Ideas - China's Cultural Revolution: a history that remains widely unknown

Episode Date: June 4, 2024

The Cultural Revolution is everywhere felt in China today, but rarely if ever talked about openly. But prize-winning historian Tania Branigan tries to fill in the historical silences with voices both past and present in her book, Red Memory.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad.

It is impossible to understand China today without understanding the Cultural Revolution. Before its war games menacing Taiwan, before its crackdown on Hong Kong, and decades before the Tiananmen Square massacre, China was transformed by an era that, for all its impact, remains obscure for most people in the West and in China. 1966 to 76. Those were the dates of the Cultural Revolution.

The decade of Maoist fanaticism which saw as many as two million killed for their supposed political sins, and another 36 million hounded. They were guilty of thought crimes. Others were guilty by blood, their parentage enough to condemn them. The hysteria of violence and misery had forged modern China, but the movement was rarely mentioned these days. My name is Tanya Branigan. I'm the author of Red Memory, and I'm also foreign leader-writer for The Guardian in London. Tanya Branigan's book, Red Memory, The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution, is the 2023 winner of the Kundal

History Prize. So first of all, huge congratulations on the Kundal Prize. Thank you so much. It was amazing to win, and especially with such a strong shortlist this year. Were you surprised? Yes, I was genuinely very shocked. So it took a moment for it to sink in. I was genuinely very shocked, so it took a moment for it to sink in. Red Memory combines historical overview with first-person stories of people who went through the Cultural Revolution. It's both analytical and visceral. And so when you look at the Cultural Revolution, I mean, it's on this huge scale. I knew that the 10 years of the Cultural Revolution, which ended only after Mao Zedong's

death, was savage, unrelenting and extraordinarily destructive. It goes right across the country. The violence and hatred terrorised the nation, annihilated much of its culture and killed key leaders and thinkers. People in remote provinces, farmers, infants even, who were killed simply because they were part of a landlord family. The movement was an emperor's ruthless assertion of power, which Mao directed and set in motion to destroy opposition within the party. Both of Mao's heirs apparent would die within this decade, and the people at the top of the party in many cases didn't realize that he was coming for them.

But it was also an ideological crusade, a drive to reshape China's hearts and souls. People were to be remade or removed. I'd like to take you back to when you went to China, to Beijing in 2008 to cover the Olympics. You say that you felt the presence of the Cultural Revolution, even on that trip. Can you describe what that presence looked or felt like? So it took me a while, to realize that the cultural revolution was everywhere in China. When I first moved there, it was a place that was so charged with possibility and was just changing so fast in front of me, felt as if we were seeing history in the making.

And so it actually seemed quite perverse to look back to the past. But then gradually, to look back to the past. But then gradually, I began to feel it more and more around me. In particular, I went for lunch one day with an analyst I knew. And while we were there, we just sort of talked through the usual politics and economic chat and all of that. But then over coffee, he started telling me about a trip that he'd made a few years before to a village where his wife's father had been held by Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution. And they had gone looking for his body and the farmers there had in fact remembered his father-in-law, but they just were uncomprehending at the idea that anyone would be trying to recover his remains because they said, well, there are so many people from those days here in the soil, so how on earth would we know which

one of those was his? And so that was the moment when I really realized how present it was, the fact that the Cultural Revolution wasn't, in fact, history, but it was something that people were living with. Living with, but not talking about. That tension lies at the heart of Red Memory, a national trauma that's everywhere felt, but virtually unseen. The Cultural Revolution covers a few scant paragraphs in Chinese textbooks. There is no mention of suffering and death. You wouldn't know about the torment and torture. And even if you knew a little more,

you might not have heard about the scholars who hanged themselves and party veterans who jumped from windows. You certainly wouldn't know about the militias who eradicated families, about children buried alive or thrown from clifftops, about the ghouls in remote rural Guangxi who killed class enemies and ritually feasted on their livers. So at what point did Mao want or need the cultural revolution there had always been purges under Mao it certainly wasn't new to see political violence but the cultural revolution however was on a scale and of an intensity that really hadn't been seen before. And the reason for that is that Mao

had launched what he called the Great Leap Forward. In 1958, Mao launched the Great Leap Forward, an extraordinary plan to transform China from an agrarian nation into an advanced economy. Households were forced to join vast communes as land was collectivised. But it was a project of such hubris it amounted to insanity. From fanaticism or fear, officials vastly exaggerated harvests. Superiors requisitioned them accordingly, in at least one place commandeering more grain than had actually been grown. People were tortured or killed for their attempts to blow the whistle.

