Tania Branigan

More than fifty years on, the Cultural Revolution’s scar runs through the heart of Chinese society, and through the souls of its citizens. Stationed in Beijing for the Guardian, Tania Branigan came to realise that this brutal and turbulent decade continues to propel and shape China to this day. Yet official suppression and personal trauma have conspired in national amnesia: it exists, for the most part, as an absence.

Red Memory explores the stories of those who are driven to confront the era, fearing or yearning its return. What happens to a society when you can no longer trust those closest to you? What happens to the present when the past is buried, exploited or redrawn? And how do you live with yourself when the worst is over?

Living, Remembering and Forgetting China's Cultural Revolution

Red Memory

To have a parent from another country is to know how little you can take for granted; to understand how deeply we have been shaped by families and cultures, and so to see how easily we could be another person. A later ship, a kinder uncle, better English, and you might be there, not here. There is another you — luckier, wiser, more daring, more desperate — or no you at all.

The Cultural Revolution was a time of impossible moral choices, a time when you could not do the right thing because there was no right thing to do. Worse, I recognise in it the youthful Roundhead thirst for purity. Uncertainty might have stayed me, but probably not rectitude.

Like growing up with a parent from another place, living in another land helped to teach me how little you can rely upon — how little you can count on universalities, but also how little you really know about your home or neighbours.

Some people still talk of democracy as if it were pregnancy – there is no such thing as a little bit; it's either there or not — even while we watch it being chipped away, or dynamited, by concerted, systematic attacks and lurching, instinctive cunning, or eroded by our own indifference or laziness. It is not so much about rules on paper, or conventions established over years, as about our own commitments —our own instincts and practices; what we are willing to accept, and what we are willing to do. 

Mao understood that on his own he could not see off internal critics. Instead, he would mobilise the public. Students like Yu were his pioneers: innocents enlisted in a war they could not understand. The Chairman was the Red Sun in their hearts; they grew and flourished in his rays. Each year, he rose higher in China's heavens, greater, more generous, more exalted.

Dates studded her speech, little rocks of fact amid the muddied currents. Chinese people often recited them where someone at home might have said 'one weekend' or 'that August'. Yu seemed especially reliant upon them. Chronology offered some sort of structure, a way of orienting herself. It was no substitute for an explanation, but time was the only truth there was; you could, if you used it as a footing, keep your head just above the water.

The media often seemed profoundly unsuited to the message. To a modern observer it is hard to imagine what lesson anyone derived from a dance piece entitled Reversing Verdicts Does Not Enjoy Popular Support. The disjunction can look all the more peculiar in retrospect. I once watched ballerinas arabesque with rifles in a revival of The Red Detachment of Women. It was a perplexing, faintly comic experience, made perhaps odder by the nostalgic warmth of the audience around me. Yet, watching a long line of soldiers advance across the stage with knife-like jetés, I glimpsed its genuine appeal.

Amnesia was the bedrock, and maintaining it took exertion, thoroughness and discipline. If tens of millions had starved in a famine, you shuttered the archives for decades. If your smart new trains crashed, you warned off your reporters. If you imprisoned a dissident, you pressured his wife so she would not talk; and then you harassed the relatives who spoke out about their treatment. You scrubbed web pages and blocked foreign broadcasts. You kept watch every minute of every hour of every day. You did it for one person, or a family, or a village. And then, as in 1989, you had to do it for millions: erase a city-full, a country-full of memory. You had to battle not just stray thoughts, the angles and caches of each mind, but a collective experience. You had to isolate it; fence it; zero in, eradicate and replace it.

She would have been an engineer without the Cultural Revolution, she thought — she spoke wistfully of equations. Maths: 'So beautiful. So logical, so reasonable, so wonderful.' But after everything that had happened, she thought about what she should have learned, and chose humanities. Still: 'Facts first. Maybe we don't need very complicated theories.'

His precise recounting of the split left me no closer to grasping its real causes than the hollered, verbose stories I had heard from his peers since ariving in the city. He took pity: the detail didn't matter so much. Mostly, I knew, it was circumstance, and pinning your hopes to someone who knew what was right or wrong, or seemed to. However clear it had seemed back then, and however you explained it now, which side you ended up on had really been the product of an unholy mixture of ideological disputes, social standing, personal grudges, old friendships, misread signals and luck, or lack of it. 

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