments that you heard from people in China when they say that they are afraid that similarities to the Cultural Revolution could happen again in Chinese society?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I mean, I feel that was a very, very live fear. Not that it would happen again in exactly the same form. Um Xu Yo Yu, who lived through the era and has written very powerfully about it, sort of says, well, you know, the difference there was that China was 800 million people with one brain. Um that now you have a China that is much more educated, much more sophisticated, uh, much more exposed to the outside world, also much more cynical, frankly, I would say. Uh, and so for all those reasons, it it would not be an exact repeat, but what it always seemed to me that the Cultural Revolution is not a story about China specifically in a sense, it's a story about human nature and the parallels with it's unique in many ways. It's this event in which you see people turning not on outsiders, so to speak, but sort of their own kind and turning on those nearest to them. Um but it you know, human human nature takes us to some very, very dark places. And I think for me, that is the real lesson of the cultural revolution, that it's not about what Chinese people did. You know, the the form it took obviously could only have happened in that particular place at that particular time, but the things that drove it are absolutely things that are present in every society. More specifically, um, we have seen people outside, but also even within China, talking about the echoes of the cultural revolution today in terms of the power that Xi Jinping enjoys, which is really unrivalled since Mao, the lack of constraints on him, you know, there's no term limits anymore, he's there indefinitely. There obviously isn't a personality cult of the kind that Mao had, where he's revered as a gog, but nonetheless, we have this intense personalization that we haven't seen of any other Chinese leader since, you know, Grandpa Xi, these primary school textbooks saying he's here to help you, you know, his thought, Xi Jinping thought is everywhere. Um in that regard, people certainly see echoes. And you may remember when we had those very rare sort of COVID protests, and before that, the sort of the solo bridge protester, the signs saying we want reform, not a cultural revolution. So I think particularly with COVID and those sort of scenes of people being dragged out of their homes, the sense that there was no longer a sort of private space in China, um, but also the constant monitoring of everybody's behaviour, the sense that there were eyes on you all the time. I think those were things that for many Chinese people really brought back um echoes of that time. I think it's also important to stress the differences, not just because people are more sophisticated, but I think fundamentally in terms of Xi Jinping, that he is a very different, clearly, personality to Mao. Mao reveled in disorder and chaos. Um, he he went outside the party. I mean, he, you know, he'd spent his entire political career purging people, basically. The thing that was different about the Cultural Revolution was that he went outside the party because he could no longer depend on the party apparatus he felt, and he went to the masses and used his power over the masses. Xi Jinping does everything through party channels. Um, it's much more structured, much more formalised approach. You cannot imagine Xi Jinping ever thinking it would be a good idea to incite the masses to sort of overturn everything. Um and in that respect, you know, as many people have noted, frankly, Donald Trump feels like a much more married leader in terms of someone who revels in chaos and sees turmoil as a way of seizing the moment and increasing his own power and you know whipping up mass sentiment. Um, there's there's a much more obvious parallel for Mao, I would say.
How should we view the Cultural Revolution today and what can we learn?
SPEAKER_01Here at the end, uh Tanya, how do you feel that journalists, China watchers, Sinologists, how should we view and learn from the cultural revolution revolution today and and see modern China and China today and what Xi Jinping is is doing, and what are some of the misconceptions about the cultural revolutions that you see in in the West today?
SPEAKER_03I think China today is so fundamentally shaped and scarred by the Cultural Revolution still, in every regard, uh from its artistic culture right through its economics, because the turn from Mao towards the market was very much fueled, um, both fuelled and justified, I suppose, by the Cultural Revolution, which made that sort of radical break both possible and and perhaps necessary, um, in a sense. Um, even on the sort of the very pragmatic level, things like when you had the 17 million people, kind of young people coming back from the countryside, um, not educated, uh, not having jobs. I mean, that was one of the things that factored into the decision to allow individual entrepreneurs. So, in in every sort of regard, uh, certainly Chinese politics, as I've said, this sort of obsession with stability and discipline. Um, she's very personalized, um, centralized form of power. Um, but also on the psychological level. I mean, I think it's just gone so deep. You know, one of the ones that really sticks with me was interviewing this novelist who said, Um, oh, well, for my family, the Cultural Revolution ended last April. And I thought I must have misunderstood her. And she said, Well, that's when my father died. And her father had been persecuted by red guards in the 60s, had had a breakdown, and had never recovered mentally. And so she said, you know, up to the point of his death, he was still arguing with imaginary red guards. You know, he was trapped in the 60s. And for so many families, um their feelings about how you what you say or don't say, um, even where people don't talk about it to their kids, perhaps especially when they don't talk about it to their kids, these sort of the defensiveness, the fear of outsiders, you know, these things have all been sort of passed on um in very, very damaging ways. I think the impact of that uh intragen intergenerational trauma is just huge. Um so that's the way in which it's shaped China. But in terms of misunderstandings, as I said, I mean, one of the striking things is how little many Chinese young people know about the era. Um there was, for example, a scandal a