In the cities, stomachs rumbled and faces grew waxy and thin. In the countryside, people ate bark, grass, husks of corn, and eventually the dead. But as the catastrophe became clear, Mao refused to turn back. It was an extraordinarily ambitious plan that could never have succeeded but that was driven through with such zealotry and went so disastrously wrong that it resulted in the deaths of probably 40 million people in the Great Famine, maybe more. It was disastrous. And it had to be reined in by more pragmatic figures within the party. And so Mao felt very much that his authority

had been threatened, although he was still in charge. He'd always been very jealous of his power, and he was concerned about that loss of authority. He was looking, too, at the Soviet Union, where Stalin had been denounced after his death, of course, by Khrushchev. And I think as well, precisely because he had this sort of crazed utopianism, this vision of what communism was going to look like, and he felt that people just, if only they believed enough, it would be pushed through. And so with the failure of the Great Leap Forward, it wasn't just an embarrassment or sort of loss of status for him, but also that he felt it was sort of further proof that people weren't really communist enough, they weren't true enough believers. And if only you could reform the souls of people,

that you could somehow achieve this newer, purer nation. And because he couldn't do that within the party in the way that he had with previous purges, he turned outside to the masses, and particularly to young people, children in many cases, very young school children, sometimes students, and they became his red guards his sort of shock troops of this cultural revolution it's stark to hear you use words like reforming souls why cultural revolution what made it a cultural revolution in Mao's estimate do you think he wanted to transform China one of the things warned, even when the communists first took power, was that he warned about the danger of what he called the sugar-coated bullets of the bourgeoisie, sort of piercing the souls of good communists. And he felt that the party had been softened and,

to some extent, even corrupted by being in power. And so his vision was to remake China by remaking customs and ideals and culture and the hearts of individuals. If we had been there in Beijing when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, what might we have seen had we been there? At the daily level, you had a society that had an extraordinary personality cult already in place. People really did revere Mao and regard him not just as a god, but as somebody who was very intimately present in their lives. The words of a song at the time that children would sing were, mother and father are dear, but chairman Mao is dearer and so when the cultural revolution starts there's really an ability for all of that to fire people up so you already see this very high level of worship of Mao you see these beliefs in revolutionary struggle that are deeply imbued in the education and the culture

that people are absorbing. The start of the cultural revolution from ordinary people's points of view is that somebody put up what was called one of these big character posters. Ignite the cultural revolution. The words appeared on a big character poster attacking Peking University's leadership, an arresting handwritten protest. Within hours, on Mao's instruction, it was read over the radio. And in the heat of his encouragement, it all burst into life, scrawled white sheets blossoming across the walls of schools and colleges. Scrawled white sheets blossoming across the walls of schools and colleges.

And that sent the signal that he wanted to see this uprising against officials and against leaders. You would have seen students turning against their teachers, extreme levels of brutality, criticising them first and then attacking them physically and they would go on to murder them and a very febrile atmosphere people didn't know where this would lead and then in august mao held the first of these giant rallies for red guards in tiananmen square in the heart of beijing the political heart of the country really really. And that was the moment that ultimately signalled his approval. And where young people were told it's time to go out and smash the old ways of being. And so they take to the streets, they turn upon people, they destroy street signs, they rename streets that they think have counter sort of revolutionary names. So suddenly you've

got anti-revisionism street in Beijing, for example. They're tearing down shop signs. They are proletarianizing people's clothes. If they think their trousers are too tight and fashionable, they might cut them. They might cut people's hair. If they had sort of fashionable Western hairstyles, they are raiding people's houses pulling out old pieces of culture like family genealogies or artworks or foreign books and burning them on the street they're turning upon people and humiliating them it could be very brutal and very personally brutal you're right about that first victim in beijing a teacher named Bian, is that how you say it? Yes, Bian Zhongyun.

