history fighting that turned that far-western city’s streets into battle zones in 1966. Many chapters are enlivened by memorable profiles of individuals who spent at least part of their lives in villages. One chapter, for example, is peppered with quotes from her interviews with an obstinate and opinionated elderly composer who spent his youth and young adulthood being sent to different places as he alternately adhered to and rejected calls to have music serve political ends, paying a steep price for each act of defiance.
The work Red Memory reminded me of most was The People’s Republic of Amnesia, just with the tragedies of a decade rather than a year as its focus. The book is an exploration of how the Cultural Revolution is remembered by China’s populace. Branigan shows that people in China are not all on the same page when it comes to the complex events of the Chairman’s era. Chapters look in detail at such things as competing accounts of a famous act of violence early in the Cultural Revolution, which ended in the death of a teacher at the hands of her students, and museums that either support or challenge official narratives of China’s post-1949 trajectory.
Red Memory is not just an engagingly written book but also, for two reasons, a much-needed one. It is valuable, first, because it helps clear up lingering popular misunderstandings of a major event in Chinese history. The Cultural Revolution and its legacy have generated a rich scholarly literature, which Branigan mines. But many non-specialists still have a vision of it formed by one or two moving memoirs they have read. The problem is that some of the most influential of these make it easy for readers to assume that China’s population is made up of two groups: former Cultural Revolution perpetrators and their descendants and former Cultural Revolution victims and their descendants. In fact, the twists and turns of the event were such that many people were perpetrators at one point and victims at another. Many families had members who moved between these two categories.
The second reason we need a book like this is that coming to terms with the Cultural Revolution has taken on an added timeliness since Xi, the first paramount
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leader to grow up in the Mao era (he was born in 1953), took power. Some Cultural Revolution events probably played formative roles in shaping Xi’s personality. Being humiliated and having members of his family pitted against each other in its earliest phase, despite (or because of ) the elite status they had thanks to his father’s role as a veteran revolutionary leader, surely scarred him. In addition, mythic narratives of Xi’s experiences during that decade figure centrally in the personality cult that he and those around him have created to justify his rule. Branigan handles particularly well the way Xi’s actions after he was sent to the countryside at fifteen have been turned into a legitimising story of personal transformation – of a city boy becoming a loved and admired leader of salt-of-the-earth men and women while in the political wilderness. Branigan writes, ‘When he took the top job, his book The Governance of China – more than 13 million copies distributed in thirty-three languages, and counting – hymned his grace in austerity, his selfless dedication to the peasants and the humility with which he learned from them (like Mao, was the unstated implication).’ Tales of his life are meant to show that he suffered during the Cultural Revolution, as so many did, but that this strengthened him in the end. Xi’s ‘story’ was ‘potent in an age where the gulfs between town and country, rulers and ruled, had expanded so fast ’.
Taking note of how events from the period 1966–76 are used to burnish Xi’s authority underscores just how different the treatments of that era and the year 1989 are in China today. It is routine in soundbite-driven reports on China to find ‘Tiananmen Square’ and the ‘Cultural Revolution’ called a pair of ‘taboo topics’. In reality, while references to the protests and state violence of 1989 are off limits, the events of Mao’s final decade are allowed to be discussed, albeit only in ways that conform with sometimes shifting official visions of the past. This difference is among the many complex issues Branigan handles astutely in Red Memory, which is a book not about efforts to impose ‘amnesia’, but about the various ways that memories of a problematic period are continually being ‘disinterred, re vived and nur tured ’ by different groups and individuals, as well as at times ‘policed, exploited and suppressed’.
Literary Review | february 2023 8