year or two ago when uh tea shop chain, I think, had um sort of pictures or little videos on its social media showing um employees being shamed with these sort of cardboard signs around their neck saying, you know, I didn't put enough sugar in the customer's tea or whatever. Um and but the the signs and the way it was staged was very obviously reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution. And there was very understandably, people took huge offence at this, that people were sort of making light commercially of this very traumatic moment. But I think for a lot of young people, they you know, a lot of these young people have no idea what happened in the Cultural Revolution. So they are then being criticized for not understanding something that they have never been allowed to learn about. Um they perhaps think, you know, well, people were denounced a bit, they've got no idea that, you know, babies were murdered because their families were put down as landgold families. They have no idea about teachers being beaten to death in the middle of Beijing. Um so there are huge, um, there's a huge lack of knowledge within China itself. But also, yes, for foreigners. I mean, I think the main things to me are firstly this idea that it was some case of, you know, young, zealous people on the left getting out of hand. And actually, we've sort of seen it invoked by the right in some of the sort of the culturals in recent years. This is like the Cultural Revolution, because it's students, um, students attacking their teachers and things. No, it's it's fundamentally different because the point about the Cultural Revolution was that it was set in chain by Mao, um, both to cement his power within the party and because of his view that his revolution had sort of lost its way and it needed to be more pure and more extreme and more radical. Um, so that's the the sort of the big misunderstanding. And the other one, as I said, I think is this view that it's unique to China. I don't think it could have happened in the same way in other places, but I think, you know, I've read a huge amount of material now on the traumas of the 20th century and the impacts that's had and the things around the world. And what really strikes me is the parallels with other places. This is not a story about Chinese people, um, it's a story about human nature, fundamentally, and all of us, uh, you know, all of us in extreme circumstances I think are capable of doing extreme things. And so what I really wanted when I wrote the book was I hope that people aren't judging the people I write about. Um because I think we have to try to understand what led them to that place and what leads them now to handle it, to try and make sense of it in the way they do. A friend of mine, in fact, a Danish friend of mine, used to sort of say to me, you know, everybody thinks that they would have been in the resistance in the Second World War if they lived in France. And of course, a famishingly small number were. And I I think it's very much like that. It's very easy for us to assume that we would have done the right thing. But you know, what was the right thing? If if standing up for someone who was being denounced meant that your entire family was then punished, you know? I mean who did that help in a sense? So one of the victims I remember saying to me, um you know, he remembers the people who didn't actively attack him. This is the composer I write about. He says he's a, you know, well, nobody could have stood up for me, but you know, um the the people who didn't actively sort of persecute me, that that that was kind of the best you could hope for, basically. That was sort of the moral thing to do at the time, in his view.
Outro
SPEAKER_01So we're nearing the end of this great conversation about your your book, Red Memory. Um, we always ask our guest, are there any books or reports or anything that you're currently reading about China that you would like to recommend or pass on to our audience?
SPEAKER_03Oh, that is a very good question. Um recently, relatively recently, as I said, Joseph Turidian's book, uh The Party Always Comes First, which is the book on Xi Jinping's father. It definitely is one for the China nerds because it's um in depth, but you know, there's uh some extraordinary material in there. Um uh Barbara Demick's recent book um on the adoptes from China was great. But I would actually encourage people to sort of go back and read um some of the material on the cultural revolutions. So The Cow Shed, which is this extraordinary personal account of living through the Cultural Revolution, um, incredibly painful. Um and Yang Ji Sheng's wonderful book, The World Turned Upside Down, which again had lots of fascinating insights. Uh he's a incredible um guy who used to be a Xinhua reporter, um, and then because of his connections um in his 80s has been able to write these remarkable history books accessing sources that nobody else could have, first on the Great Famine, uh his book Tombstone, and then secondarily, secondly on um the Cultural Revolution with his book The World Turned Upside Down, which I'd highly recommend.
SPEAKER_01And then, of course, we would also like to recommend your own book, Red Memory, The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution. We'll put a link um in the description of this podcast where you can buy it in in in Denmark at least, but you can of course also buy it on Amazon and wherever you get your your Englishly written books. But uh, Tanya, so much, thank you so much for being guest on our podcast and talking about this very relevant topic in in China still.
SPEAKER_03Well, thank you so much.
SPEAKER_02Thank you so much, Tanya. And I would just like to echo what Caspar uh said. As I in recent years, it's probably the best book I have read on the Cultural Revolution. So I want to also recommend that to all our uh listeners. And I think it's very important work you have uh done here, and you were able to do it, as we talked about it um uh uh during this episode before really uh um the the information space became a lot tighter as it is today. So thank you so much and thank you for a great uh conversation.
SPEAKER_01Tanya Branagan, author of Red Memory, um the aftershad of China's uh cultural revolution. You're a journalist and you're the former China correspondent from 2008 to 2015 with uh the British newspaper The Guardian. We're now the foreign editorial writer. Thanks again for being on the podcast.