Can you tell us her story? What happened to her? She was a teacher at an elite school where the children of many senior leaders went, and she was the first victim of the Cultural Revolution in Beijing, we believe. She came under criticism for a number of reasons. she came under criticism for a number of reasons um she was an easy target in the sense although she in fact had been a sort of staunch party member for many years like many of the victims of the cultural revolution she was the daughter of a banker and this was a time when family background as well as your political beliefs or sort of deeds counted against you yeah and then she had people who perhaps had personal grudges against her fanning the flames um and when you look at the sort of things she

was accused of it just looks so absurd to us now as well as horrific she was accused for example of opposing chairman mao and the main reason for this seems to have been that somebody had asked her whether if they had sure you get out quickly. And that was sort of taken against her. The fact that some children of officials hadn't been accepted by the school, that again was sort of taken as a political crime. She was accused completely absurdly of trying to mount a coup against the sort of Beijing communist authorities. It was a ridiculous list. But really, I think as in so many cases, once somebody became a target, people often, for example, feel that if they didn't join in, they too might become

a target. So something that motivated people often in turning on others was thinking about protecting themselves and so forth. But certainly for being jonghyun it's just this extraordinary sense of these very young people sort of teenage girls that she taught in a culture that had this reverence for authority and for learning turning upon her and ultimately beating her to death and it's a moment so horrific, and it sets so much, I think, the tone and the warning for what will come, that it's really never been forgotten. She had seen it all coming.

Girls dragged her onto a stage in shackles and forced her to kneel while they kicked and struck her, beating her with iron-banded wooden rifles. When she fell, they hauled her up by her hair and began again. Officials ignored Behan's plea for help. Practice had perfected the rituals of abuse. The girls at the school poured ink over victims and forced them to chant as they paraded. I am a counter-revolutionary revisionist. I deserve the beatings. I am damned to death.

They hit them each time their voices dropped or broke. They forced them to kneel in the blistering sun and to carry large baskets laden with earth. When Bion fell, they trampled her in their heavy army boots. Someone yelled for clubs. The hospital was metres away, but it was hours before students and a teacher took Behan across the street. The doctor was too frightened to help a counter-revolutionary. Treatment, when it began, was too late. At school the next day, the student leader claimed the loudspeaker and announced Bian's death.

She died. It is over. There was a short silence in the classroom and someone changed the subject. Her husband, Wang, was a historian and though he could not protest her death, he documented it. He bought a camera the next morning, a little black and aluminium Shanghai 202. That story basically embodies this contradiction, this contradictory dynamic of trying to understand the cultural revolution, the fact that he's a historian who can't even write history. Yes, absolutely. That's one of the most painful things about the story. He certainly could never have protested her death at the time, but even really recording it was dangerous. But nonetheless, as a grieving widower and as a historian,

he set out to record it. He bought a camera the day after her death. He took a series of these very graphic photographs, not only of all the posters that had been put up around their home and so forth denouncing her, but even of her children beside her body. And so he created this record. He kept her bloodststained clothes for example he wanted all this to be kept because he believed there would be a time when people could talk about it and yet publicly he could say nothing he captured everything he photographed the smoke from the crematorium chimney he rigged up a secret shrine for her ashes. Closed, it looked like an ordinary bookcase. When he and the children were alone, they left it open, keeping watch over her. You really paint a picture where these times are marked by mass participation. I'm wondering if

there's any sense when you're there, whether those actions were coerced in any way, or was it a wholehearted sort of embracing of this idea? For many people at the start, young people, of course, there was this genuine excitement for many of them. This enthusiasm, this belief, as I said, they've been brought up in this atmosphere of revolutionary struggle and of worshipping Mao. And they'd really never had an opportunity to put those ideals into action. Many of their parents would have been very involved in the revolution, had perhaps fought for the communists. They were of a generation that had grown up in a much more settled circumstance circumstance and yet one where they're told

that their country is under threat from the outside, that the People's Republic is imperiled. And so they have this urge, as I think many young people would, for meaning and for doing something. And then, of course, there is also an element of freedom, almost anarchy in what happens. People suddenly turning upon authority figures who maybe would have dominated them, criticized them, ordered them around in the past. Suddenly they're not going to school. They're able to turn upon their teachers. They're able to criticize their parents. It's a moment that for many people was confusing, but also thrilling and idealistic as well at times. And even fun, because at times they were traveling around the country.

