Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

A rally at Tiananmen Square: Chairman Mao standing on the rostrum above, thousands of cheering participants below. A struggle session: the accused bent and bowed, surrounded by Red Guards screaming out their victim’s purported crimes. A loudspeaker, an orchestra, a chorus: incessant sources of “The East Is Red” and other songs lauding Mao and the Chinese Communist Party. Wailing. Pleading. Crying. Jeering. Declaiming. Reciting. Gunshots.

When I summon mental images of China’s Cultural Revolution, they’re dominated by noise. In photos and movie clips, through memoirs and academic papers, I’ve come to think of 1966-1976 as a decade of sound—of mass rallies and mass accusations, of musical performances and public demonstrations of loyalty. The movement’s most notorious events and most enduring images all seemed to take place at top volume.

I became aware of how much noise was involved in my thinking about the Cultural Revolution only when immersed in the opposite: while reading Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution, by journalist Tania Branigan. A China correspondent for the Guardian between 2008 and 2015, Branigan has written a quiet and elegant book, moving through the memories of her interlocutors and their experiences in the following decades with thought and care. She listens to what her interviewees (and the Chinese Party-state) say about the Cultural Revolution—and, just as often, what they don’t say. By 2008, Branigan writes, the Cultural Revolution “dwelled at the margins, biding in the shadows. Fear, guilt and official suppression had relegated it to the fringes of family histories and the dustiest shelves of records.” Red Memory is a book filled with silences, omissions, elisions, and memories too painful to revisit.

Fifty years in the past and born of a China that feels light-years away from the one I’ve known, the Cultural Revolution occupies a curious space—a far-off event, but one involving people only a few years older than my parents. Red Memory brings the Cultural Revolution into the present day, emphasizing how recent the events of that decade were and their continued effects on the personal, professional, and political in China. “This wasn’t history,” Branigan realized while talking about a friend’s parent, who had died by suicide after persecution by Red Guards. “It was life.”

Although Branigan sketches important events for her audience, her primary interest is not in what happened during the Cultural Revolution, nor in why—readers can find plenty of publications elsewhere that tackle those topics. Instead, Branigan seeks to understand “how the country lived with it, what it meant and why it mattered now.” To answer these questions, she visits important sites and speaks with people around China; each chapter of Red Memory focuses on a location or individual who serves as a representative of a larger type. Prominent figures like Xi Jinping and Bo Xilai make appearances, as do people familiar to those who have already studied the Cultural Revolution, like Red Guard Song Binbin and museum founder Fan Jianchuan. Far more interesting to me are Branigan’s discussions with those who might be considered average—students who seized the opportunity to become Red Guards and sent-down youths who spent years toiling in the countryside. These are powerful stories of ordinary people who can, somehow, be the subjects of sentences both active (“they joined the movement”) and passive (“they were swept up in the movement”).

“This book could not be written if I were to begin it today,” Branigan acknowledges, a reflection of ever-tightening Party-state control under Xi Jinping over China’s history. Individual actors might be reluctant to talk about what they did during the Cultural Revolution, and this understandable reticence is reinforced from the top. The silences have grown in recent years, a reflection of the Party-state’s increased vigilance over controlling narratives about the past, even as Xi Jinping pulls elements of governance straight out of Mao’s playbook. As Branigan notes, a collective sort of amnesia about the worst and most shameful parts of a country’s history is certainly not unique to China—the United States is only beginning to grapple with its past treatment of Black and Indigenous communities, and this effort has sparked considerable pushback. But in Xi’s China, there can be no history wars, no open debate over what should be taught (even when one version is flat-out wrong). There is the Party-state’s official story of the past, and there is historical nihilism—and while the line between the two might shift a bit, there nevertheless remains a clear-cut line. Right and wrong. True and false. No shades of gray.

Yet the Cultural Revolution was a decade marked by shades of gray and moving lines, as victims became perpetrators, political winds changed, people saw their lives upended again and again. Uncertainty, Branigan writes, was the era’s hallmark:

The ground would shift beneath your feet and what had been mandated was now forbidden, or vice versa. There were things that made no sense at all, whichever way up you turned them. The confessions you penned, one after another, never knowing what you had actually done. The political orders that you pored over, no closer to knowing how you had strayed. The new rules, so plentiful and so quick to morph. For a while you had to quote the Little Red Book when you spoke to strangers, before you could get to business. You queued for your groceries: ‘Serve the people! Comrade, may I buy a pound of leeks?’ When that fell by the way there were new campaigns, new orders, new taboos to master.

Little wonder that an entire generation would emerge from these years having internalized the lesson that there was safety in caution and silence. And as Branigan argues toward the end of Red Memory, the Cultural Revolution generation has passed on both its lessons and its trauma to those raised in the succeeding decades. Recounting the story of a young man whose deep depression threatened to explode into violence, Branigan shares his father’s realization of the teachings he had imparted to his son:

Throughout his son’s life he had drummed in the same lessons: Keep your distance. Keep your guard up. Don’t trust anyone. Never, ever let them see you angry. He drove the message home again and again, and never told his son why. He had watched his own father murdered by Red Guards. He suppressed the pain and fear and rage for almost half a century, and still it had betrayed him, and his child.

In Red Memory, Tania Branigan has written a clear and urgent call to action, emphasizing the importance not only of studying the past, but of talking about it. Events in the rear-view mirror, she shows, are always closer than they appear.