So you've got 13 or 14-year-old girls who've led these very restricted lives, and suddenly they're free, they have status, they've got an excitement that just didn't exist in their lives before. That excitement was concentrated, just as it was in 1989, in Tiananmen Square. But unlike 1989, this gathering was sanctioned and orchestrated by the leadership of the Communist Party, by Chairman Mao himself. In 1966, China was closed to the world. No Beatlemania, no hippies, no psychedelic exhortations to turn on, tune in, and drop out. The start of the Cultural Revolution had all the energy of anti-government protests in the West during the 60s, but here, the crowd was in lockstep

with the government. In Red Memory, Tanya Brannigan describes one group of schoolgirls who, among countless other groups, answered the call to gather at Tiananmen Square. At 3 a.m. on 18 August 1966, summoned at only a few hours' notice, they marched in line through the night, all the way from the campus to Tiananmen Square threading into the broadening streams down the great avenue of eternal peace. As dawn broke a million students flooded the great expanse. Red guards took place of honour on the stands waiting for leaders to address them. The chairman's portrait gazed down upon them from the imposing gate. And then, it was not just senior leaders, but Chairman Mao, Chairman Mao himself,

walking slowly back and forth before them, not addressing them directly, but holding his hand up to acknowledge their cheers. Long live Chairman Mao! Long, long live Chairman Mao! Long live Chairman Mao. Long, long live Chairman Mao. You, while you were in Beijing, went to a museum dedicated to the Cultural Revolution. And from your description, it was a bizarre experience. Can you describe your time there? There was long a campaign to sort of try and have a museum of the Cultural Revolution. People suggested that this was the way to keep the memory alive and really ensure it couldn't happen again, I suppose. And then one man, a former official, because it's often people who've been inside the system in China who actually have the opportunity to do quite challenging things, really dedicated himself to setting up this Cultural Revolution Museum. He wasn't able to do it in the capital. He was a man from the south of China. And so he tried to set up this museum in a fairly remote area, which

involved a lot of negotiations. He's someone himself, actually, who was condemned to death in the Cultural Revolution and somehow survived. He's still not quite sure how, but his brother and friends had been killed. And so he felt it was critical to memorialise all this. And he did eventually succeed in setting up what is as much, I suppose, a memorial park as a museum with this large area of land with statues and plaques and so forth, and then this small museum at the top of it. But what happened was that as soon as it began to draw interest, and what's striking is that it did draw interest from Chinese people, there was quite quickly a reaction where the authorities told media to stop reporting on it, and it wasn't on signposts and so forth you really

had to know it was there and soon the numbers dwindled and it's had this sort of strange existence whereby it could survive as long as nobody showed an interest in it and when i went there i found that in fact i was unable to get inside because by the time I got up to the top of the hill where it's located, the undercover police had obviously been around and there was a sign outside saying, you know, work's being done here. It had obviously been closed fairly hastily. And then I was followed down the hill by the plainclothes police. And I think that really just spoke to the sensitivity of this remote museum that people really aren't going to go to. And yet, even just having that attention from a foreigner was enough to concern them. And in fact, more recently, the museum's been closed down.

Like kind of there and not there. Yes, absolutely. Yes, absolutely. Ideas is a podcast. You can subscribe to us on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. We're also a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. My name is Graham Isidore.

I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. ShortSighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. Tiananmen Square is best remembered today for the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations

that were eventually crushed by the government. But in 1966, it was the birthplace of the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution was Mao's reassertion of personal control, but it was also an anarchistic upheaval. As many as 36 million people saw their lives destroyed in the upheaval. Two million people were killed. What made China's slaughter unique was that people killed their own kind and that the line between victims and perpetrators shifted moment by moment. Comrade turned on comrade, friend upon friend, husband upon wife, and child upon parent.

You could build a career on such betrayals, until the currents shifted once more and the victims turned upon you. The Cultural Revolution lasted a decade, from 1966 to 1976, and affected virtually everyone across the country, from peasants in the remotest regions to high-ranking elites in the Communist Party. It is impossible to understand China today without understanding the Cultural Revolution. Subtract it and the country makes no sense. It is Britain without its empire,

the United States without the Civil War. Unfortunately, it is also impossible to truly understand the movement. Mao's erratic nature, changing tactics and deliberately cryptic pronouncements, the political intrigues at the top of the party, clashing interests and motives at all levels of the movement, the many stages through which it rapidly passed, its sheer scale, many stages through which it rapidly passed, its sheer scale, each one would make it hard to decipher. Together, they make it in many ways incomprehensible. I want to stay with the idea of this tension or contradictory thread that runs through your book, Red Memory. You say early on that it's, quote, impossible to understand China today without

understanding the Cultural Revolution. But very shortly afterwards, you also say that in many ways, the Cultural Revolution is incomprehensible. Yes. I mean, first and foremost, just because of the enormity of what happened. Those betrayals we saw with people turning upon workmates, turning upon members of their own family. In some cases, I write about a man who denounced his mother and she was executed a few weeks later. This is Zhang? Zhang Hongbing, yes. He was a man who denounced his mother when he was around 17. She had criticized Chairman Mao and he and his father reported her to the authorities and suggested, in fact, that she

should be shot, which she was a few weeks afterwards. And so he has spent the following decades carrying that guilt. The name of Zhang's mother was Fang. The name of Zhang's mother was Fang. It was late one evening when friends had left and she was doing the laundry. Fang made an acerbic allusion to Chairman Mao. Zhang accused her of viciously attacking and insulting Mao Zedong thought. As the row ignited, Fang abandoned all caution. She said, why has Chairman Mao made a personality cult?

His image is everywhere. I warned her, if you go against my dear Chairman Mao, I will smash your dog head. There was a yellow washtub and I meant we would use that to smash my mother's head, Zhang said. I felt it wasn't my mother. It wasn't a person. She suddenly became a monster. She had become a class enemy and opened her bloody mouth. My father said, Fang Zhongmo, I'm telling you. From now on, our family separates itself from you. You are the enemy, and we will struggle against you. The poison you just released, you should write it down. The poison you just released, you should write it down. And my mother said, it's easy. I can finish it in five minutes.

Zhang and his father left to report her. By the time they returned, she had finished her letter. Effectively a suicide note. It called for Chairman Mao to be removed from all official positions. Zhang remembered his mother trembling, her chattering teeth, her struggle with his father as she ripped down the portrait of Mao which each family kept in their home.

She barricaded herself in the bedroom and tried to burn the picture, a statue, Mao's poems. Beat the counter-revolutionary, her husband cried as they forced their way in. I still felt I couldn't do it. She was my own mother, Zhang said. I didn't smash her head, but I hit her twice on her back. He described the officials arriving. How one kicked out his mother's legs from under her, so that she fell. How they bound her with rope, and how he heard her shoulder crack as they hauled

her to her feet. She walked out with her head high as if she didn't feel any shame. Did he know what would happen? I knew she would be executed. He saw his mother one more time at the last public meeting to denounce her on the day she died. She was on the stage upon her knees. A soldier forced her head down, ordering her to confess her crimes, but she raised it the moment he took away his hand. Then they put her on the truck. Neither Zhang nor his father attended the execution nor did they collect her body she was buried close to the execution ground but her body was exhumed and buried elsewhere when officials decided to build a bridge there that was really I, where the book started with that interview, because one of the things that

you really realize by sitting with people is the complexity of all this, because I think it's very easy for people outside to say, how on earth could this happen? And I wanted, when I wrote this, I wanted to understand, but also i wanted people to understand how easily it might have been us that we're very fortunate to live in such a different context where we're not having to make impossible moral choices in the way that people were in the cultural revolution and we have no, but also really no ability to judge what people did then, the decisions that people made, and even to judge how they have lived with that. And so when you look at the cultural revolution, I mean, it's on this huge scale.

It really is universal, unlike sort of previous purges. It takes in everybody. It goes right across the country. Geographically, it goes from Beijing's top leaders. So both of Mao's heirs apparent would die within this decade, and many more senior leaders, very well-known figures, whether they be artists, scholars, thinkers, the country's star ping pong player who was a national hero for bringing sporting success to China. He would hang himself having been accused of being a spy. So really at every level, all these figures, and yet at the same time also people in remote provinces, farmers, infants even, who were killed simply because they were part of a landlord family. And so it really was all-encompassing. And it's also

very contradictory because it goes on for 10 years. So 10 years in which you see these waves. First of all, you have the initial wave of Red Guard violence, and then you see this factional fighting as Red Guard groups split and are battling with each other, sometimes physically, I mean, in the streets, almost a form of civil war, touched really every household. Mao's policies were intended to disrupt the household. Personally, he grew up hating his harsh father. Ideologically, he viewed the family unit as an instrument of political oppression. So during a later phase of the Cultural Revolution, droves of young people

were sent from their urban homes to the countryside to take part in his project of remaking the national soul, 17 million of them. I want to talk about a particular teenager in those years who would have gone through some of what people went through at the time. I wonder how those years affected the future leader, Xi Jinping. Well, this is such a fascinating question because he had a very hard cultural revolution, as so many people did. We're told that she himself was humiliated, had to take part in these denunciation rallies, and that Redguards even ordered his own mother to denounce him at one stage. The family was under such pressure that his half-sister would later kill herself. And then she was, like so many of his peers, sent down to the countryside.

So there was this great wave of teenagers, 17 million of them. The party, Mao included, had really decided that matters had got out of hand after the first few years of the Cultural Revolution. And so to try to calm the cities down, they just dispatched a whole generation of teenagers to the countryside, telling them that they were going there for life. And they went to labour in these really brutal circumstances. It was not just going hundreds of miles away from their families at a very young age, but also really going back a century. So they were going to places without electricity or running water. They were struggling to scrape a living. I mean, these are city kids who've been in schools

and suddenly they're told that they have to try and race crops to feed themselves. And for many, for years on end, not knowing if they'd ever return home. Now, in fact, she has said that things had been so bad in Beijing that he was sort of relieved, really, to be going down. He was laughing on the train when others were crying because he just felt it couldn't get any worse. must have been just a brutal and punishing and lonely existence, going to a place where he and the villagers could barely understand each other, not knowing when he might ever get back. And what's fascinating is that this has now become the one part of the cultural revolution that's not just accepted as a matter of discussion in China, but is even celebrated in official propaganda, in China, but is even celebrated in official propaganda, but in a very particular form. So there's no discussion really of the political context. There's no discussion of why they were

sent down there, what had been happening in the Cultural Revolution, of the fact they thought they were stuck there for life and it was desperate. It's become repackaged as this sort of creation myth, which is the story of how he found his way to manhood, how he found his purpose in life, the fact he was tough, resilient, that he understands how ordinary people live at the bottom of society. And all of that, of course, is true in a sense. But it's also been a very, very powerful part of the party's propaganda. The other thing that's really important is that after the Cultural Revolution, the party really made a couple of decisions. And the first one, of course, was to turn away from the years of Maoism. And part of the way

they justified that turn towards the market was by saying, well, we have this great catastrophe, let's just do something completely different now. They didn't turn their back on Mao, but they turned their back on Maoism and they embraced the free market. But the other thing is that the party elders, having suffered so much themselves, really tried to find ways of preventing another strongman from coming to power again. So they sought to cage power, to collectivize it, to have these sorts of consensus decisions, to have norms around term limits and things like this, to try and create a more stable political system in which

the party still held power. But she has really swept all of that away. Here we are. And we now have a figure who is there indefinitely, who has a burgeoning personality cult, clearly not on the same level that Mao did. But we have primary schools talking about Grandpa Xi and how hard he works for the country and all of that, and who has centralized power to this extraordinary degree. Now, it's not a rerun of the Cultural Revolution. He really is somebody who seeks order and discipline and works through party structures. And the kind of turmoil that Mao absolutely relished would be anathema to him. But it seems as if the message he took is not that you should cage power to some degree, but that you should monopolise it, that you will be

safest, I suppose, if you're the one in charge and there's nobody who can challenge you. So you've said in conclusion about Xi Jinping that as a result of his experiences, he has a unique understanding of the uses and the dangers of history. So you talked about what the uses could be. How do you think his knowledge of the dangers of history manifests itself in how he rules the country? He, more than anyone since Mao, has understood how much history matters. Its power in China goes back a long way. So it's something that rulers have always used to justify their rule, but also they're aware that if they don't get their own story out there, that an alternative narrative can be a danger to them. And so the first thing that Xi does after taking power within

the party, his first public act, is to take his colleagues down to the museum in Tiananmen Square, the National Museum of China. And he takes them to an exhibition called The Road to Rejuvenation, which is all about how the Communist Party saved China from these years of humiliation by foreign powers and brought it back to greatness. And so it starts with things like the Opium War, and it ends up with China's space achievements and even sort of mobile phones and all the sort of the modern luxuries that people enjoy. But I think that speaks to how central history is, this idea that this is the thing that justifies party rule. Now, in fact, that's something that the party was already relying on increasingly, particularly the Cultural Revolution and then, of course, the massacre of protesters in 1989 following the pro-democracy demonstrations had really destroyed any claim to be serving the people. Tiananmen. Tiananmen, exactly. And so instead, it turned to economic well-being for people, the promise that your life was going to get better materially, but also this historical

narrative that we're bringing China back to greatness. Well, Xi has really doubled down on that. And what's striking is that within months of then taking power, he gives an internal speech to the party in which he says that it faces several existential perils. And one of these, on a par with things like Western democracy, is what he calls historical nihilism, which really means any version of history that is not the party's, or as we might call it, simply facts or memories. And he warns against it. Yes. And increasingly that's been policed. There have been new laws laws there is even now a hotline where you can call up and denounce people for such acts if you wish as we speak as we speak so it's something that um it's a much more narrow palette and he has said that you know to destroy a nation you

first destroy its history which is a very old saying but something he's drawn upon so there's no doubt that he sees the battle over history as being sort of right at the heart of this. Xi Jinping and fellow leaders were among the 17 million. He left Beijing for a little village in northwestern Shanxi province, where he lived for seven years in a narrow, musty cave house built into the yellow earth hillside. He endured the fleas, the biting cold, the monotonous diet and still more monotonous labour. He read books while herding sheep or, late into the night, cutting short his sleep. It was quite a creation myth.

The story testified to his grit, his discipline, his humility. His service emphasised his impeccable heritage. It also proved that he was one of the masses. He had suffered and he had risen above it. He had suffered and he had risen above it. So history gets weaponized, whitewashed, erased, rewritten, and people reappear and appear and disappear. You write about various people who lost so much during the Cultural Revolution and then later were rehabilitated. You also write about this extraordinary phenomenon of Mao imitators.

Mao impersonators seemed almost as prevalent in China as Elvis's were in the West. There were dozens of varying girths and statures, and even a female Mao, surprisingly convincing. They acted in TV plays and graced official functions. They were earnest in their work, turning down bookings they judged inappropriate. Yet what was not permissible as history in China was allowed as entertainment. The country had several Cultural Revolution restaurants serving up tragedy as farce. At Beijing's Red Classics restaurant, you could have a fully themed wedding, posing for photos in matching Mao suits on the tractor parked in one corner. Customers ordered Party Secretary Aubergine from a menu printed to look like a party newspaper.

They eyed the waitresses in Red Guard uniforms before lurching into battle reenactments and a suite of Maoist songs reset to a driving synth backing. Several dancers climbed onto chairs, egging the customers into a chant, Long live Chairman Mao! Long live Chairman Mao! What do these imitators believe they're representing? It's not kitsch in the way that we might imagine. So there's nothing mocking or parodic about it at all. And so it's more a matter of people feeling nostalgic and showing their respects.

And processing history. And processing history. And certainly when I met them, they had this sense of sort of purpose or dignity. It was obviously a sort of commercial opportunity for them, which was one of the things that sort of struck me about it, that even history and even Communist Party history could become a business opportunity in modern capitalist China. But at the same time, there was very definitely this sense that there were certain things that would be below their dignity or that of the party, such as as opening a new spa for example um whereas there were other events that were sort of more in keeping with the standard but i think what's interesting is that there's this audience for that um i write in the same chapter about going to

a cultural revolution restaurant in beijing and again there's this odd form. People do feel nostalgic for the Cultural Revolution. And nostalgia is always as much, of course, about how we feel about the present as it is about the past itself. And so people were looking at a China that was increasingly and grotesquely unequal often, where there was rampant corruption, where they felt that people were so focused on money and wealth and getting ahead. And they were harking back to a time that they somehow saw as being purer, more meaningful. And there are sort of elements that are true in that nostalgia, in that sort of critique. Is it fair to say, though, that the Cultural Revolution itself is being rehabilitated?

For the most part, it is Maoism in a much looser sense. There are people who are on the left who think that there were opportunities in the Cultural Revolution. So one of those I met was a former Red Guard who's still a diehard Maoist, also a fan of Margaret Thatcher, rather oddly. And he really felt that the worst thing about the Cultural Revolution, I suppose, is that it hadn't succeeded. So he believed that if it had gone through, then there would be a much fairer China with greater equality that hadn't sort of given in to capitalism and the sort of the ruthlessness of capitalism and the damage that that has done itself in China. And even more intriguingly, a listener actually got in touch with me to say that they'd

been taken to a cultural revolution restaurant by someone who had emerged, had spent years in a labor camp during the cultural revolution. So while many people who suffered in that time are revolted by this kind of nostalgia um there even even some of them have a kind of sense of a different time that they are drawn to and as i said i think it's really important to remember that there's no country that's totally honest about its own past there's plenty that we have erased, albeit not to the same degree or with the same political ruthlessness. And there are plenty of people here who sort of have nostalgia about empire, for example, in the UK, in a way that I personally find very hard to understand. So it's certainly not something unique to China.

You do say in the book that in the West, we've sometimes not dared or bothered to look into our own history. But with China, it appears to be more of a case of pretending not to have seen the history to experience. And I'm wondering what you think the sociological price tag that comes with that aversion in China. I think it's been immense because this was a collective trauma, not just in the sense that everybody was caught up in it, but that it was about people within communities turning upon each other. And so to have no kind of collective reckoning, I think has been incredibly damaging and has made it all the harder for people to come to any kind of personal reckoning or personal settlement within themselves

as well. One of the most devastating aspects of the book was really sort of talking to psychotherapists about the way that the burdens are carried down between the generations, even or perhaps especially where people haven't spoken about it. And I wonder in those conversations, what you think it would take, if anything, to ever undertake that process of reckoning. I think it's very hard to imagine it happening while the party is in power, fundamentally. I mean, one explanation that's often been given is that the party really only has Mao. It's not like Russia, where you had Lenin and Stalin, and you could say, well, it was all going fine, and then Stalin came along, and it all went horribly wrong. So to turn upon Mao would really sort of cut off its own roots. I actually think

it's more fundamental than that, in a sense, which is if you grant people the right to criticize former leaders, then you are implicitly granting them the right to criticize current leaders, you would have thought. And that's clearly not a path that Xi Jinping wants to go down. I think the other thing that's very complicated here is that although the party unleashed this, it has had a very ambiguous relationship to it since. So the official verdict says it was a catastrophe, implies it wasn't really Mao's fault because he was misled by the gang of four, these leftist intellectuals, but then sort of tries to move on. And in fact, it's become this important sort of bulwark of communist party power, whereby the message they have sent to people is

either you have us in charge with a tight political grip maintaining the status quo, or you have chaos and chaos of course was what happened in the cultural revolution so in that sense the party although it was actually responsible for the cultural revolution has positioned itself as the force that will prevent another cultural revolution from taking place and so for that reason too, it really doesn't want to open up that box and go back to discussing what it actually was and what happened. Yet another contradiction.

Yes. Tanya, you've done the research, you've talked to people who lived through it, victims and perpetrators, you've published the book, and now you've won the Kundal History Prize for it. But is there a sense that a full understanding for you of the Cultural Revolution is still elusive? I don't think perhaps we will ever truly understand it. I hope we can get closer. It's really important to say that there have been extraordinary Chinese scholars working on this, in many cases unofficially, and who have documented, who have kept records, and who have in some cases published their work outside China. In other cases, I think sort are sort of publishing it underground or perhaps even sitting on it. And so while it's been absolutely wonderful and an honour to have the recognition that this book

has had, I really hope that there will come a time when all this work that's been done by so many brave people comes fully to light and that it can be published in China itself as well as outside. to light and that it can be published in China itself as well as outside. Tanya Branigan, it's been an honor talking to you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Tanya Branigan's book is called Red Memory, The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution. It won the 2023 Kundal History Prize. Special thanks to Keeley Rigdon and Net Green for helping make this episode possible. Thanks also to Faber Audiobooks for permission to use excerpts from Tanya Branigan's audiobook.

Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for Ideas, technical producer Danielle Duval. is the web producer for Ideas, technical producer Danielle Duval, Lisa Godfrey is the acting senior producer, the executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.